Doug Gottlieb's Man Cave: What the 2017 Listing Shows and What You Can Copy

Doug Gottlieb's man cave, as 2017 coverage described it, was a sports bar with a fireplace, several TVs and a pool table inside his Westport, Connecticut Colonial. The house went on the market in mid-2017 at about $1.9 million, and that listing is the last documented chapter of the room; no verified sale or re-listing has surfaced since.

That is also the useful part. The documented feature list reads like a checklist for a room that gets used: a place to serve, seats that face the action, and heat for the off-season. This piece covers what the 2017 reporting actually showed, where the sale stands, and the decisions from that setup worth copying into a garage, basement, or spare room of your own.

Key insights

The documented cave was a sports bar with a fireplace, several TVs and a pool table; no studio or memorabilia museum was ever verified.
The home was listed in mid-2017 for about $1.9 million; no verified current listing has surfaced since.
Copy the system, not the celebrity: map activities, plan serving flow, and run power and cable routes before finishes.
Build custom work to be reversible; freestanding bars and modular shelving keep your options open at sale time.

Who is Doug Gottlieb, and why did his man cave make headlines?

When the house went up for sale in June 2017, both outlets that covered the listing described Doug Gottlieb the same way, as a former professional basketball player and a Fox Sports commentator. That is the verified identity, and it carries its date with it, because public identities change over time and every documented fact about this room comes from that reporting.

The headlines explained themselves once you picture the house: a classic family Colonial in Westport with a sports bar and courts on the lot. But what makes the room worth studying is not celebrity luxury. It is how legibly the layout answers its owner's habits. Gottlieb talked about sports for a living, so his room is a place to watch the games, talk over them, and serve the people who showed up to do the same. That is why the feature list reads the way it does, and why that one list teaches more about planning a room than a dozen showroom photos would.

What did the man cave actually include?

Both reports agree on the core, and the documented details fit in one honest list:

A sports bar with a fireplace, the room at the center of every account.
Multiple TVs and a pool table in the sports bar, per the New York Post's June 2017 report.
Tennis and basketball courts built on the lot (the basketball court per Connecticut Cottages & Gardens; the Post also confirms a tennis court).
A 4,651-square-foot Colonial at 27 Pequot Trail in Westport's Old Hill neighborhood, on a one-acre lot.

Read that list as a spec sheet and it states the room's intent outright. A sports bar is not a shrine; it is a serving counter with screens that face the seats. A fireplace in the bar zone means someone planned for a cold Connecticut January, not just Sunday kickoff. This is a room built to be used all winter, not admired.

Then the boundary, because a bigger room may already be living in your head. That list is the complete documented feature set. Both 2017 stories describe the sports bar and stop there. No broadcast studio, no memorabilia museum, no standalone custom-built cave appears in either account, so any source promising one is filling in its own blanks. The documented parts are modest, but they are real, and everything that follows builds on them.

Was the man cave really for sale, and what did the listing actually say?

The sale details, properly dated, are these. The New York Post reported the listing on June 1, 2017 at an asking price of $1.94 million. Connecticut Cottages & Gardens wrote it up in late July 2017 at $1,899,000. Same house, two published asks a few weeks apart, which is worth knowing before anyone quotes either figure as the price. Cyd Hamer of William Pitt Julia B. Fee Sotheby's International Realty held the listing.

After that, the published record goes quiet, and saying so plainly is the honest part: as of September 2026, no verified current or recent listing of the home has surfaced. That does not mean the house never sold. It means nothing reliable has been published about a sale since the 2017 coverage, so the last verifiable chapter of this room is a nine-year-old listing. Treat any current price or new-owner claim you run across as running ahead of the record.

Which of Gottlieb's choices work in a normal guy's room?

Nothing below depends on Gottlieb's budget or his name; it depends on what the documented setup did right, translated into the order you would actually work in.

Map activities before buying anything. Write down what the room has to do: watching, hosting, playing. Put the noisy zone where noise bothers nobody, and give the layout a sober walking-path test before you commit to it. Three people should be able to pass one carrying a tray of drinks; if they cannot, the arrangement gets renegotiated the first time you host.
Build the bar around serving flow, not size. A counter deep enough to work behind, cold storage within arm's reach, glassware and trash handled without anyone crossing the sightline of the game. A heat source near the bar zone is what makes that work in January; without one, the room runs on game day and goes quiet the rest of the winter.
Power and routes before finishes. Once the walls close, adding an outlet or an HDMI run stops being shopping and becomes a bill. Decide where the screens, the bar fridge and the game storage will live, and run the electrical, network and cable routes first. Many setups give the cold storage a circuit of its own, because a bar fridge sharing a circuit with the AV stack invites a breaker trip at the worst moment of the night. There is no universal number for the capacity a setup needs; local electrical code and a licensed electrician decide, ideally before the drywall rather than after it.
No plumbing? The bar still works. In a rental or a finished basement, a drainless sink or a drip pan with a small condensate pump solves the water problem without touching a pipe. You give up a real drain and keep a working bar, which is usually the better trade than cutting open a floor you just paid for.
Screens and seats. Let the screen size suggest a starting seat distance, then adjust to the actual sightlines: sit where the seats will actually go and look at where the screen would hang. Mount the display at seated eye level and the back of the room stops complaining. In a tight space, a modest riser behind the main seating buys sightlines back without moving a wall.
Sound and light finish the room. Hard walls throw echo at the seats; rugs, heavy curtains and a panel or two at the first reflection points calm it down for less than any speaker upgrade. To find those points, sit where the main seat goes and have someone slide a hand mirror along the side wall: wherever the screen shows up in the glass is where the panel belongs. Then layer the lighting, dimmable overheads for cleanup, task light at the bar, and something low behind the screen so a three-hour game stops feeling like a headlight.

What does a room like this cost you when it's time to sell?

A specialized room reads as somebody else's room to a stranger walking through it. The tradeoff is not taste; it is reversibility. Freestanding bars, modular shelving and removable display systems let the next owner reimagine the space without a demolition quote. Fixed custom work goes the other way: buyers start pricing its removal into their offers, and some will ask you to remove it before closing rather than absorb it. Neither choice is wrong. Just make it deliberately. Build the parts you touch every week to be permanent, and keep the signature pieces on furniture with feet.

Staging runs the same logic in reverse. Keep one focal piece and make the rest adaptable, then show the room in use: seats facing the screen, the bar ready, the lights low. Before that day ever comes, keep the receipts for what you installed, copies of permits for permitted work, and a running inventory of what conveys with the house. Built-in versus transferable changes the negotiating position on both sides of a sale, and the paperwork is the part you control years ahead of it.

One part of the documented property deserves a warning of its own. The tennis and basketball courts in the 2017 coverage are a different order of commitment from anything indoors: they consume land, they are effectively permanent, and they appeal only to a buyer who wanted exactly that. Copying Gottlieb ends at the bar for most of us.

So the verdict is to build reversible now and pick the one commitment you will still defend in ten years. Everything else in the room should be furniture, not surgery.