When I closed Calabrese & Sons in 2021, I gave myself one retirement project: turn the small room off the back porch into a proper smoking room. Theresa let me have it on the condition that the smell stayed in there and didn't drift into her kitchen. That one condition is the whole game. If you get the ventilation and the seal right, the rest of the room is just taste. If you get them wrong, no amount of leather chairs and Ybor-style ironwork will save you.
I've helped maybe two dozen friends set up a room at home over the years, and the questions never change. So here is what I tell them, in the order it actually matters.
Pick the room before you pick the chair
Most folks start with the furniture. Wrong end of the cigar. Start with where the room sits in the house, because that decides whether your wife ever speaks to you again.
The three honest choices:
- A detached structure — a shed, a casita, a converted garage. Best option for keeping smoke out of the rest of the house. Costs more.
- A bonus room over the garage — second-best. There's usually a buffer of insulation and you can vent through the gable.
- An interior room — basement, library, finished attic. Workable, but you have to seal it like a submarine.
Whatever you pick, the room needs an exterior wall. You cannot ventilate a smoking room that has no path to the outside, and you should not try.
One thing to check before you cut drywall: your local smoking ordinance. Federal law leaves private single-family residences alone, but if you live in a condo, co-op, or any multi-unit building, the rules get tight. New York City and a growing number of municipalities now require smoke-free policies in residential buildings with three or more units. Read your HOA documents and your lease before you start framing. I've seen guys spend $4,000 on a setup and then get a cease-and-desist from the board.
Ventilation: the part most people get wrong
This is the conversation I had a hundred times at the shop. A customer would come in proud of his new room and describe a ceiling fan and an open window, and I'd have to break it to him gently that he had just built a cigar-flavored room, not a cigar room.
The standard for a proper smoking room is measured in air changes per hour, or ACH. The ventilation industry settled on these levels for cigar lounges:
- 10 to 13 ACH — the bare minimum. The room will get hazy when two of you are smoking.
- 14 to 16 ACH — comfortable for moderate use.
- 17 to 20 ACH — what most working lounges aim for.
For a home room you can usually live with 14 to 16 if you're not having a party every week. Get there with a balanced setup: one fan or inline duct pulling fresh air in, another pulling smoky air out. That balance is the trick — you want neutral pressure so the smoke doesn't push past the door into the rest of the house every time someone walks through.
Add a HEPA-and-carbon air purifier sized to the room's square footage. HEPA catches the particulates; activated carbon catches the smell. The big floor units like the Airpura T600 and T700 are built specifically for this and will run you a few hundred dollars, but a properly sized residential unit with a heavy carbon bed will do the job too. Check the CADR rating against the room size.
One more honest note: a smoking room is still a smoking room. The Surgeon General has not changed his mind. Make your peace with that, and if you have grandkids visiting, keep the door closed and the system running an hour after the last puro goes out.
Humidors and storage
If you have ten cigars at a time, a desktop humidor is all you need and you can stop reading this section. If you have a hundred, you want a cabinet humidor. If you have five hundred or you and three friends share the room, a walk-in is on the table.
A walk-in humidor is essentially a small, sealed room inside the bigger room. Lined in Spanish cedar — which is what every decent humidor has been lined with for over a century, because the cedar holds humidity and the aromatic oils keep tobacco beetles away. Spanish cedar is not cheap. A 4-foot quarter-inch sheet runs around $85 to $90 now, and that adds up fast.
Rough numbers I've seen in the last year:
- A closet-conversion walk-in with a basic humidifier: $1,300 to $1,800.
- A 6-by-3 walk-in done DIY with mixed cedar and pine: around $2,000.
- A full-build home humidor with backing, flooring, and a professional humidification system: $4,000 and up.
Hold the inside at 65 to 72 percent relative humidity and 65 to 70 degrees Fahrenheit. That's where the wrappers stay supple without going soggy. A digital hygrometer that you actually calibrate once a year is worth more than a $300 humidifier you never check.
Furniture and the rest of it
Now the fun part. Your room, your taste.
I will say one thing about fabric: it absorbs smoke. Leather and vinyl wipe clean. Linen and velvet hold onto the smell for a year. If you love a fabric chair, fine, but understand you are renting it from the smoke. A wool rug will outlast a synthetic one in this environment but will also hold the most odor. Hard floors with a small rug you can replace are easier on the long run.
A short list of things that earn their keep:
- A side table at elbow height next to every chair. You will set a cigar down a hundred times a night.
- Heavy, deep ashtrays — ceramic or metal, with rests that hold a 60-ring cigar without it rolling.
- Good lighting. You need to see the foot of the cigar when you light it and read the band when a friend asks what you're smoking.
- A torch lighter you can refill, and a few wooden matches for when the wrapper is delicate.
- A small fridge or wine cabinet if you also drink — the room is going to smell, and a bottle stored in here will pick up that smell.
For decor, build around one thing you love. At the shop my father hung a framed cedar cigar box lid from El Reloj, the old Cuesta-Rey factory in Ybor that used to mark shift change with its tower clock. Every regular asked about it. That's what you want — one piece of yours, not a catalog room.
A few honest takeaways
For anyone in their sixties or seventies thinking about doing this: get the ventilation right and the room is a pleasure for the next twenty years. Skip it, and the rest of the house pays the price.
Don't overspend on the build before you know how often you'll actually use it. Start with a sealed door, a balanced fan pair, a HEPA-and-carbon purifier, a 50-count desktop humidor, two good chairs, and a side table. If you find yourself in there four nights a week and want to grow into a walk-in, you'll know.
And keep one window operable. Even the best ventilation system runs better with a little real air now and then. That's something my father used to say about la fabrica too — you can install all the machines you want, but you still need to open a window.