This month, Victoria Vergason is at a Paris flea market searching for glassware for The Hour. That’s to be expected. Her store in Old Town Alexandria features high-end vintage barware; you’ll find: a set of seven art deco coupes with ruby red hexagon bases ($280), a circa 1930s chrome ice bucket from Manning Bowman ($475) and an 18-piece, midcentury modern stainless-steel bar set, including tongs, a corkscrew and six stirring spoons from Germany’s Solingen ($1,100).
Those are some of the 15,000 items in Vergason’s collection. She started amassing gear while in business school at Georgetown University in the 1980s, scouting for Vaseline glass on antiquing trips to Maryland and Virginia, and later traveling throughout Europe and Asia while working in international finance.
But then she had kids and needed the closet space; her highballs, shakers and decanters moved to a storage unit. After time in the nonprofit sector, she decided to open a cocktail supply store, selling everything but the booze. “It was going to be the Williams Sonoma of the cocktail world,” Vergason says.
She bought a building for her shop on King Street right before the market crash of 2008. What could have been a personal financial diaster instead tipped to Vergason’s favor,
“Everyone was drinking,” she says, and those who could no longer “afford Mercedes could afford these small luxuries like $200 glasses.”
While Vergason kept collecting, she says, in the “back of my mind I wanted to create my own line.”
After searching for years for domestic production, Vergason launched The Modern Home Bar late last year. A pewter jigger in the shape of a penguin ($80) is the first product. Inspired by the penguin motifs of the 1920s, she wants to recapture “the whimsical nature of some of the bar tools” of the past. Rocks glasses—priced at less than $20 each, above the generic options at mainstream stores, but less than the opulence found at The Hour—will be added to the line, plus more glassware, cocktail stirrers and shakers.
With cocktail culture still rising, it’s time home bar carts not only show off locally made spirits and bitters but proper drinking vessels. “The thing that hasn’t come back is the glassware,” Vergason says. Until now. // The Modern Home Bar line is available at The Hour and thehourshop.com
