In Defense of the Man Cave

On a quiet Friday last October, British singer Lily Allen released West End Girl, a surprise album that documents the breakdown of her marriage in petty and exacting detail. Allen is married to David Harbour, the actor known to some as the sheriff from Stranger Things and, maybe, more well known to others as the subject of two Architectural Digest home tours. The first, shot in 2019, features Harbour as the consummate bachelor. His New York apartment, located in Nolita, is a light-filled space that’s both cozy and expansive. The hallway is lined with bookshelves, the kitchen is airy and inviting, and the space is furnished with plants and tasteful Danish-inspired furniture—the platonic ideal of a bachelor pad for a man about town with few if any obligations and little specific taste. The second tour is different. In 2023, Allen and Harbour are enshrined in their shared domestic bliss after buying and renovating a town house in Brooklyn where each room is an exercise in compromise and collaboration; the design choices (described as "layered Italian" by Harbour via their designer, Billy Cotton) were made as a unit, so that the house is the physical representation of their love and partnership. It was never clear from the second video whether or not Harbour got rid of his previous apartment, but in the song "Pussy Palace," from West End Girl, we learn her truth. Harbour’s bachelor pad remained as such during their marriage and was the perfect backdrop for the care and maintenance of his alleged extramarital affair. It turns out that even in marriage, a bachelor needs a space of his own.

The bachelor pad as we know it today is quite similar to past iterations. Championed by America’s preeminent bachelor, Hugh Hefner, in the October 1956 issue of Playboy, the midcentury bachelor pad bore more than a passing resemblance to the interiors of today. "Here a man, perhaps like you, can live in masculine elegance," the copy reads, before launching into rapturous prose that, if you squint, could be describing any number of contemporary houses seen in the pages of Dwell and many other publications. There’s a Saarinen chair, a Noguchi coffee table ("alcohol proof," per the copy), and a hanging Knoll wall cabinet repurposed as a bar in the bedroom. A platform bed dominates the boudoir, complete with a custom control panel built into the headboard so that the man who lives here can start the coffee and turn out the lights without abandoning his conquest. In the bathroom, a mural that is "reminiscent of the prehistoric drawings in the caves of Lascaux" takes up an entire wall. Lighting is recessed or hidden, so as to avoid the visual clutter and fuss of floor lamps. The entire space is oriented toward a man’s comfort and lacks any of the frills of a home shared with and decorated by a woman. Men need space, after all, to work out the contours of their masculinity—hard graft that is apparently difficult to achieve in the presence of a window valance (or a woman).

Playboy’s penthouse was the blueprint for the enduring image of the bachelor pad, and not much about it has changed in the modern imagination. The modernist swinging sex palace aesthetic persists in movies and TV; Rock Hudson’s moody apartment in Pillow Talk is another blueprint for the bachelor pads of now, as is Patrick Bateman’s mostly white, slick ’80s murder den or Don Draper’s predivorce lair, with its sunken living room and notes of middle-age ennui, which eventually became his bachelor pad—sparely decorated, traditionally "masculine" spaces absent any personal touches or evidence that a person with a regular life lives there. A brisk scroll through TikTok, Instagram, or Pinterest will show that, for the design-forward man of now, a USM Haller credenza, chrome accents, and at least one midcentury chair of note still serve as a quick visual shorthand for "having good taste," resulting in interiors that feel largely devoid of personality.

The bachelor pad aesthetic is by now so recognizable that it’s easily parodied or replicated. But what happens when your domestic life is entwined with someone else? Where can you go to be alone? Enter the man cave, the physical manifestation of a man’s interior life—his shadow self, if we must—a space for retreat where he can really be alone with himself, his thoughts, and, more importantly, his stuff.

Bachelor pads are elegant spaces, meant to be pleasant enough to attract and then ensnare a mate. A man cave, on the other hand, is anything but—a repository for all the hideous trappings of modern manhood. If your husband’s baseball card collection is taking over your carefully decorated living room, why not banish him (and all his crap) elsewhere? That mythical "elsewhere" is the man cave, the bachelor pad’s domestic equivalent. What distinguishes a man cave from a bachelor pad is its intended audience; because a bachelor pad is meant to make a good outward impression, it must look "good," but a man cave is truly a space just for its inhabitant and no one else. As described in John Gray’s infamous work Men Are From Mars, Women Are From Venus, when a stressed-out man needs to work through a complicated interpersonal problem or just needs space to think, he retreats to his "cave," where he can organize his thoughts or, in the absence of those, play Xbox or organize his coin collection in peace.

Men need space, after all, to work out the contours of their masculinity—hard graft that is apparently difficult to achieve in the presence of a window valance (or a woman).

The cave in Gray’s book is largely metaphorical, but the need for a space where you can truly be yourself is very real. And perhaps because of this distinction, man caves aren’t held to any specific aesthetic standard, despite the examples across the cultural landscape that seem to suggest otherwise. Picture Barbie’s Dreamhouse from the 2023 film Barbie after it was invaded by the Kens—overstuffed leather recliners, large televisions, foosball tables and minifridges, and vaguely Western-inflected wall decor (velvet paintings, horses galloping across a golden plain). The beauty of a man cave is that it is precisely the reflection of its inhabitant and beholden to no preexisting aesthetic standards. Even though it seems like a man cave needs to have a blinking Budweiser sign on the wall, that simply isn’t true. Your cave, your rules.

Regardless of how unappealing this space might be to other people, the entire point of it is that it doesn’t need to be palatable to anyone else—and, I suppose, what you do inside the cave is your own business, too. A man cave is a space for experimentation and freedom and, also, ugliness, ideally just aesthetic ugliness and not moral depravity, too. What happens in a man cave stays in a man cave—from experimenting with kitsch in a spare bedroom of your split-level ranch to dabbling in an extramarital affair. A man cave is the unjudged expression of a man’s interior state, and the bachelor pad is a space for men to impress. And when the wires get crossed, chaos ensues. (Ask David Harbour, whose bachelor pad crossed into cave territory.) But above all, the need for a man cave—and any other space that is entirely your own—is control in a world where men feel like that’s slipping out of their grasp. For our nastiest impulses, aesthetically and otherwise, it’s nice to have a space that’s all your own.

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