The Man Cave

I have no time for this 'man cave' nonsense. It’s a term that suggests a sort of retreat from domestic life, a bolthole for men to do ‘manly’ things - watching sport, drinking beer, fiddling with gadgets. Essentially, a parody of masculinity, wrapped up in overpriced neon signs and a faint whiff of desperation. Call it what you will, but if your garage has been turned into a themed boudoir for middle-aged blokes, you’re not fooling anyone. It’s not rugged or rebellious; it’s just sad.

 

A garage, if it is to be worthy of the name, should smell faintly of oil and rubber. It should have a corner filled with useful bits of timber that you refuse to throw away because one day you’ll need exactly that length of 4x2. There should be a proper workbench, not some flat-pack nonsense bought for the aesthetic. The floor should bear witness to years of activity – oil stains, sawdust, the odd dropped spanner that left a gouge in the concrete. This is the essence of a garage: functionality, practicality, utility.

The ‘man cave’, on the other hand, is a consumerist fantasy. It’s a room designed to be seen, not used. Leather armchairs, a vintage fridge stocked with craft beers, walls adorned with faux-retro metal signs proclaiming the virtues of petrolheads or bacon. All very Instagram-friendly, but where’s the vice? Where’s the angle grinder? Where’s the sense of purpose?

The whole concept feels like a capitulation. It’s as if some men have decided that the rest of the house is beyond their domain, and instead of asserting themselves in shared spaces, they retreat to a themed shed. Worse still, they’ve bought into the idea that this is what they’re supposed to do – that masculinity can be packaged and sold back to them as an experience, complete with beer mats and novelty coasters. It’s infantilising.

Give me a garage that is unapologetically rough around the edges. Give me a place where you can actually get things done, where tools are within arm’s reach and there’s always a project on the go. A place where the kettle is more likely to be a battered old tin affair that’s seen better days than some shiny coffee machine you’d find in a yuppie’s kitchen. I want to see shelves sagging under the weight of jars filled with mismatched screws, not LED strip lights and framed posters of 1970s pin-ups.

The man cave is a symptom of a broader malaise – a society that encourages men to buy into a shallow caricature of masculinity instead of living it. Real men don’t need a designated space to assert their identity. They don’t need a curated experience to feel at home. They get on with things. They fix, they build, they tinker. Their garages are functional, because life itself is functional. Anything less is a betrayal of that basic principle.

So let’s ditch the man cave, and reclaim the garage. Let it be a workshop, a storage space, a sanctuary of productivity. A place where you can change the oil in your car, weld a broken gate, build a birdhouse for the garden or restore a classic, 1972 Triumph GT6. Let it be a place of purpose, not a monument to the commodification of masculinity. Because at the end of the day, a man’s worth isn’t measured by the neon sign on his wall, but by what he’s made with his own two hands.

The man cave is for the hen-pecked husband who needs a refuge.