AskMen Guy Gear Awards 2025 Best Man Cave Essentials

Lots of people think the man cave concept is kind of silly, but not us. Whether you’re a millionaire or a regular guy just struggling to get by, having a space in your home that feels truly designed for your enjoyment is seriously kickass for your mental health. Whatever that looks like is up to you, of course, but for the Guy Gear Awards, we try to put together a list of sweet products that we think will appeal to lots of guys with a little bit (or a lot) of wow factor, whether that’s how it looks, what it can do, or some combination of the two. So whether you’re into gaming, watching movies, listening to music or just kicking back and relaxing, we think this list of man cave essentials has something for just about every guy. And now, please check out the winning man cave essentials from the 2025 AskMen Guy Gear Awards: Editor’s Note: Because it’s 2025 and AI slop is everywhere online, we wanted to let you know that generative AI and LLMs were not used in the production of the Guy Gear Awards. We were hands-on about it, and quotes directly from our testers are included throughout to give you a sense of how actual human guys feel about this stuff. Best Watching Options Best TV Hisense U8QG As far as tech goes, the television may have ceded some of its dominance in the 21st century, but your smartphone is never going to be the centerpiece of a room. Whether you’re watching war documentaries, Fight Club or your favorite team (we kid, we kid, men aren’t uni-dimensional) you deserve a seriously great TV in your man cave. The U8QG from Hisense is a marvel of modern engineering that, unlike many so-called smart TVs these days, isn’t a huge hassle to own and operate. Check it out at Amazon.com Best Projector BenQ X3100i While TV is the traditional approach, the tech getting both better and cheaper in recent years has made projectors an enticing alternative. Blowing up your screen to the size of your whole wall allows for home viewing that the vast majority of televisions just can’t match. With 4K ultra HD definition and 4LED high brightness, BenQ’s X3100i model is your new best friend when it comes to gaming and watching your favorites. Check it out at BenQ.com Best Streaming Stick Google TV Streamer (4K) Call us old, but we’re starting to miss cable. One single, simple monthly fee, and all those channels! The streaming era is a bit fraught. We’ve got way more options, sure, but it costs a ton to be subscribed to everything. In any case, while you’re here, you may as well have the best streaming option available. Right now, that’s Google’s TV Streamer stick. Our testers say: “If you don’t already own one, this will revolutionize your TV-watching experience. Genuinely next-level.” Check it out at Google.com Best Couch Lovesac Sactionals No man cave is complete without a couch. Frankly, a gaming chair and nothing else is a little depressing. Couches tend not to be cheap, but the advantage of Lovesac’s Sactionals concept is that you can buy a small one now and simply expand it later by adding components. The fully modular approach also means if your budget is big, your couch can dream just as big to match it — plus lots of cool add-ons like in-seat charging, sound and more. Check it out at Lovesac.com Best Recliner La-Z-Boy James Walnut Leather Power Headrest Rocker Recliner Once you’ve got your couch sorted, if you’ve got enough scratch, you might start looking into add-ons. That’s where the recliner comes in, and, as just about everyone not currently located under a rock knows, La-Z-Boy is the first and last name in recliners. There’s not really any bad choices to make on their site, but for our money, the James is the model you want to really capture the old-school classy vibes of the platonic Man Cave form. Check it out a La-Z-Boy.com Best Listening Options Best Speaker Bowers & Wilkins Zeppelin Pro By God, just look at this thing. The sound is amazing, and it’s a conversation piece that will give you a little thrill just looking at it, while wowing anyone lucky enough to be invited into your man cave. It’s got its own spotlight for a subtle touch mood lighting, and, again, it’s shaped like a zeppelin. A beautiful, sonically amazing zeppelin with gorgeous audio and a proprietary mobile app. Yes, you can play Led Zeppelin through an actual lead-colored zeppelin. If that’s not Guy Gear, we don’t know what is. Check it out at BowersWilkins.com Best Portable Speaker Ultimate Ears Everboom As with another winner on this list, (we’ll get to that later), sometimes portable is better than stationary. While you may lose a few advantages that are unique to possessions intended to stay put, you gain the possibility to take the show on the road. The Everboom from Ultimate Ears took home this category last year, and for good reason. Our testers say: “The sound is surround and has great range. It's easy to use, quick to charge, and with 20 hours of play time, can keep going all night long, and well into the next day, too.” Check it out at UltimateEars.com Best Record Player Pro-Ject Debut Carbon Evo If the man cave vibe is all about conjuring up expert craftsmanship, well, it’s no surprise that lots of guys will want theirs to have a turntable in it. After all, it’s true what they say: Vinyl really does sound better. This gorgeous number from Pro-Ject looks incredible, sounds incredible and is also really easy and fun to use. Plus, its high-tech feet give you a stability most people could only dream of, meaning you can dance as hard as you want without making the record skip. Check it out at Amazon.com Best Subwoofer REL Acoustics Classic 99 Is it hackneyed to say “By God, just look at this thing” a second time in just the Best Listening Options section? Well, sue us. REL Acoustic’s Classic 99 subwoofer is a jaw-droppingly gorgeous piece of hardware that will class up just about any man cave. With its gorgeous walnut veneer, it’s easy to mistake it for some kind of heirloom side-table — until you hear what comes out of its 450-watt amp. Check it out at REL.net Best Soundbar Sonos Arc Ultra No matter how good your picture is, if the sound isn’t up to par, your watching experience won’t be peak. The Arc Ultra soundbar from Sonos can put those worries to bed, though. It boasts a whack of top-of-the-line features like voice control, Dolby Atmos and Apple Airplay 2, as well as genuinely incredible sound that’ll turn your viewing experience into a genuine listening experience, too. Check it out at Sonos.com Best Ambiance Options Best Man Cave Decoration The Ultimate Guide to Rebuilding Civilization The modern man cave may at times skew more in the directions of gaming and binge watching than reading leather-bound books while sipping a Scotch. But we do think that owning (and reading) books is a noble pursuit. And we’re obsessed with this one, which attempts (surprisingly successfully) to boil down all the most crucial human knowledge for surviving and thriving into a large coffee-table picture book. You don’t need to be a prepper to find this thing cool — or handy. Check it out at HowToRebuildCivilization.com Best Man Cave Lighting Globe Electric Griffith 3-Light Faux Wood Track Light Good lighting is a surprisingly overlooked aspect of interior design for a lot of guys, who settle for run-of-the-mill fixtures and lightbulbs. This bad boy from Globe Electric kills two birds with one stone on that front, mixing in a seriously dapper-looking set of hardware with their awesome smart bulbs that allow for immense amounts of control over your lighting. You might just feel like a kid again (because you can set your man cave up to look like a high-school dance with all kinds of funky colors). Check it out at Globe-Electric.com Best Gaming Options Best Console PlayStation PS5 Pro Look, if you’re going to be spending a lot of time with a product, you kind of owe it to yourself to go for the best, right? And for our money, the best is PlayStation’s PS5 Pro model. Our testers say: “I grew up without a console and it always made me feel less than the other kids. Getting to test this out was a dream come true, and it seriously blew me away at every turn. You can tell how much love and intelligence went into making this an ultimate gaming machine.” Check it out at PlayStation.com Best Gaming Keyboard Razer BlackWidow V4 Pro 75% We were going to say this is the perfect fit for all the keyboard warriors out there, but apparently that’s not a term for someone who plays war games using their keyboard. The more you know! In any case, we’re obsessed with the BlackWidow V4 Pro 75% from Razer. It’s got a socketed PCB for enhanced ease of hot-swap-ability, which is a nice touch to go along with its incredible feel, tons of bells and whistles and the fact that it’s frankly gorgeous. Check it out at Razer.com Best Gaming Monitor Samsung Odyssey OLED G9 You know what? Screw flat, rectangular monitors. Yeah, we said it. We’re obsessed with the curvaceous beauty that is Samsung’s Odyssey OLED G9. With a jaw-dropping 49-inch, 32:9 screen that’s curved at the sides to produce a seriously immersive gaming experience (without the sweaty-face aspect of VR headsets), this is top-of-the-line material. Essentially its only drawback is the price. Which, no offense to the competition, but that’s the kind of tagline that snags one a Guy Gear Award. Happy gaming, gents. Check it out at Samsung.com Best Gaming Mouse 8BitDo Retro R8 Mouse Far too common are the stories of people developing carpal tunnel syndrome or similar physical afflictions due to poor mouse setup. Don’t be one of those people! Even more common? Guys with really boring computer mice. Do yourself a favor and ante up to 8BitDo’s Retro R8, which in addition to looking super cool (and coming with a seriously slick stand) also features programmable buttons and a whopping 4K polling rate for extra precise clickery. Check it out at Amazon.com Best Gaming Chair Vari ComfortFlex Office Chair Controversial, perhaps, given we’re living for the first time in history where fully dedicated gamer chairs exist (we think) but their aesthetics are sometimes, well, lacking. Ever wanted a chair that was great for gaming but didn’t also scream “I’ve put up five-digit hours on video games” to anyone who looked at it? If so, the ComfortFlex from Vari is for you. Our testers say: “This chair has every possible thing you can adjust to make you feel just right, which I appreciate as a short person. I work from home five days a week and play PC games more than a few hours a week so this has been a very welcome change to my life and made my back happier!” Check it out at Vari.com Best Refreshments Options Best Mini-Fridge Dometic CFX5 Look, sure, you could get a regular-degular mini fridge. Or, if you’re smart, you could get a kick-ass cooler like Dometic’s CFX5, which boasts most of the advantages of a mini-fridge (minus the vertical aspect) and is also designed to be portable. With 25L capacity and 75-degree temperature range, it’ll keep your man cave beverages cold, and be ready in an instant next time you go camping or roughing it. Our testers say: “This thing is built like a tank. I might just replace my go bag with it. Full of clever design details” Check it out at Dometic.com Best Wine Opener Craighill Best Wine Key Admittedly wine isn’t the most man cave-coded alcoholic beverage (that’s whiskey, obviously). Still, wine is and remains a classy drink with a long and storied history, and the classiest bottles have corks, not screw-tops. Luckily for you, there’s Craighill’s Best Wine Key, tortoiseshell edition. Besides being drop-dead gorgeous, it’s also super easy to use and makes opening a bottle both easy and cool, the kind of product that you get excited to whip out and show your friends. Check it out at Craighill.co Best Drinking Glasses Dragon Glassware Yellowstone Barware Gift Set Nothing says classy like drinking out of a bottle. Said no one ever. If you’re going to have a proper man cave with some refreshments on offer, you need some glasses to drink them from and/or serve them in. Enter the Yellowstone Barware set from Dragon Glassware. Our testers say: “Really cool product, got a lot of use out of it. Especially the cubes and the glass which I've used to drink throughout the summer. The items are easy to wash, and the flask has that ‘cool’ factor… I actually got comments about it.” Check it out at DragonGlassware.com Best Whiskey Decanter Whiskey Peaks Denali Decanter If you’ve checked out the Guy Gear awards in 2023 or 2024, maybe you knew this was coming. Sorry, not sorry, but Whiskey Peaks takes this award again. As noted, whiskey is the man cave beverage (in our humble opinion) and a nice decanter allows you to seriously class up the joint (not least because it means you can store cheaper whiskeys without certain low-rent labels all over the place). This bad boy remains our favorite for obvious reasons — it’s beautiful without being too showy about it. Check it out at Huckberry.com You Might Also Dig: Check Out All 73 Winners of This Year's Guy Gear Awards 25 Awesome Pieces of EDC Kit to Make Sure You’re Ready for Anything Life Throws at You 27 Seriously Cool Pieces of Clothing to Give Your Wardrobe the Turbo-Charging It Deserves