How To Decorate A Sports Themed TV Room

Any respectable super sports fan would love a dedicated space where he (or she) can relax, watch a game, and be surrounded by what they love the most: sports. Whether you’re the fan or you just love one, pulling together a sports-themed TV room can be a lot of fun. This is one area where whimsy, creativity and playfulness can run wild. Or not, depending on your personal style.

Location, Location, Location

The first step in planning your sports-themed room is deciding exactly which room it will be. The best time to make this decision is when you are moving into a new home, but it’s not a necessity. A finished basement is an ideal venue, but family room or dedicated media room will work as well. Your location will help determine how subtle or extreme your look will be. If the room opens up to another space that will have a completely different decorating scheme, you’ll have to take that into account in your plan.

Getting Specific

Once you have the place chosen, it’s time to narrow down your theme. You may choose to have a single team represented or you may want to celebrate all of your hometown heroes. On the other hand, you may not want to confine yourself to one sport. Having a direction will help you focus your efforts. Need some ideas to get you going?

• Pick a single sport. If football’s your game, make a football-themed room. Into hockey? Try that. Choose one sport and design the room around it.
• Pick a favorite team. Set your sights on your favorite hometown team and incorporate their colors and paraphernalia into your decor.
• Pick an “all-purpose” theme. You can make a generic sports theme that showcases several different sports. You can create a theme-within-a-theme by getting specific: Go with a vintage sports theme or superstars of the sports world to help narrow your choices a bit.

With any of these themes, you can go all-out or put together something more subtle and sophisticated depending on your personal taste. Areas that serve more than one purpose, like a family room, may call for a more restrained approach than a dedicated space would.

Choosing the Color Scheme

While it may seem a no-brainer to use your favorite team’s colors if you’ve chosen to go that way, you might want to give it some thought. Not all teams have wall-friendly color palettes and even if they do, the effect can be overwhelming.

If you’re looking for something subtle and sophisticated, consider a white or neutral wall and a color scheme that will work well with the team’s color scheme. This way, you can pull out those colors during the season or on game day while keeping things more subdued at other times.

Neutral hues also work best in themes that are not team-specific. You can give a nod to your theme-within-a-theme with an aged-look paint job if you’re going with a vintage-sports theme, or with a single (coordinating) color from several teams as accents in a “superstar” theme.

If you’re going for an all-out look or just really love a particular team’s colors, go for it. But there are still ways to make those looks a bit more subtle, if you choose. Try using the team’s accent colors, like white or gray, for your wall color and saving the deeper or wilder tones for accents. You can use them in a border near the ceiling or in other places around the room.

Rounding Out with Details

What makes a sports-themed room so cool are the little details. You can paint with team colors, but that’s not what really makes the room. It’s all the accessories and creative touches that take your space from just a place to watch TV to a complete sensory experience. One of the most important accessories? The jersey. You can hang framed versions of your favorite players’ jerseys on the walls or you could even take it a step further and use jerseys to make covers for the backs of bar stools. Have a signed ball you want to display? Try putting a removable decal with the player’s number on the wall, then add a floating shelf just big enough to hold the ball. You can put the shelf slightly above or below the number or even overlapping it a bit. Tap into your creativity and try something new. Use hockey sticks as drapery rods or iron-ons to add team logos, varsity letters or player numbers to solid-color accent pillows. An elegant and subtle alternative is to use vintage and recent black and white photographs of moments from your favorite teams and players on the walls, along with a display case of your collection of signed memorabilia. Lastly, and most importantly, don’t forget the television.