Designing A Stylish Home Gym
A space to work out should be more than utilitarian.
A space to work out should be more than utilitarian.
There’s no denying that home gyms are having a moment. Whether you have a sprawling space or a tiny corner of a bedroom, installing a workout area isn’t just about the equipment. Making it your own means adding flair. Here are tips from the pros to inspire your workout with style and substance.
“An important starting point for a well-designed and stylish gym is to determine a focal point or feature wall—whether it’s paneling and mirrors or a great view. And aside from just filling the room with gym equipment, consider using furniture and accessories to warm it up.
“I like to add texture, like grasscloth or linen wallcovering, and warm materials such as hardwood floors or paneled walls. And add artwork and a statement piece of furniture, like a console table below a television. Stack fitness magazines on top and stock bottles of water to make it feel more like you’re at a home spa gym, rather than the basement.
“The ideal flooring type depends on how you plan on using the gym. If heavy weights or medicine balls will be used, it’s wise to use something with give like rubber or cork flooring. Most often, however, we prefer to use a hardwood or tile floor, which offer the greatest flexibility, ability to clean and help add a little more ambiance to the space.”
— Vancouver-based designer Stephanie Brown
“The layout depends on the variety and amount of equipment. Leave a generous portion of the open floor for pilates, floor exercise, stretching and yoga. Layering a space always helps evolve the overall aesthetic. Opt for a patterned wall to elevate a plain white wall and add inspired lighting such as brass globe lights from The Future Perfect.
“The home’s architecture and flow will determine where to put your home gym. Ideally, separate it from the main living spaces with a custom build. With Covid, many clients have adjusted existing spaces—we’ve built gyms on lower levels and in unused rooms.
“Floor-to-ceiling mirrors with matching mirrored outlets create a streamlined look. We have also installed hidden TVs behind the mirror, which seamlessly brings in the audio/ video component.”
— Kendall Wilkinson of Kendall Wilkinson Interior Design in San Francisco
“Consider the backdrop—it’s amazing when a gym offers visual connections to water, nature and the distant horizon, and even better if the space is uncluttered and calm and trimmed with live plants.
“Choose a location that maximizes views or one that’s motivating to you. For example, we designed a gym at Jolie [on Greenwich] in New York, which is at the very top of the building. The double-height space affords spectacular views that everyone in the building can share—with streaming natural light from the west and vistas of the Hudson River and the World Trade Center.
“Natural light is always ideal to have in a gym as are oversized windows or floor-to-ceiling windows, if possible.”
— Stephen Brockman, partner at Deborah Berke Partners in New York
“Adding a beautiful seating area is a great way to not only connect a gym to the rest of the home, but also to make the space feel less utilitarian. Adding color, soft textiles and pattern softens the overall look and feel of a gym, which has so many hard surfaces and materials. This also helps create a social space where you can work out with friends.
“I like to be strategic with mirrors so that the entire room isn’t consumed by them. For equipment like treadmills and stationary bicycles, most people want to be looking at a screen, so positioning them in front of a mirror isn’t necessary. For other areas of the gym where there are free weights, a reformer or other types of equipment, positioning them in front of floor-to-ceiling mirror elevates a home gym to a more professional looking environment.
“Add space for a sink and refrigerator loaded with water, energy drinks, fresh fruit—whatever you need to stay energized and focused.”
— Los Angeles-based designer Carrie Livingston
“Paint your walls something fresh and clean, like Jolie’s Moonstone, Misty Cove or Spa. Greenery can be used to improve air quality, while an essential oil diffuser can help create a relaxing environment.
“Opt for flooring that can be wiped down and sanitized and add rubber mats, corkboard, and floor pillows to soften the space, absorb sound and cushion your landings. If you need to hide concrete or transform existing floors, paint them and add a floor varnish for easy clean up after workouts.
“Windows are great for bringing in natural light. Opt for roman shades in linen or natural fibres for a more relaxed style. When it comes to lighting, recessed cans are a great option, especially if they have a dimmer so that you can easily adjust the brightness depending on your workout type and time of day.
“And place larger equipment as close to the edge of your space as possible to leave yourself room for stretching and floor work.”
— Lisa Rickert, CEO and creative director of Jolie Home based in New Orleans
Reprinted by permission of Mansion Global. Copyright 2021 Dow Jones & Company. Inc. All Rights Reserved Worldwide. Original date of publication: March 2, 2022
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At the World Plogging Championship, contestants have lugged in tires, TVs and at least one Neapolitan coffee maker
GENOA, Italy—Renato Zanelli crossed the finish line with a rusty iron hanging from his neck while pulling 140 pounds of trash on an improvised sled fashioned from a slab of plastic waste.
Zanelli, a retired IT specialist, flashed a tired smile, but he suspected his garbage haul wouldn’t be enough to defend his title as world champion of plogging—a sport that combines running with trash collecting.
A rival had just finished the race with a chair around his neck and dragging three tires, a television and four sacks of trash. Another crossed the line with muscles bulging, towing a large refrigerator. But the strongest challenger was Manuel Jesus Ortega Garcia, a Spanish plumber who arrived at the finish pulling a fridge, a dishwasher, a propane gas tank, a fire extinguisher and a host of other odds and ends.
“The competition is intense this year,” said Zanelli. Now 71, he used his fitness and knack for finding trash to compete against athletes half his age. “I’m here to help the environment, but I also want to win.”
Italy, a land of beauty, is also a land of uncollected trash. The country struggles with chronic littering, inefficient garbage collection in many cities, and illegal dumping in the countryside of everything from washing machines to construction waste. Rome has become an emblem of Italy’s inability to fix its trash problem.
So it was fitting that at the recent World Plogging Championship more than 70 athletes from 16 countries tested their talents in this northern Italian city. During the six hours of the race, contestants collect points by racking up miles and vertical distance, and by carrying as much trash across the finish line as they can. Trash gets scored based on its weight and environmental impact. Batteries and electronic equipment earn the most points.
A mobile app ensures runners stay within the race’s permitted area, approximately 12 square miles. Athletes have to pass through checkpoints in the rugged, hilly park. They are issued gloves and four plastic bags to fill with garbage, and are also allowed to carry up to three bulky finds, such as tires or TVs.
Genoa, a gritty industrial port city in the country’s mountainous northwest, has a trash problem that gets worse the further one gets away from its relatively clean historic core. The park that hosted the plogging championship has long been plagued by garbage big and small.
“It’s ironic to have the World Plogging Championship in a country that’s not always as clean as it could be. But maybe it will help bring awareness and things will improve,” said Francesco Carcioffo, chief executive of Acea Pinerolese Industriale, an energy and recycling company that’s been involved in sponsoring and organizing the race since its first edition in 2021. All three world championships so far have been held in Italy.
Events that combine running and trash-collecting go back to at least 2010. The sport gained traction about seven years ago when a Swede, Erik Ahlström, coined the name plogging, a mashup of plocka upp, Swedish for “pick up,” and jogging.
“If you don’t have a catchy name you might as well not exist,” said Roberto Cavallo, an Italian environmental consultant and longtime plogger, who is on the world championship organizing committee together with Ahlström.
Saturday’s event brought together a mix of wiry trail runners and environmental activists, some of whom looked less like elite athletes.
“We like plogging because it makes us feel a little less guilty about the way things are going with the environment,” said Elena Canuto, 29, as she warmed up before the start. She came in first in the women’s ranking two years ago. “This year I’m taking it a bit easier because I’m three months pregnant.”
Around two-thirds of the contestants were Italians. The rest came from other European countries, as well as Japan, Argentina, Uruguay, Mexico, Algeria, Ghana and Senegal.
“I hope to win so people in Senegal get enthusiastic about plogging,” said Issa Ba, a 30-year-old Senegalese-born factory worker who has lived in Italy for eight years.
“Three, two, one, go,” Cavallo shouted over a loudspeaker, and the athletes sprinted off in different directions. Some stopped 20 yards from the starting line to collect their first trash. Others took off to be the first to exploit richer pickings on wooded hilltops, where batteries and home appliances lay waiting.
As the hours went by, the athletes crisscrossed trails and roads, their bags became heavier. They tagged their bulky items and left them at roadsides for later collection. Contestants gathered at refreshment points, discussing what they had found as they fueled up on cookies and juice. Some contestants had brought their own reusable cups.
With 30 minutes left in the race, athletes were gathering so much trash that the organisers decided to tweak the rules: in addition to their four plastic bags, contestants could carry six bulky objects over the finish line rather than three.
“I know it’s like changing the rules halfway through a game of Monopoly, but I know I can rely on your comprehension,” Cavallo announced over the PA as the athletes braced for their final push to the finish line.
The rule change meant some contestants could almost double the weight of their trash, but others smelled a rat.
“That’s fantastic that people found so much stuff, but it’s not really fair to change the rules at the last minute,” said Paul Waye, a Dutch plogging evangelist who had passed up on some bulky trash because of the three-item rule.
Senegal will have to wait at least a year to have a plogging champion. Two hours after the end of Saturday’s race, Ba still hadn’t arrived at the finish line.
“My phone ran out of battery and I got lost,” Ba said later at the awards ceremony. “I’ll be back next year, but with a better phone.”
The race went better for Canuto. She used an abandoned shopping cart to wheel in her loot. It included a baby stroller, which the mother-to-be took as a good omen. Her total haul weighed a relatively modest 100 pounds, but was heavy on electronic equipment, which was enough for her to score her second triumph.
“I don’t know if I’ll be back next year to defend my title. The baby will be six or seven months old,” she said.
In the men’s ranking, Ortega, the Spanish plumber, brought in 310 pounds of waste, racked up more than 16 miles and climbed 7,300 feet to run away with the title.
Zanelli, the defending champion, didn’t make it onto the podium. He said he would take solace from the nearly new Neapolitan coffee maker he found during the first championship two years ago. “I’ll always have my victory and the coffee maker, which I polished and now display in my home,” he said.
Contestants collected more than 6,600 pounds of trash. The haul included fridges, bikes, dozens of tires, baby seats, mattresses, lead pipes, stoves, chairs, TVs, 1980s-era boomboxes with cassettes still inside, motorcycle helmets, electric fans, traffic cones, air rifles, a toilet and a soccer goal.
“This park hasn’t been this clean since the 15 century,” said Genoa’s ambassador for sport, Roberto Giordano.
Chris Dixon, a partner who led the charge, says he has a ‘very long-term horizon’
Americans now think they need at least $1.25 million for retirement, a 20% increase from a year ago, according to a survey by Northwestern Mutual