For years, Chris and Lizz McKay have been fighting against an idea. Or maybe it’s more accurate to say they’ve been fighting against a lack of ideas. Brilliant, thoughtful, creative interior design might be found everywhere throughout a home, but when you say the words “game room,” ideas about elevated design often stop.
Game room. Are you picturing a finished basement? Does the TV that used to be upstairs sit on the TV stand that used to be upstairs next to the sofa that used to be upstairs? Why look, is that a 20-year-old concert poster hanging above a mini fridge?
Lizz McKay gets it. Before she and her husband, Chris, took over the family company, Venture Games, which specializes in billiards tables, shuffleboard tables and other game room staples, she worked as an interior designer in the New York area. She knows about the spaces people love—and the spaces they often don’t think twice about.
With Venture—and in particular, the company’s new luxury brand, Milieu—the McKays want to get people thinking about the game room as a place where you don’t have to sacrifice style for fun. “We find that the game room is forgotten,” Chris McKay says. “We’re trying to bring that design aesthetic into that room.”
These trends aren’t new, Lizz McKay says. “It’s really been the forgotten space for decades; it’s just been where the kids are,” she says. But, she reckons, the COVID-19 pandemic changed that. “There’s no forgotten space in your house. That really became clear when everybody had to be home.”
In that dawning realization, the McKays see opportunity.
“There is this opportunity in the billiard market for good-quality, well-designed game tables coupled with impeccable customer service,” Lizz McKay says. “In design school, there are no parameters around designing game table rooms. There’s very little knowledge base because there’s very little education.”
In working with both clients and design professionals, they see education as a big part of the process. If they haven’t imagined how a room like this and the things in it might look, the McKays’ expertise and Milieu craftsmanship can help.
“It’s this very elevated experience, both for the end user and for the design professional,” Lizz McKay says. “An elevated sense of what the game table is, what a room and an aesthetic could be, and to make these spaces feel really comfortable and well designed.”
Milieu is the latest advancement for a company that has stuck to some core values while adapting to a changing market. Chris McKay’s father, Russell, began Venture in 1997; from the beginning, the company created artisan-made products. At that time, most Venture customers were commercial: The typical Venture product was coin-operated and went to a restaurant, pool hall or places like Dave & Buster’s. Gradually, that changed.
Chris and Lizz McKay’s move to the head of the company was more sudden and came amid the worst possible circumstances. Russell McKay died of a heart attack in 2011. He left a company with a reputation for quality and craftsmanship. It would be up to his son and daughter-in-law to understand how customers and the market would evolve. And much of that evolution has involved concentrating more heavily on private homes. Milieu eventually came from that.
“At our core, Chris and I are entrepreneurs,” Lizz McKay says. “We’re always evolving, we’re always fine-tuning, and we’re always pushing our industry forward. Milieu is an industry leader. There was this idea: What if we started from scratch? What would that look like? If we had no constraints, what would it be?”
The answer they came to: elevate the artisan Venture process even more.
“It’s refined quality,” Lizz McKay says. “Our Venture tables are batch made. Three or four move through the studio at a time, and of the artisans, seven or eight people might work on it. Milieu is that, more refined. They are bench made, which means one artisan. We use refined materials like handmade leather pockets, where the leather is all hand dipped. Because of the attention to every single detail, the fit and finish of that piece becomes very unique.”
Venture has always been about evolving, and this is a big evolution.
“Milieu is that next step,” Chris McKay says. “Having the limited runs is unique. What we really wanted to do with Milieu is to create a full solution.”
They recently opened a space in the Atlanta Decorative Arts Center (ADAC). A presence in ADAC will, they believe, open even more doors as people become more and more receptive to their ideas.
“We see articulated now in high-end residential and commercial what Chris and I have been striving toward for a couple of decades now,” Lizz McKay says. “We want people to jump off from a Milieu project and design the rest of the room around it. Part of that education is to really dive in and discuss: Who’s going to use this room? Is it his space with his friends? Is it for the couple when they want to spend time away from their busy lives? We all have those spots where we can go and get away and relax. We want to create spaces that are intimate enough for couples to use and welcoming enough for a group.”
Even when the McKays are away from work, the ideas are always percolating. On vacation, anything from a creatively designed boutique hotel to a cobblestoned street can provide inspiration.
“Chris and I design together, and we have lots of different places that we pull inspiration from,” Lizz McKay says. “We bank all this information and knowledge, and then I send random messages and photos to him that have nothing to do with the game room.” Ancient architecture, grand, old-world bars—they look well outside the traditional game room box.
They also work well as a team with different skill sets. “What makes us unique is the design/engineer parts, and also that we’re husband and wife,” Lizz McKay says. “I ask for the moon, and Chris delivers it. He has the engineer brain. In my head, I can see rooms done. He has that too, but it’s an exploding view of a table on how to make it work. It’s an interesting, amazing process to watch—to watch a table come from the ether, from a sketch into a first article.”
The result is a beautiful, one-of-a-kind piece but, interestingly, also something meant to blend in. “To bring them into the real world is a gift,” Lizz McKay says. “The best part about beautiful design is that you don’t see it. It’s not at the forefront of your brain; you just think ‘I love being in this room. I love spending time here.’”
They make fun things. Pool tables. Ping-Pong tables. Shuffleboard. Products that in a past age belonged almost solely to the domain of smoky barrooms and design-free corners of homes. But not anymore. And that means something to the McKays.
“For us, there really is so much that we’ve invested,” Lizz McKay says. “This is our life’s work. Even if I never meet the end customer, it’s so important to provide a piece that speaks to them—that the quality, fit and finish really becomes part of the fabric of their family, of their establishment. We really do build things to make life better.” *
Erik Petersen was formerly editor of Fort Lauderdale Magazine, columnist for the Nottingham Post (U.K) and reporter for The Kansas City Star. He likes his homes how he likes his bourbon: neat, Southern and significantly more than 10 years old.
