Use Sports Memorabilia to Decorate Your Sports Bar

There are two things that differentiate a sports bar from the typical neighborhood watering hole – a great television system so patrons can watch the game, and the décor. Owners of sports bars often go overboard with the sports memorabilia, covering every available inch of wall space with sports posters, sports photos and mounted sporting equipment in an effort to hammer home the fact that yes, this is indeed, a sports bar. If you’re working on the décor for a bar dedicated to sports fans, there’s a better way to use memorabilia in your decorating. These hints and tips will help you create the proper ambiance for your bar without tipping overboard into kitsch.

Choose Sports Memorabilia for Your Customers

Before you choose a single item of décor, decide who you’re catering to and what you want the atmosphere to be. The décor for a sports bar catering to college students and twenty-something rowdies will be far different than the bar situated in the middle of a solidly working-class neighborhood with an older demographic. Once you’ve figured out who your customers are, you can aim your purchases of sports memorabilia, wall art and décor at making them comfortable.

For the younger crowd, for example, you might highlight a collection of autographed sports jerseys worn by today’s greats. Whether you choose one or two hometown favorites or a selection of greats from one sport, you can hang each jersey individually in a beautifully crafted frame that highlights the jersey as well as protecting it from damage.

Highlight a Few Specially Chosen Items of Sports Memorabilia

Instead of slapping up a wild assortment of sports-themed posters and other wall art, choose a selection of authentic sports memorabilia and build your décor around them. Unless the atmosphere you’re trying to evoke is college frat hall, you’re better off choosing a few quality items and accenting them in your design.

Build a Wall of Fame above a row of booths opposite the bar, for instance. Select autographed photos of famous players or news photos of spectacular moments in sports history that you can hang over each booth. Add accent lighting to illuminate each photo without detracting from the ambient light in the room.

Take Your Collection Off the Wall

Many items of sports memorabilia aren’t designed to hang on the wall. Intersperse autographed balls, bats, helmets and the like with the liquor bottles in your display or frame the ends of the bar in a pair of display cases filled with memorabilia commemorating local and national sports heroes.

Taking care to accent your memorabilia collection can add a great deal to the atmosphere in your sports bar. Choose your items carefully and display them artfully so that they’ll be an asset that immerses your customers in the sports experience.

How to Display Music Memorabilia

You may not have called it music memorabilia when you were a teenybopper, but those posters pulled out of the centerfold of Teen Beat and Tiger Beat may have set the stage for a lifelong love of decorating with music memorabilia. Back in the day, displaying your music memorabilia was probably a matter of sticking your posters to the wall with masking tape, or if mom was a stickler about the paint job on the wall, with sticky tack that didn’t leave adhesive behind.

You may have done the same in college, or learned to appreciate the sleek good looks of a simple poster frame, a popular way of displaying band posters on dorm room walls and in first apartments. But just as you’ve outgrown the Tiger Beat centerfolds and moved on to classier mementoes of your favorite bands, so you should have outgrown plastic frames and picture hooks. Today’s collectors of music memorabilia have far more than concert posters to collect, and displaying their mementoes and memories calls for more than cheap frames and thumbtacks.

Autographed Guitars

Guitars are among the most popular music collectibles of the past few decades. A beautifully crafted, signed guitar is often the centerpiece of a music lover’s collection of mementoes. But displaying that guitar can be a tricky proposition. It’s important to protect the instrument from dust and damage while displaying it in a way that accents its beauty. If you purchase collectible autographed guitars from a dealer of collectibles, they’re often sold complete with a shadowbox display frame, and may be framed with a certificate of authentication and often include other memorabilia to make them even more valuable.

Framed Displays

Concert tickets from your favorite Aerosmith concert, drumsticks, a headband worn in concert – these are just a few of the pieces of music memorabilia that find their way into framed collages and displays. On their own, each piece may be meaningful to you, but when you pull them together into an artfully arranged collage and frame it with a polished wooden frame, you’ve transcended the genre of memorabilia and created a work of art.

Celebrity Autographs and Photographs

Celebrity hounds have been collection autographs for decades, so it’s no surprise that the signatures of music’s stars – from B.B. King to Justin Bieber – are among the most popular types of music memorabilia on the market. Don’t hide your autographs away in a scrapbook or closed box. Celebrity autographs can become the center of your decorative scheme when you frame them with a photograph or put them together with other pieces to create a collectible display.

Don’t let your music memorabilia hide away. Display it beautifully and make it a central part of your home or office décor.