A Tropical Cigar Paradise In Oregon
You’re sitting in a tiki hut, a Mai Tai and a cigar by your side, island music playing in the background. You look around and see a putting green, palm trees and exotic plants. You must be somewhere in the Caribbean, right? Perhaps, or maybe you stumbled your way into the backyard of Jim Lewis in Beaverton, Oregon. If there was ever a place to “Find Your Beach,” you’ve come to the right spot. Lewis created a tropical paradise in his backyard, and to make matters better, he added one of the more unique and enviable cigar spaces you’ll ever see.
Beaverton, Oregon is a suburb just outside of Portland. While the climate isn’t exactly frigid in this part of the United States, it’s known for rainy, gloomy weather. In short, there’s not much of a tropical feel in the Pacific Northwest. For Lewis, 54, that became a problem. His family adores their annual tropical vacations, but the short visits just aren’t enough. His solution? Bring the tropics to them. Thankfully, he was uniquely suited to do just that. Lewis owns a residential landscape construction company that specializes in outdoor living.
Around 2010, Lewis began transforming his backyard to become the ultimate island paradise. He planted 13 big palm trees, tropical plants, seasonal flowers and a banana tree. The palms and plants can survive year-round in the Oregon climate, while the flowers are seasonal and the banana tree wilts down in the winter. But Lewis says it grows with a vengeance in warmer months, reaching around 20 feet tall by summer’s end.
“What I like to do when I’m building yards is create destination areas,” he says. “Even in a small backyard, you can have all these different destinations where people can go and entertain, and that’s what we built in our backyard.” Lewis says his yard is roughly 50 feet by 22 feet, and within its confines, are various “destinations.” Beyond the exotic flora that populates the backyard, Lewis installed a putting green, firepit, grilling area, patio and dining area. But the crown jewel of them all is his most recent addition, completed in the summer of 2023. In an area that used to be home to a trampoline, Lewis built a tiki hut, and it’s not your run-of-the-mill bungalow.
This project began in May 2023. Lewis had his landscaping team build the structure of the hut, the roof and all exterior framing. The rest was done by Lewis and his family in their free time. This included putting up the walls; cutting and staining them; adding the bamboo veneer; building a hidden liquor cabinet; installing a kegerator and adding straw to the ceiling. The hut is around 160 square feet.
Inside, various island-themed tchotchkes and cigar decor transport you to a tropical, smokey wonderland. There’s a walk-up tiki bar, wood-paneled windows with shutters that can open and close, various light displays, bamboo on the poles and walls and a table in the center with a green felt poker surface underneath a wooden topper. A television and speakers are mounted on the walls, the hidden kegerator lies in wait and, if you know where to look, one spot on the wall opens up to reveal a stocked liquor cabinet.
“Originally it was just planned as somewhere we would take guests into a couple nights a week in the summer,” says Lewis. “As soon as we built it, our weekly herf—that we already were having in my backyard—started moving over into the tiki hut.” Lewis is referring to his local cigar group, who meet every Thursday night to smoke cigars, typically at his place. This squad of aficionados has varied over the years. They started hanging out in his backyard before the pandemic, then Covid flipped the script. Since then, the group has taken on new members, and now they meet in the tiki hut.
Lewis was instrumental in orchestrating this weekly cigar group, recruiting friends, neighbors, parents he met at his kids’ school, another from church, another outside a golf club—just about anywhere. Now, he says they’re as big as they can reasonably be, with 13 members in all. About eight to ten guys make it every week.
The group has rebranded the gathering as the “TikiHerf,” and a sign bearing that name hangs inside. There’s an established system of operations too: $15 in dues every month to handle regular expenses such as beer, propane, plastic silverware, paper plates and napkins. Guys also bring bottles of whisky to add to the collection in the liquor cabinet, and they trade off every week on who brings food and dessert. For cigars, they pool orders together to buy in bulk. They even take their show on the road, attending the Big Smoke Las Vegas every year. “That’s an awesome event, I just bought my ticket for this year,” says Lewis.
To accommodate such a group, insulation and ventilation are paramount in a close-quartered hut, especially in the colder months. Lewis set it up so it can be completely insulated in the winter. He installed hanging curtain doors, clear plastic ones you would find in commercial refrigeration. The window shutters also get closed and he staples a clear plastic veneer outside each window to further keep out cool air. The roof is also full composite and provides total coverage in the cold and the rain. If that’s not enough, he has five heaters inside the hut. In the summer, the extra protection comes down and it essentially becomes an open-air layout.
He keeps the hut ventilated via a combination of methods, including two motorized vents that go through the roof, pull up smoke and dump it outside. Those are joined by a regular ceiling fan that can go two directions: one way pulls smoke up in the winter and towards the vents, the opposite way blows air down to cool them in the summer. “We’ll have nine to ten guys there in the winter,” says Lewis. “It’s way better than you think it would be with that many guys in a small space.”
Lewis and his family welcome opportunities to entertain in their backyard. Every Fourth of July, they have a party with more than 100 people, and of course, it’s tropical-themed. Lewis says besides the weekly herfs, he’ll typically have a buddy or other family friends over at least once a week. Holidays, family events and all kinds of celebrations are typically hosted at their place as well. The space was built to entertain.
Around the time the hut was completed, Lewis reconfigured his work structure so he needn’t be out in the field every day. With the transition to remote work, the hut became a round-the-clock escape. “If I can have cigars while I’m working and be out here in this amazing tiki hut, then this is going to be my new office,” thought Lewis. He has a few cigars out there during the work day, and he generally keeps the same pace come weekends.
Lewis estimates he has 1,000 cigars on-hand, which he keeps inside the house. He points to Eiroa CBT, Liga Privada H99 and “anything made by A.J. Fernandez,” as his preferred brands, but he’s not keen on locking himself in. He has about 30 go-to smokes that he keeps organized together via dividers in his humidor, but he also enjoys having one or two smokes a day that he hasn’t had before, or in a while.
Lewis actually found his way into cigars via fake Cubans. It’s a familiar story for many cigar smokers. It started with a trip to Mexico eight years ago. Lewis, who had smoked one cigar in his life at this point, stopped at a small store on the side of the road. After quelling the store owner’s first attempt to sell him cigars, Lewis followed him into the back of the store for the “good stuff.” He was presented with a fancy, glass-covered box with Romeo y Julieta cigars inside. The unsuspecting Lewis, forked over a wad of cash for the box.
When he got back to Oregon, he went to his local lounge asking only to buy a humidor, cutter and torch lighter. The puzzled shop worker wondered if he may want to buy cigars as well, and Lewis told him about his newly-acquired “Cubans” from Mexico. Without hesitation, the worker told him that the cigars were fake. Lewis tried to protest, brought in the box the next day and that was when he learned Cubans don’t come in a glass box. Still, the fake cigars are responsible for starting his journey to becoming a cigar aficionado. They manifested an itch he needed to scratch. Soon, he was going to the local cigar shop once a week. Then it became a few times a week. And now, he smokes three or four sticks a day in a tiki hut in his backyard that’s tailored-made for cigar-smoking. Maybe fake Cuban cigars did some good for once.
