Despite the washout weather, garden bars have been this summer’s hot home trend and it’s not too late to join the party.

Online searches for outdoor bars rose by a whopping 358 per cent in June, compared to January, according to Toolstation, while budget homeware shop The Range saw a massive 60 per cent rise in online shoppers checking out its al fresco drinking options this summer.

What’s more, being late to the garden bar party isn’t necessarily a bad thing. Retailers are discounting their summer stock. So before you buy directly from the manufacturer, shop around multiple stockists to find the best discount available.

So, if you fancy pulling a pint from your own backyard pub or shaking a cocktail in the shade of a tiki hut, there’s a garden bar to suit every space and budget.

Join the party: A tiki hut-style garden bar is perfect for friends-round-Friday or a family do

Jenny Davis from Forest Garden, suppliers of garden timber goods, says before heading to the garden centre, consider the space you have available first.

‘Smaller areas might seem overwhelmed with the addition of a standalone bar, which is where a fold-down wall-bar comes in handy,’ she said. 

‘A wall-mounted fold-down bar means the smallest of gardens, even balconies, can become a party haven.’ Forest Garden’s fold-down bar costs £189.99 and comes with a fold-away serving table and shelves to store bottles and glasses. 

Online retailer A Place For Everything stocks a more compact wall‑mounted bar at £67.50.

For free-standing bars to fit a modest back garden for less than £400, specialists Dunster offers the Utopia Gable Gazebo Bar at £384.99, which is 2.22m wide and 1.20m deep. 

The Range sells a tiki-style bar in its Marbella collection for £239.99, complete with straw roof and two bar stools, which is half the size.

To build your bar atmosphere, it could be placed in front of a high wall or sturdy fence, giving you the option to put shelves up for your spirits and accessories.

Interior designer Siobhan Murphy recommends creating an eye-catching rainbow effect and to group together the colours of your spirits, mixers and glassware. 

She says: ‘Invite nature to your garden bar by installing hanging planters, or create a vertical garden backdrop using wooden pallets for an organic feel. 

Oversized potted plants can add a touch of luxury, and unique planters like repurposed teapots will amp up the quirkiness.’

If you’re looking for an enclosed bartending space, you’ll have to spend a bit more. But it does mean you can use your bar for storage in the winter by shutting up the serving hatches. 

Forest Garden’s Shiplap Pent Garden Bar at £729.99, or £1,039.99 with installation, is weatherproof and lockable so you can keep a fridge to store spirits in overnight.

When the winter months draw in, replace the fridge with a lined box for blankets and cushions to keep you cosy, and install a fire pit or outdoor heater, at a safe distance, to stay warm while you entertain outdoors.

Garden bars are designed with DIY-ers in mind. But if you’re not handy with a hammer, many companies offer an installation service costing £200 to £300 extra.

Cheers! Garden bars don’t necessarily have to be put away for the winter, as some are covered and can be warmed up with a heater (at a safe distance) or blankets

When your bar arrives, it will be unpainted and without any of the accessories, lights or additional wall fittings shown in the adverts. You will, however, have a blank canvas on which to create your own unique bar vibe.

Siobhan suggests creating a backdrop feature with nature-inspired outdoor wallpaper, and creating an eclectic counter-top using patterned tile mosaics or faux marble vinyl.

If you’re looking for a pub experience in your back garden and you have a budget of close to £4,000, Dunster’s Severn Pub Shed Log Cabin could be right up your street, if you have the space that is. At 5m wide and 3m deep, it’s no small addition to your outside space.

Only the structure and bar are included in the £3,959.98 price — you’d have to buy your own pub sign, seating and beer pump. But there’s space to hang a TV, room for a heater and doors to shut out the chill.

Those who want to entertain their friends in the garden all-year-round could push the boat out with Cuckoo-land’s Ornate Garden Off Set Oval House Garden Pod for £18,995. 

It seats ten, has a built-in heater, Bluetooth soundbar and a sideboard, which can be used as a bar. Installation is included, but you’ll need a level, hard-standing base measuring at least 3.25m by 1.7m for it to be built on.

Although most garden bars are designed so that you don’t need planning permission, it’s always wise to check the height of the bar at its highest point against current regulations. Buildings over 2.5m high, at the tip of the eaves, may require planning permission.

Check with your local council if you are unsure.

Savings of the week… quirky lamps 

Light side: Graham and Green’s Hetty Hare table lamp – reduced from £165 to £89.10 (grahamandgreen.co.uk)

The nights are drawing in. If this makes you feel a little melancholic, a quirky lamp that brings joy when you switch it on could be the answer.

Homeware companies seem to have recognised the allure of this type of lighting, and you can you find designs in every shape and hue at reduced prices.

If zingy colour raises your mood, Not On The High Street has an Anglepoise-style desk lamp in acid yellow, reduced from £75 to £52.50.

The retailer offers lamps in the shape of birds and bears. But the range also includes a white triceratops lamp which was £19.95 and is now £13.97 — for those who find dinosaurs cute rather than fearsome.

Graham and Green has a fun silver Hetty Hare table lamp with large floppy ears that has been reduced from £165 to £89.10.

Or enjoy a warm glow from the edgy Wayfair lustrous copper base and black shade Trystan lamp with 30 per cent off at £62.99.

ANNE ASHWORTH

This is a story full of fairy tales. In some ways, it even resembles one. And yet it also proves that, in the real world, things rarely end happily ever after. A few days ago, Bill Willingham, the father of the celebrated Fables comic book series, announced that he was sending his most cherished work to the public domain, that is, to everyone. That’s only fair, since that is also where he got the main characters of his stories, from Snow White to the Wolf, from Pinocchio to Prince Charming, who were then relocated to modern New York. In this tale, the hero has long-faced mistreatment at the hands of the villains, DC Comics, the owner of Vertigo, which publishes the work in the United States, and its executives.

“If I couldn’t prevent Fables from falling into bad hands, at least this is a way I can arrange that it also falls into many good hands,” Willingham wrote in an online post in which he decried the label’s repeated attempts to take over his creations and opposed them with this final extreme remedy. But the company responded that it considers itself to be the true owner of the series.

In a statement published by the specialized media IGN, the company threatened to take “necessary action” to defend its rights. Thus, the end of the dispute is uncertain. But it is unlikely that everyone will end up happily ever after.

In the meantime, in a new post, Willingham celebrated the massive support he received. In fact, for the moment, he has declined all interview requests — he did not respond to this newspaper’s request, nor did the publisher — arguing that he preferred to spend the next few days working on new artistic projects. Meanwhile, the dispute continues.

Fables is one of the most celebrated graphic novels of the last 20 years, and it has spawned spin-offs and a video game adaptation (The Wolf Among Us).

This situation also touches on a key issue, namely, the intellectual property rights of characters and works, especially in a sector where, for decades, dozens of cartoonists and screenwriters have accused comic book giants Marvel and DC of pressuring them to cede their ideas and accept commissioned contracts.

Willingham sums it up as a policy aimed to make creators sign “work for hire” agreements and crush them. All of this makes a gesture that was already intended to make a splash even more resonant.

Indeed, the battle over intellectual property is as old as contemporary comics: the copyrights for Superman, Batman and The Fantastic Four all have unresolved disputes and complaints from Jerry Siegel, Bill Finger and Jack Kirby over the contemptuous treatment they suffered. And heavyweight Alan Moore has been lamenting for years that DC took away his ownership of famous works like Watchmen.

Along with prestige and principles, tens of millions of dollars are at stake, especially now that the film industry has become interested in comics.

“When you sign a contract with DC, your responsibilities to them are carved in stone, where their responsibilities to you are treated as “helpful suggestions that we’ll try to accommodate when we can, but we’re serious adults, doing serious business and we can’t always take the time to indulge the needs of these children who work for us” the Fables author wrote on his blog. Following the impact of his original message, Willingham posted two other texts. He maintains that he had thought about sending his work into the public domain when he passed away, but that “certain events” have changed his plans: among them, he lists the changes in management and attitude at the top of the publishing company; the multiple breaches of obligations such as consultations about covers, artists for new plots and adaptations; DC’s forgetfulness when it came to pay, which forced him to demand invoices of up to $30,000; the suspicious frequency with which the publisher attributed it to “slipping through the cracks” (to such an extent that the author insisted that they stop using that expression); and the time and chances he gave them to respect the pact, renegotiate it or even break it and consensually separate.

A detail from the cover of the first volume of Bill Willingham’s comprehensive collection of ‘Fables’.

“Shortly after creating Fables, I entered into a publishing agreement with DC Comics. In that agreement, while I continued to own the property, DC would have exclusive rights to publish Fables comics, and then later that agreement was expanded to give DC exclusive rights to exploit the property in other ways, including movies and TV.

DC paid me a fair price for these rights (fair at the time), and as long as they behaved ethically and above-board, and conducted themselves as if this were a partnership, all was more or less well. But DC doesn’t seem to be capable of acting fairly and above-board.

In fact, they treated this agreement (as I suppose I should have known they would) as if they were the boss and I, their servant. In time that got worse, as they later reinterpreted our contracts to assume they owned Fables outright,” Willingham laments. Hence, he concluded that “you can’t reason with the unreasonable.”

Having ruled out a lawsuit as too expensive and time-consuming at 67 years of age, he found a more creative solution: if they prevented him from owning his works and benefiting from them as he was entitled to do, he would not let the publisher do so either. Or, at least, everyone could use the comics as they wished. But the label was quick to clarify in its statement to IGN: “The Fables comic books and graphic novels [are] published by DC, and are not in the public domain”.

For his part, Willingham promises to continue fighting for all the conditions of his still-in-force contract that he considers DC to have violated, as well as for the last installments of the series, the final script of which he delivered two years ago.

There will be additional chapters in this dispute, as well as in many other ones like it: in 2024, the historic first image of Mickey Mouse, the one that starred in the 1928 short Steamboat Willie, enters the public domain in the U.S. and other countries. Copyright in the U.S. lasts for 95 years, and math is an exact science.

Therefore, in a few years, King Kong, Superman and Popeye will meet the same fate. But The New York Times has wondered how the “notoriously litigious” Disney will react and how far it will go to fight in court. And who would dare to freely use all these works for fear of a million-dollar lawsuit? The same question surrounds DC and similar companies. Because in the real world, fairy tales are rare. Or they end up in court.