Are you a sports freak, or is any member of your family a big fan of any kind of sport? Yes? Then it’s perhaps the right time to consider giving your home a true sports flavour. Furniture and furnishings with sports concepts are your best options if you are living in a rented apartment, but if you own your living space, the wall and all that you see is your canvas to inject your home with all things sporty. A little creative twist could help you overcome any issue with your landlord in converting your home into a sports den. So give it a try…
Here are some ideas to get you started:
One Sport Per Room
Refrain from giving in to your love for the sport by turning the room into a stadium, unless it is your basement which is equipped with a pool table, a basketball hoop or some such sporty item. Even your entertainment or the TV room could wear the flavours of a couple of sports, but if you are looking to give your room subtle hints of your sports affair, it is best to pick your favourite team or sportsman to follow through with your décor ideas. If you take one sport, rather one team, it is easier to decorate the room with sports equipment that can blend with the rest of the accoutrements around the house. Items like a basketball hoop, baseball bat or skateboard can easily become decorative pieces if you know how to adapt them into your room – a skateboard, for example, can become a shelf on the wall. You could spread the mood onto the furnishing by picking a throw blanket for your sofa in team colours. The options, as we always say, are many…too many.
Colour Speak
Paints and borders are the best, rather easiest ways to give your room a semblance of the sport you have in mind. You could paint the walls in the colours of your favourite sports team or draw borders that reflect the team uniform or pennants. One way of going about painting the walls sportily is to divide the colours associated with your favourite team by using the border as the divider between darker shades and lighter ones. Alternately, you could colour the four walls of the room in all the different colours of the team. To make it sportier, you could complement the paint with a wall border designed with steamers that reflect your favourite team’s flag. This could be a paper border that you could be made at home with craft papers from the stationery shop in your neighbourhood. And, if you are up for experiments, you could use a stencil to trace out the silhouette of a player or a feature of the game to paint it in and give the wall a mural look. You could even paint the walls of your children’s room in specific sports themes, like a football field, cricket stadium…
Vintage Theme
There is something about vintage pieces that immediately add warmth and class to the home, reflecting the strong personalities of the residents. Scour second-hand shops and old antique outlets to source vintage sports items to decorate your home. Look for old posters of sporting stars or framed pictures of teams, even miniatures of sports equipment to adorn the entryway console or the showcase in the sitting room. If you have the time and resource, you could even create a collage of sports schedules and programmes from online picture galleries or from your grandparents’ attic – get creative and find ways to make your favourite team rock your home décor.