Senior Living: Building collections

 

The modern senior lifestyle provides older adults with the opportunity to fill their days with the activities, events, and projects which bring them happiness and joy. For some, retirement is an opportunity to become immersed in an existing interest. For others, it is a time to explore in detail what may have been merely a passing interest during the career and family life.

 

Finding a creative muse is challenging for some adults, but the hardest part is getting started, and there are endless activities, niches, and scenes to explore. Collections are a fun activity that you can pursue either as a casual interest or as a serious project. As a senior living community in Los Angeles, we see the positive physical and psychological effects of pursuing a project with purpose, and we love seeing our residents find creative releases like curating collections. We’ve highlighted a few interesting collection niches.

Decorative garden miniatures

 

These kinds of items can be found everywhere from craft stores like Michaels, small boutiques, and online stores like Etsy. Decorative garden miniatures can include elf homes, foliage features like mosses, figurines like angels, cherubs, gnomes, and fairies, and woodwork like logs, and cottages. Garden miniatures have a unique charm about them that often inspire people to pursue garden miniature collections.

 

Paintings

 

Building a painting collection doesn’t necessarily require large amounts of space or money. Charming pieces can be found in small galleries and boutiques throughout the United States. The core principle of building a collection that feels like all the pieces fit together naturally is to find a theme, and to build on that theme. Landscapes, a specific landscape, animals, a specific animal, a specific color, small towns, cottages, or paintings by a single artist - any recurring feature, item, or quality can be the theme of your collection. Part of the joy of collecting paintings is finding a theme that sparks your personal interest, and establishes for you a quest to pull similar works together into an overarching collection. As you begin to curate a collection, the best presentation of the collection can become a pursuit in and of itself.

 

Closing

 

Pursuing a collection of any kind creates a project that you can work on independently, or with a family member or close friend. Building this ongoing project will keep you learning about the subject or niche, creates small goals to accomplish, stimulates the memory, and builds joy into your retirement lifestyle. You can read more about the interesting collections that people are building , or contact us if you’re exploring senior living communities in Los Angeles.