Every private club used to have one: a room off the main hall with heavy chairs, a card table, and a door that closed. Most are gone — some legislated out, some quietly retired by their own memberships. But the ritual didn’t die. It relocated, and in several cases it was rebuilt better than it ever was.
Here are the twelve rooms worth planning a trip around. We’ve led with the four inside the LXV network, because those you can walk into.
Where You Can Go
1. The Hardy Room — Nemacolin, Farmington, Pennsylvania
The best cigar room in the network, and it isn’t close. The Hardy Room has the feel of an old gentleman’s club: dark wood bookshelves crowded with nineteenth-century volumes and memorabilia, including a humidor given to Joseph Hardy by Milton Berle and, standing in one corner, a Mr. Punch figure from an old English tobacconist reported to have belonged to Andy Warhol.
It works as three connected spaces — a retail cigar and accessory shop with its own entrance, opening into a bar built specifically around what you drink with a cigar: whiskies, rums, tequilas and cognacs. The humidor cabinets run deep into seasonal and genuinely hard-to-find stock, including Dunhill Cubans from decades back.
Pennsylvania permits cigar lounges. This one is indoors, year-round, and unhurried.
2. The Hotel Bar — The Broadmoor, Colorado Springs
The Broadmoor’s Hotel Bar sits beside Lake Cheyenne and has, by its own account, always been a cigar bar. A stand-up glass-fronted humidor holds a small, well-edited selection at the entrance — this is a bar that curates rather than warehouses.
The real argument for it is the patio: concentrated seating gathered around a ten-foot stone fireplace, which makes a Colorado shoulder season entirely survivable. And the permission extends absurdly far. You may smoke outdoors nearly anywhere across the resort’s five thousand acres — on the golf course, along the trout rivers, on the hiking and biking trails, and on the walkway that rings the lake.
3. Fairway One — Pebble Beach Resorts, California
California writes essentially no private-club exemption into its smoking law, which should have ended cigar culture at the most famous golf resort in America. Instead Pebble Beach simply moved the whole thing outdoors and made it better.
More than a dozen places across the resort sell cigars, with humidors at The Tap Room, Stillwater Bar & Grill and the Gallery Café. But Fairway One is the destination: a private terrace with a stone fireplace and outdoor firepit, views that justify the walk, and — the detail that gives the game away — cigar room service delivery.
A resort that will bring a cigar to your terrace has made a decision about who it is.
4. The Safari Tent — The Preserve Sporting Club & Resort, Rhode Island
The most theatrical entry on this list, and believed to be the first of its kind in North America. Set on a 3,500-acre estate and created by the Ocean House Collection, the experience runs out of two appointed safari tents — rich wood floors under oriental rugs, wood-plank ceilings, large lanterns, curated artwork, and Adirondack chairs around a fire pit outside.
The two-hour tasting pairs a flight of Laphroaig running from the 10 Year to the 25 Year against a Cohiba selection including the Royale and the Black Gigante, with charcuterie, chocolates and roasted nuts alongside.
There is a $995 food, beverage and cigar minimum, charged at booking and consumed on premises. Open to Preserve members, overnight guests, and the public — which means it is bookable.
Where You Can Aspire
The rooms below are, with one exception, not bookable at any price. They are here because they are the standard the others are measured against.
5. The Heritage Cigar Club — Union League of Philadelphia
Members of the Union League have smoked together since 1862. Not “since the club’s founding, roughly” — since the Lincoln administration, continuously, in the same building on South Broad Street, where a dedicated Smoking Room still operates under the Heritage Cigar Club banner.
When a practice has run that long in one place it stops being an amenity and becomes a fact about the institution. Nobody votes to remove it. They inherit it.
6. The Men’s Locker Room — Seminole Golf Club, Juno Beach
Seminole’s version was never a cigar lounge at all. It is the men’s locker room: deep armchairs and sofas, a beer, a cigar after the round on the Donald Ross course. No humidor wall, no ventilation engineering, no branding.
The best of these rooms were never designed as cigar rooms. They were rooms where nobody made you go somewhere else.
That distinction is the whole thing. A cigar lounge is a feature a club builds and markets. What Seminole has is permission — and permission is what members were actually paying for.
7. The Oak Bar — Sea Island, Georgia
Sea Island runs the same play with more infrastructure behind it: the Oak Bar and the men’s locker room both welcome cigars, supported by a genuine cigar program stocked against the year’s best-rated releases. There is also a hideaway lounge with a cigar room looking out over a practice putting green to the Atlantic beyond.
8. The Caribou Club — Aspen
Underground, behind a deliberately obscured entrance, with a whiskey bar, a humidor and a sunken living room around a fireplace. For years the Caribou has held a peculiar distinction: in a town with strict municipal antismoking rules, it has been the only place in Aspen where lighting up was legal at all.
One grandfathered room, in a resort town full of people who could buy the building.
9. The Amber Salon — Cheval Blanc Paris
The most beautiful room in this category anywhere. Cheval Blanc built the Amber Salon as a proper smoking room — real air extraction, and a floor-to-ceiling glass humidor of premier Cuban brands lit as the centrepiece of the space.
Note what happened there. The thing private clubs hid behind a locker-room door, a Paris hotel put behind glass and lit like a jeweller’s case. A cigar terrace has been reported in development.
10. The Cigar Yurt — Cheval Blanc Courchevel
The funniest and possibly smartest solution on the list: an authentic Mongolian yurt pitched on the terrace, warm inside, snow outside, set up for a cigar, a cocktail and a game. No indoor ventilation problem exists if you never go indoors.
11. The Terrace — Hotel Bel-Air, Los Angeles
California again, and again solved by landscaping. Cigars are welcome at the Bel-Air Bar and outdoors on the terrace beneath the bougainvillea. The statute that emptied the card rooms turned out to be no obstacle whatsoever to a hotel with a good garden.
12. Aman — where the law allows
Aman’s house habit is to build a cigar lounge into a property wherever local law permits one; Aman Delhi is the frequently cited example. It is worth knowing as a rule of thumb rather than a guarantee — including at Amanjena in Marrakech, which sits inside the LXV network. Ask at booking.
Why the Map Looks So Strange
If you are wondering why a cigar is welcome in one clubhouse and unthinkable in another two states over, the answer is that nearly every state banning indoor smoking wrote an exemption for private clubs — and no two states agreed on what a private club is.
- Massachusetts exempts most private clubs, provided they are genuinely closed to the public.
- New Jersey carved out cigar bars and lounges specifically.
- North Carolina requires a club to clear four conditions: selective membership, member-operated, no food or lodging sold to anyone but members and guests, and nonprofit.
- Indiana asks whether you are exempt from federal income tax under 26 U.S.C. 501(c) — meaning your ability to light a cigar in the card room turns on your tax filing status.
- California exempts essentially nobody, which is why every Californian entry on this list is a terrace.
And plenty of clubs went further than any statute required. Baltusrol permits smoking nowhere inside its clubhouse — or in any other building on club grounds. That was not a mandate. That was a membership deciding what it wanted its building to smell like.
One Practical Note
Call ahead. These policies change quietly, they vary building to building within a single property, and a room that was open last season may not be this one. Everything above is described as reported — treat it as a starting point for the concierge conversation, not a guarantee of what you’ll find on a Tuesday.