Saville Row your Home

Saville Row represents a home from home for the well-heeled City gent. Similarly, inside the many a discreet doorways of designer boutiques in Milan lie rows of meticulously regimented suits. Over time the professional male will acquire a collection of fine cloth worth a considerable amount.

Short of displaying them in walk in wardrobes which remain uncommon in Europe, they will often be hidden away in closed cupboards and wardrobes - You don't store your art collection a cupboard so why should your suits live out of sight? The open rail is a easy way to display your finest weekday uniforms and give a subtle nod to your home from home in W1.

Blackboard Bistro

These days, man is very much at home in the kitchen. We have moved away from hunting and gathering and toward roasting, braising and blow-torching. And even then, hunting for us involves a quick trip to Waitrose to pick up some £10 single estate olive oil and a handful of hand dived scallops.

So we all think we're Gordon Ramsay. And what better way to make your kitchen a Michelin starred gastropub than with a tin of blackboard paint and some chalk. I like the simplicity of chalk on a wall, and this may be stretching it, but there is something cave-like about drawing on walls. Add a refined twist with a classic typeface.

American Power by Mich Epstein

The best thing about a coffee table is its ability to host some great coffee table books. Also due to the fact the mancave has few feature walls for displaying paintings, fine art photography books have a perfect home in the coffee table.

American Power is a collection of power stations, oil refineries, motorway junctions and juxtaposed landscapes breathtakingly shot over 5 years by Mitch Epstein. Read about this book in the Guardian while on the tube one weekend and picked up a signed copy in New York at the famous Strand Books.

Graham the Springbok Bathmat

Meet Graham. He lives in the locker-room bathroom of the Mancave and serves to dry wet feet after exiting the bath or shower. Named by me after the shop where he was purchased, Graham & Greene, he was an African springbok; a type of gazelle; in a previous life. Now he wasn't sold as a bathmat, but I figure if a springbok is waterproof when it's running around the watering holes, then there shouldn't be any problems with using him to dry feet. Indeed, springbok is excellent at absorbing water and dries very quickly.

I am certain that back in the day, cavemen would have used something just like Graham when leaving the hot spring after a long day of hunting. And before you organic fairtrade vegans start to complain, using a Graham is far more environmentally friendly than using a synthetic, mass produced Chinese rug. So there.

The Man Cushion - It Does Exist

Generally speaking, soft furnishings have no place in the Mancave. At best, a comfortable sofa or armchair is permissible. However there are exceptions. These monogrammed cushions from Cape Henley feature a club-like logo that lend a Drones style sartorial elegance to any room. The fabric is a grey herringbone and definitely has something of the Saville Row about it.

Swiss Timekeeping in the Kitchen

We all know that the Swiss are the most punctual people on earth. You see page upon page of advertorial content saying how you never actually own one particular brand of Swiss watch; merely look after it for the next generation. That's all well and good, but timekeeping shouldn't be exclusive to one's wrist.

This triple mechanical kitchen timer by Swiss design house Bengt Ek has a Saab-like aero/auto feel to it. The housing is fabricated in a single piece of cast and polished steel with timers ranging from 20, 60 to 120 minutes. At £50, (or just £33 from Achica) this is one Swiss timekeeper that deserves to be passed from one generation to the next.

Salt & Pepper = Cole & Mason

Nobody knows why or how the inseparable combination of salt and pepper came together. Where there is one, the other will never be far away. In the same respect, where there is salt and pepper, there will most always be Cole & Mason. One of only two manufacturers I would entrust with dispensing seasoning, the other being PSP Peugeot. These solid acyclic Seville grinders exhibit ice-cube like coolness with simple steel accents.

[Man]Cave Paintings - Oil by Burtynski

A fantastic fine art photography book published by Steidl. Oil by Edward Burtynski is split into chapters charting the life of oil from extraction & refinement, transport & motor culture through to the end of oil. A bit depressing you might think; why not have a fine art photography book on the subject of mountains or sunsets?

Quite simply, mountains and sunsetsare nature's wonders. A cave is a creation of nature. A mancave is a creation of man. It's man's wonders that we should take more time to appreciate. Images like these are our modern day cave-paintings. They are a snapshot of our everyday life as humans- just as mud paintings of blokes hunting zebras were 30,000 years ago.

Television as Furniture

It's inevitable that most living areas with a telly are designed to function around it. The TV dictates fundamentals such as where the seating areas are and how the area is lit. But apart from the fantastically functional Sony Monolith, most TV's are bland and uninspiring by design.

Like the very first radios and black and white televisions, the Korean HannsLounge LCD TV, takes an approach to design that encases the screen in, what is essentially, furniture. Chrome deer-horn legs hold up the distinctively Eames matt black body with curved walnut-ply rear. Best paired with the Alfason Finewoods series television stands; religiously used in Harrods and Selfridges.

Decanters & Wasabi Peas

No mancave is complete without a fully stocked bar. While there are some bottles that you clearly want to be on display, casually keeping the finest single malt on the sideboard could be seen as being a little vulgar. On the other hand most every-day cocktail / mixing spirits come in bottles with all the visual appeal of a can of Tizer.

Enter; these decanters from LSA International. Made in Poland, I think the contrast between the wide and tall designs work well together - his and hers perhaps? As for the wasabi peas, they make for excellent visual bar-candy and don't appear ever to spoil. Perfect for the Oriental GastroPubClub look.

Cave Lighting - The Torch Uplighter

Back in the day, caves were lit either by fires on the ground, or for the more discerning caveman, wall mounted torches (actually, I may have got that from Scooby Doo, but it's besides the point). The mancave is therefore lit, with these wall mounted 'torches' that cast a fiery glow upwards and add a distinctively cave-like presence.
Oh, and the artwork has been purposefully pixelated. All in good time.

Interior Signage - The Locker Room

Picked up this stainless steel sign for the bathroom the other day. I like the simple iconic representation. Normally reserved for commercial uses, I think it works well in a residential environment - particularly for giving the dullest of rooms a suitably mancave locker-room coolness.

Tablet Remotes - Effortless Over the Topnesss

This is the Logitech Harmony 1100 universal touchscreen remote control. At the risk of sounding hypocritical, when writing about the HP MediaSmart Extender, I said that technology should should enhance our lives without being 'in your face'. The Harmony is hardly a subtle way to control your telly however - I admit, at first glace it looks a bit over the top.

But consider what it replaces. In the mancave, it's replacing 4 remotes. Indeed, this particular remote only has a few hard buttons. The touch screen changes according to if you're watching TV, a DVD or listening to music and it can be customised with icons for the channels that you actually watch. So the Harmony cuts down on clutter, tiresome channel surfing and makes interaction with technology really rather effortless. Not so 'over the top' after all. From £329

AV Technology - Heard and not Seen

Take a look at the row of books under my telly. Some interesting reads certainly, but the book in the centre is the most interesting. It's a HP Media Smart Wireless Media Extender and it wirelessly streams content from computers around the mancave to the TV and through the sound system.

But it wasn't designed to be propped up on its side. I'm uncomfortable with the traditional ethos of flaunting a portfolio of high-tech AV kit in the living room. Technology should enhance our quality of living and it should do so in an unobtrusive and effortless way. At the end of a busy day I want to relax in a living room, not a data centre - the less technology on display the better. Available in the US for around $250.

The Magnificent Wine Machine

There isn't a lot to say about this one. Just look at it. Found this beauty at the BALS Store in Nakameguro, Tokyo. Designed by a random, if not uninspiring named, outfit called Device Style, it looks like something from the drawing board of Bang & Olufsen.

Housing one bottle of your finest wine, it will maintain a constant temperature inside the chamber of 12, 14 or 16 degrees. It monitors temperature both outside and inside the chamber, maintains humidity at 65% to prevent corkage, dampens vibrations, blocks UV radiation and operates at a blissfully quiet 15db. It also turns tap water into Lafite Rothschild. Okay that last part is a lie, but at over £300, it's more expensive than a bottle of 1971 Dom Perignon. Which is just as well; it doesn't take champagne bottles.