A Tale Of Two Cigar Rooms
It was 2:30 in the morning on October 19, 2020, and Emil Dameff was jolted awake by alarms. He was at his home in Punta Gorda, Florida, and he rushed out of bed, assaulted by the smell of smoke. His home was burning, and he and his family scrambled away to safety. He remembers standing in his front yard, shocked and devastated, watching helplessly as firefighters struggled to stop the blaze. His home burned to the ground.
The guest house next door, which housed Dameff’s beloved collection of 12,000 cigars and a luxurious cigar room, thankfully remained unharmed, small solace on such a horrible day. As he grieved the loss and planned to rebuild, his unwavering passion for cigars spoke to him—and soon, an idea was born. Why not add another cigar room on his property? And not just another one—this one had to be even better than the first.
Dameff is 59, and built his first Punta Gorda house in the 1990s, when he was just getting into cigars. But as he fell deeper into the hobby, he realized he made a mistake. The home was missing a cigar room. It was too late to make a change, and for years, all he could do was dream and plan for the day he could have his own cigar-friendly space. He took detailed notes at cigar lounges across the country, jotting down what piqued his interest and what he didn’t enjoy. He was desperate, so much so that he nearly walled off his attic to create a pseudo lounge before reason mercifully came to the rescue. In 2011, he and his wife at the time decided to build a guest home on their property to care for her mother, who had been diagnosed with Alzheimer’s. “That was the seed,” he says. “That seed, like so many things in my life, just grew rampantly.”
What was initially meant to be a small, two-seat smoking room on the side of the guest home quickly evolved into a full-blown lounge, 14 feet by 22 feet with room to comfortably seat nine. The space is outfitted with Brazilian ebony wood floors and paneling, brown leather chairs, a marble fireplace, a bathroom, a small bar and a sizable walk-in humidor guarded by glass. There are also hidden elements: The bar doubles as the door to the humidor and it can only be opened via a biometric fingerprint scanner coded to Dameff. He also has speakers disguised in the walls and a projector concealed behind a painting of a bottle of the high-end spirit Louis XIII Cognac.
Still, the majesty of the new space was short-lived. Dameff entered the lounge one day in 2013 to discover that his walk-in humidor had flooded. Boxes of his meticulously-curated collection of cigars were floating in water, completely destroyed, about 200 boxes in all. He ripped out the floors, walls and shelves of the humidor and rebuilt an identical model. It was gorgeous, stately enough to even win second place in Cigar Aficionado’s 2020 “My Cigar Space” reader contest, but he remained unsatisfied. “As it came to fruition,” he says, “I quickly realized all of the things I had not done properly.”
Dameff’s main frustrations with his first lounge centered around airflow, ventilation and sound. The space was far too smoky when cigars were lit, and with a person living nearby, that created an undesirable dilemma. “As a physician, it actually bothered me,” says Dameff, who works in medicine for correctional facilities. And with his then mother-in-law living so close, for years he rarely used the space, waiting for when she would leave the house before he felt comfortable lighting up.
Dameff went through a divorce in 2013. He kept the home, and no longer had someone living next to the cigar room. Still, he struggled with what he saw as imperfections in his cigar setup. “I get very focused on needing to know why something happens and how it works,” he says. “I should probably be focusing on diabetes and high blood pressure, but instead I’m focusing on the physics of airflow and humidity.” The frustrations would ruminate in Dameff’s mind for years to come, familiar territory for this Floridian. “If I get something in my head, I go down a rabbit hole and nothing else enters my head for a long time,” he says.
Dameff’s unrelenting, highly-focused nature constantly intersects with his passion for cigars. Examples abound. He once started a corporation to become an authorized retailer for S.T. Dupont, not to make a profit, but to make it easier to build his collection of Ligne 2 lighters. When he felt Punta Gorda was missing a proper cigar retailer, he used the corporation naming rights to open his own cigar shop and private club. To cultivate a deeper understanding of tobacco, Dameff installed a 300-plant tobacco field on the back property of his retail shop. When his mother wanted to add gold trim to her Lexus, he became an expert in gold plating and even gilded a Padrón 80th Anniversary Figurado for the Padrón family, who then hosted him on a visit to their Miami headquarters. After losing his entire repository of Cigar Aficionado magazines in the 2020 fire, he spent three-and-a-half years meticulously building back his collection through Ebay, issue by issue, no matter the cost.
Time and time again, Dameff’s unyielding love for cigars has carved new paths in his life. The 2020 house fire is a shining example. Amid the devastation and the ashes, Dameff saw a rising Phoenix, a chance to right past wrongs and create a better lounge than the original. “Of course, everyone thought I was insane,” he says. Wisely, he focused his efforts on the principal player in the matter, his wife, Missy, who he married in 2021. “Her edict was if you can design and build this room so that not one molecule of smoke escapes, go for it,” he says. Four years later, in October of 2024, the new house and cigar lounge were complete.
The new lounge mirrors the layout of the original: dark wood floors and paneling, brown and green leather chairs, a marble fireplace, a bathroom and a small bar that doubles as a secret door allowing access to a glass-enclosed, walk-in humidor. This space is slightly smaller than before, measuring 12 feet by 19 feet, which Dameff says can comfortably seat six, but it has several new enhancements, including an adjoining bar and kitchen area and additional light fixtures. On the ceiling, he commissioned an artist to create a hand-carved tobacco leaf display in dark green with 24-karat gold-foil accents. Hidden features remain: Dolby speakers and a subwoofer are confined within the wall; the humidor door and a 124-inch projector are activated via remote control.
The largest improvements in the new lounge address Dameff’s key areas of frustration with the original: airflow, ventilation and sound-proofing. First came insulation and creating an air-tight seal. Dameff spray foamed every nook and cranny; he installed melamine foam composite barriers in the ceiling; he deployed two layers of sound-proof, inch-and-a-half thick drywall; and he went through 17 tubes of caulk, at one point hanging from the ceiling to get to hard-to-reach places. On the ventilation side, Dameff installed a controllable exhaust and fresh-air intake system, one he says is capable of producing more full-air changes per hour than most operating rooms. As fresh air is pulled in from the humid Florida climate, it blows over the cool coils of an AC unit and is pushed into the room via vents just above the baseboards. In turn, it pushes up the smoky air in the room to exhaust vents situated on the ceiling. He also has an air purifier ozone generator to further eliminate signs of smoking.
“Every screw-up I made in the original room, I tried to make up for it and fix it in the new room,” he says. The original lounge is still the go-to spot when hosting social gatherings, due to its larger size, but the new space gets more daily use.
Dameff smoked his first premium cigar in the ’90s, an experience he calls “a life-altering moment.” He became obsessed. Now, he stores his massive collection of cigars, roughly 12,000 in total, between the lounges: Cubans in the new space, non-Cubans in the original. Some of his treasures include Cuban Cohibas (including the Cohiba 50 Aniversario), Padrón Millenniums, Fuente Fuente OpusX The Lost City and the original release of La Flor Dominicana Salomones, among others.
Dameff’s days of dreaming about an unblemished cigar room are over. Instead, he’s the envy of other aficionados, with two gorgeous smoking lounges to choose from. His soul can rest at ease in his new, luxurious space, devoid of irritating deficiencies. But sometimes, nostalgia outweighs his perfectionism and he finds himself wandering back to his original love and all her flaws. “There are times when I will go and sit in that room and have a cigar,” says Dameff. “There’s history there, there’s warmth there. I love that room.”
