Tiny homes are pretty much commonplace these days. They’re efficient, cheap and ecologically correct. But tiny bars? John Walsh from Galway, Ireland has taken the tiny home concept one step further. He’s built a fleet of four tiny pubs, each one patterned after an Irish cottage and fitted out with the appropriate interior. They look like the real thing complete with flocked wallpaper, padded upholstery and working taps, only smaller.
“I love the old Irish pubs. I probably spent too much time in them in my youth,” says Walsh, a trained cabinet maker who started his tiny fleet of shebeens on a whim. Shebeen is the Irish word for an illegal public house.
“My original plan at the time was to make this a kids’ playhouse,” he says referring to the first of the four, The Burren, “but I didn’t have any kids so I said maybe I’ll turn it into some sort of a bar. I gave up the drink three months before I started building The Burren and after the first or second month I said alright, this is something I want to work on. So instead of going to the pub on a Saturday afternoon, I came over here and worked a couple of hours on it.”
Walsh’s company, Clinical Cabinets, manufactures clean room furniture for the pharmaceutical industry. It keeps him busy. And now the shebeens. Although The Burren started life as a do-it-yourself conversion project – it was originally a family trailer sitting at the back of his parent’s house – his first shebeen quickly became a money maker. He rents out The Burren and the three others he’s built from scratch, The Connemara, The Hay Shed, and Paddy’s for weddings, corporate events and family get togethers. He tows them to the desired location, most often Dublin two hours away. They all come with booze, two coolers and two pull taps and hold 10 to 16 people each in a warm and inviting environment Walsh has designed himself.
“I’m a cabinet maker by trade so we’ve done it all ourselves,” he says about fitting out the interiors on his own. He decorates them with his own collection of pub memorabilia, plates, posters, and antiques and is especially fond of an old tractor he has converted to bar duty in one of the later shebeens, The Hay Shed.
“They’ve got the cuteness, the Irish cottage factor,” he says of their universal appeal and dismisses the suggestion the novelty has worn off. They’re about to enter their fifth year of operation and with the Connemara permanently stationed in Boston, Massachusetts, he’s negotiating with an American manufacturer to expand the concept States-wide. Long live the shebeen.
