How to decorate around exercise equipment
Not everyone has the luxury of having a dedicated room to use as a gym, and so often exercise equipment has to live in the other rooms of our homes. There’s nothing quite like munching dinner in front of the TV while your exercise bike watches you from the corner.
With so many of us opting to exercise at home now rather than the gym, our need to have multi-functioning spaces which are practical to exercise in but still aesthetic is on the rise.
I think you have 2 options. Embrace the equipment, or disguise it.
Option 1: Embrace and display it
Peloton corner with plants, by @kristinmansky
A nicely styled exercise bike corner, by Lovely Indeed
Create a designated corner - make it intentional. Rather than just leaving it in the corner and hoping it won’t stand out, make a purposeful and aesthetic area which you can style and make look good.
Add a large picture on the wall, or a large mirror (if you want to watch yourself workout, that is) - the reason I suggest large is so that it grounds the space. Add plants, shelves, lamps - anything else you would use to style a corner in a room.
If you have exercise equipment, make a point of making its storage look nice. Put weights, shoes and yoga blocks in baskets, hang your matts on the wall underneath some nice shelving.
Yoga mat storage, seen on Apartment Therapy
Pegboard storage, from Ikea
Option 2: Disguise and hide it
A tactic used in interior design is to disguise objects by painting their background a similar colour. Have a huge TV but don’t want it to be the focal point in the room? Paint the wall behind it dark. Or use a busy wallpaper to pull the focus away from the object and onto the wall behind it.
The same tactic can be used to hide bulky exercise equipment; an idea I used when re-designing our spare room which has 3 uses: home office, guest bedroom, and Peloton room.
My design for our spare room, which is yet to be implemented. What exercise bike?
The same idea, as seen on WSJ
For smaller equipment like weights and accessories, you can blend them in with other decorative objects.
In this example, on their own, the weights would look unattractive. But when coupled with shelving of a similar height and plants in a similar sizes to the weights, the repetition causes the area to blend into one aesthetic scene.
Weights storage, design by Max Humphrey
And then finally, you can have a go at physically hiding your equipment. If you have enough space, screens, bookcases or even curtains hung from the ceiling can be used to section off an exercise corner.
Exercise corner sectioned off with a screen, by Leroy Merlin
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