Chicago Cigar Room Marries Modern Design With Prohibition-Era Character
Adversity can have a funny way of being both detrimental and advantageous. Sometimes a door needs to close to reveal others that can open. Tim Campbell of Inverness, Illinois, experienced this about 15 years ago. He turned one of his life’s biggest challenges into a defining triumph, and his success ultimately led to—among other things—converting his basement into a cigar lover’s dream.
By 2008, Campbell had a successful job in publishing, reaching what he called the “pinnacle” of his career. Then the financial crisis hit. “Almost just like that, I found myself out of work,” he says. With two kids getting ready to head to college, he came home understandably distraught, and immediately began to ponder his future, and his family’s living situation. “I went downstairs and started cleaning the basement and my wife’s like ‘what are you doing?’ and I said ‘we can’t stay here,’” says Campbell. “She thought I had lost my mind. I kind of had.”
Campbell decided he wasn’t going to wait around hoping to find another job paying the same amount of money. He needed to downsize. “I wanted to sell the house and take my equity,” he says. He sold his home, took the cash from the sale and bought a more modest home outright, relocating his family to a nearby neighborhood. He took a job “making about a third” of his previous salary. At the same time, he also decided to take his shot at a new side venture: starting his own wholesale, ecommerce business. The new project would soon become the focal point of Campbell’s life. “For the first two to three years, my wife and I literally didn’t take a day off,” he says. The couple worked holidays and weekends, shipped products from their house and fully dedicated themselves to the venture, distributing electronic cigarettes. The work paid off and their business blossomed into a staff of 40 people in an office and 15 in a warehouse. Sales soared.
“We built it from I think $130,000 [in revenue] in the first year to one million the next year,” he explains, with revenues getting to nearly $100 million in eight years. He then sold the company, which helped lead to the creation of his idyllic cigar room and hangout spot.
About four to five years ago, Campbell, now freshly retired and reaping the benefits of selling his business, decided to add a cigar room in the basement of his home, the same place he moved into following his job loss in ‘08. “It started as just a cigar room, that’s what it was going to be,” he says. His wife gave her full , so long as he could control the smoke and the smell. Soon the small project morphed into a six-month ordeal and a full remodeling of the basement.
To get the job done, Campbell solicited the help of Rae Duncan Interior Design, a firm based in Chicago who had assisted with the rest of their home. Campbell and his wife gave the interior design firm full reign for the basement, leading to a finished product beyond Campbell’s imagination. “The basement is one of those things, not to sound braggadocious, when people go down there, they go insane,” says Campbell. “And our designer gets a lot of credit for that.”
As you enter Campbell’s 1,800 square-foot basement, you step into an ocean of dark, steel blue. The rich color of the millwork walls, accentuated by quartz white and brass gold, is reminiscent of American Art Deco style, fulfilling Campbell’s goal of a “modern-day speakeasy” feel. At the base of the stairs, you’re greeted by a large black-and-white mural showing the old Chicago Coliseum in the city’s South Side. The basement opens up on your left, where immediately to your side sits a floor-to-ceiling, glass-enclosed wine cellar. Further off, just beyond a small table that seems ideally suited for poker, your attention gravitates to a 16-foot, quartz bar. The lengthy watering hole is backed by a large flatscreen television that’s flanked by custom-built glass cabinets loaded with fine spirits. Behind the raised bar is just about everything one needs for entertaining: a kegerator, sink, dishwasher, ice maker and a fridge.
The rest of the basement continues to reveal itself as you curl around to your left. Next to the bar is an open living room area with a large, dark olive-green couch and an additional television accompanied by large bookshelves and antique brass picture lights. As you continue angling around to your left along the dark brown hardwood floors, you’ll find a gorgeous pool table with a top that matches the steel blue surroundings. In this back corner of the basement, there’s also two black studded leather chairs, a modern brass chandelier and a third television.
As captivating as the rest of the basement is, one mustn’t get lost in its grandeur and miss the real gem of the area: the cigar room, which sits alone to the right of the stairs.
At the bottom of the basement stairs, a pair of brass cobras are there to greet you—or fend you off should you not like cigars. But not to worry, if you’re a cigar lover, these are two snakes you’ll want to make an acquaintance with. The cobras are the handles to two large glass doors, behind which sits a cozy smoking room. Unlike the rest of the basement that sort of never stops unraveling itself, once you enter past the glass doors of the smoking room, what you see is what you get.
“That’s one regret I have, I would have made it three times as large,” says Campbell, noting at the time of the build he didn’t have the same die-hard ion he now has for cigars.
The space is still more than suitable to host a group of cigar-loving friends, with four leather chairs comfortably circled around one another, with additional space to fit more smokers if needed. The ambiance and furnishings are largely consistent with the rest of the basement. Bookshelves adorned with antique reads and vintage goods line the back wall alongside another television that, like the others, doubles as an art display. Additional brass picture lights compliment a custom brass chandelier from the 1940s that hangs above a small, round coffee table in the center of the room. The desired speakeasy undertones are brought forth by old, black-and-white photos depicting Prohibition busts and bourbon barrels that hang along the walls.
One of the more impressive features of the room is Campbell’s built-in wall humidor. About the size of a mini fridge, the Spanish cedar-lined humidor has enough space to comfortably hold a few boxes and some single sticks, though it doesn’t even come close to holding Campbell’s full cigar inventory, which he estimates at somewhere between 1,000 and 1,500 cigars.
A smoked glass door just next to the wall humidor leads to a bathroom complete with a shower. But Campbell has dreams of scrapping this lavatory, which is seldom used, to convert it into another walk-in humidor. For now, this possibility remains in the realm of fantasy.
The smoking room is reinforced with spray foam insulation, includes a Rabbit Air purification system, an exhaust fan that expels smoky air and a system that brings air in. Campbell even has an ozone generator he turns on after using and exiting the room, which helps to remove lingering odors. “When I have three guys over, I can go upstairs later and my wife won’t make me take a shower, it’s that effective,” he says. But it can only do so much. “Now the other night we had ten guys over,” he says. “Then, all bets are off.”
Campbell has been smoking cigars for roughly a decade, reaching what he would consider aficionado-level the last four to five years. He credits his dad and brother for introducing him. “My dad retired in Montana and he lived in a log cabin on a lake and we would just hang out on the deck overlooking the lake and light up cigars,” he says, a notably nostalgic quality in his voice.
Like many ionate cigar fans, Campbell is “always trying to find the next thing.” He mentioned a few brands he often enjoys such as Oliva Serie V, Perdomo, New World Dorado and Padrón, and revealed his partiality towards Drew Estate factory smokes and Honduran cigars from the Eiroa family. Campbell likes to utilize the knowledge base of local cigar shop workers too, trying out their recommendations and sometimes buying boxes when he enjoys what they suggest. He likened the process to the old days of Blockbuster, for those old enough to the pre-streaming era, where it was common for one to ask employees for movie recommendations.
Campbell estimates he smokes about five cigars a week on average, sometimes more or less depending on his social schedule, which is pretty active. He and his neighborhood buddies scheme up plans nearly every night via text. Campbell’s spot is obviously a popular choice, although they like to mix it up. One of his friends even bought a geodesic dome, those rounded encampments that were popular at restaurants during peak Covid days, and put it in his backyard and equipped it with a ventilation system and a stocked bar. Talk about ingenuity.
When Campbell wants to host for game night, particularly when the Bears or Cubs are playing, he sends out his version of the bat signal to the friends group chat, a simple acronym known as “FSBM,” or as he calls it “Full Sports Bar Mode.” When FSBM is engaged, all four televisions come into play. Campbell will get each going, sometimes with different games on, as the group tends to move around the basement.
“We’ll start out at the bar and I may make some Manhattans,” says Campbell. “We’ll have a drink then we’ll just sort of migrate into the cigar lounge and hang out there.” He said sometimes they may head out of the smoking room and spend time in other areas of the basement, but after a slight chuckle, Campbell caught himself: “Actually, the cigar room by far and away is where we spend most of our time.”
As a now retired man, Campbell has developed a greater appreciation and respect for cigars. The hobby has developed into a ion that he shares with others, and thankfully, he has quite the spot to do it. “Cigars have a way to help you get to know people on a whole other level,” says Campbell. “The sense of community cigars and whiskey has brought to my life is incredibly fulfilling.”
Do you have a cigar room worth sharing? Send us a note and some pictures at [email protected].
