Design Your Home around Your Hobbies

Have you every considered creating an exclusive space to indulge in your hobbies? As rewarding a pastime as it may be, a hobby also offers sweet escape and scope for rejuvenation in a stressful world. Individuals of all ages can pamper themselves into something they enjoy doing, be it art or music, photography or multi-media, embroidery, reading or creative writing. A hobby home can be as small as a corner with sufficient work surface and storage spaces to organize and spend time on your hobbies, or as large as a common family room, if there are others in the family who would also like to spend time there.

A hobby can have you accumulate a lot over the years. Sundar, a techie by profession, took to nature photography long before the era of digital cameras, and has albums that quite literally, 'speak volumes' about his passion. "My first goal was to be able to organize all the photos that my hobby was generating, and I looked for ways to exhibit them in a small corner of my room," he says. This forced him to consider a hobby home. He chose neutral shades in wall colours and hung up smart canvases to pin up his spoils. The best of his creations were elegantly framed and took up the pride of place in his living room. The large number of albums that were generated before he made the transition to digital photography are neatly catalogued and tucked away into hidden racks on his shelf. The others are neatly organised on his desktop computer.

No hobby should have you feel burdened by your collections, and you can think of creative ways to exhibit them and enhance the look and feel of your room. Shilpa, a 15-year-old philatelist, chose to display her stamps in an innovative collage displaying the world map. Each country was filled in with a delightful melange of colour and pattern using stamps. The outcome was spectacular.

Your hobbies are in one sense, an extension of yourself, and can speak of how interesting you are. A hobby as simple as collecting shells on the beach can be fashioned into exquisite arrangements for tabletops and windowsills. A collection of coins can make an interesting display under the glass top of your table, and embroidery can be used to customize tablemats or make a tea cosy. Those that enjoy gardening have ample creative expression opportunities. Indoor plants, hanging gardens, dry floral arrangements, and cactus gardens - the list is endless. As always ensure that the arrangements flow with the decor of the room, and stick to keeping it as aesthetically appealing as you can. It's the little changes that can make big differences and overdoing your room with too many of these objects would only destroy the ambience.

If music is your passion, toss a little of it onto your walls in the form of portraits of your favourite groups or musicians. Try and arrange your CDs into interesting looking racks to give a contemporary flavour to your room. Let your room speak of the activities that you love, and enjoy the exclusive privileges it offers you as you indulge in your varied interests.