Our favorite rooms are the places we go to hang out with family, to think things through or simply to ignore the world for a while. We create paradises in extra bedrooms, unused living rooms, basements, attics and studies. Sometimes the room evolves over time, and before you know it, it’s where you spend all of your time. If you need inspiration to create a new haven in your home, check out a few metro Atlanta homeowners’ favorite spaces.

They’re Always Game
Shawn Donalty gathers friends like honey gathers bees. It helps that his mom, Lori, always has the kinds of food that college guys love: pizza bites, brownies and chips with homemade salsa.

“We love having them here,” Lori says. “We don’t have much space for them, but they don’t care. Sometimes they spread out into the dining room, kitchen and family room. The living room was my office, but we decided to change it into a room for the kids because they started hanging out here.” Lori and her husband, Bob, expanded their home to make a new office and turned the old area into a poker room, complete with a table, poker chips, dice, a television and framed collages of friends and family at proms and on vacations. Now her son and friends hang out so much that they’ve nicknamed their group “the fratority.”

When Alvar visited once, Jeff says he was like a child finding his old toys that he hadn’t seen in years. “He sold many of his early works to buy art supplies, and he hadn’t seen many of these pieces in 30 or 40 years,” Jeff says.

A Crafty Family
Becky and John Lambert have creative streaks—three, to be exact. Their two daughters, Katie, 10, and Leah, 5, love to draw, take pictures and make all kinds of inventions, and they’re sure their newborn son will follow in his sisters’ footsteps. So it’s fitting that their favorite room is the basement craft room where the girls’ “portfolio” can be displayed and everyone has room to create, whether it’s drawing, making Play-Doh flowers or creating telescopes out of paper towel tubes.

The $200 Dream Bathroom
Cissy Reynolds is one determined do-it-yourselfer. When she and her husband bought a 115-year-old house in Monroe, there was little in the budget to add a bathroom. So, after $200 and two years of searching, Cissy, who volunteers at a thrift store, can now say she’s got a great bathroom.

To do it, though, she had to teach herself how to tile, float the floor and veneer old maps onto the ceiling. “Luckily my husband [Steve] was handy, but he travels a lot, so I had to do most of it myself,” she says. “I had criteria that the maps had to be old, and it took two years to get enough map books. Every time a map book would come in the thrift store, I would grab it.”

“When we have visitors, they’re always from out-of-state, so they love to find where they are on the maps,” Cissy says. She appreciates all the work she did to make the bathroom perfect. “Sometimes the hardest thing to do is the best one,” she says.

The Kidd Cabana
When Jackie Kidd and her husband decided to finish their basement, a regular space wouldn’t do.

“We love vacationing in the islands, and I saw some great island wallpaper that was my original inspiration,” Jackie says. “We had to order all of the bamboo and thatch for our awnings from Miami since that hadn’t really hit this market yet.” She took some ideas from a Gilligan’s Island theme she found in a Christopher Lowell book and created thatch awnings to match. “I’m very proud of those,” she says.

“The tiki bar was a major hit with all our neighbors that used to frequent the ‘Kidd Cabana,’ but now that we have children, it’s more of a smoothie bar and place for snacks,” Jackie says. “We have lots of gatherings down there, and as a family we go to watch movies, play games or just hang out and feel like we’re away on vacation.”

Their Private Idaho
Kathy Elliott’s pool house is a paradise, hidden on a relatively small lot in the middle of Brookhaven.

Surrounded by two outdoor fireplaces, a Jacuzzi, a pool with a grotto and waterfalls, it’s a creative haven for her family to transform gourds into works of art and paint, and it is a safe haven for her two teenagers and her young son to have friends over. Throughout the space is art that Totally Dependable Contracting and interior designer Marlene Brannon of Red Twig Gallery incorporated into the design, such as Frank Lloyd Wright stained glass windows, an antique chandelier from Africa and antique wood furniture that Kathy inherited from her father

“We call it our ‘private Idaho,’ because people say when you’re in our backyard you don’t know you’re in the middle of the city,” Kathy says. “They would never imagine this back here.”

Movie Night
When Sam and Louise Joyner built their theater room, Louise was a little worried they wouldn’t see each other much.

“I wanted to have something in the house that was like my little corner of the world,” Sam says. Sam definitely got his wish, and Louise was reassured, with the help of interior designer Jack Poles. Now Sam uses the space for his office, often inviting business partners over for meetings. And together, the couple likes to host regular dinner parties, which their closest friends have dubbed “Wheezie’s night,” after the character on The Jeffersons. “It’s just so much fun and it actually brings us together,” Louise says. “I thought we would eventually go back to our old habits once it was finished, but when we go down there, cell phones don’t work, so it’s very relaxing. It’s like being in a cave.”

Worth the Wait
Brandon Sutton knows he’ll never find another place like his loft at the Stacks at Fulton Cotton Mill. He rented the loft for four years, waiting for the building to turn into condos, which it did last year.

“There is nothing that compares,” he says. “This loft’s got the most character of anything I’ve ever seen.” The living room is flooded with light and graced by a 65-foot tower, and thanks to Brandon, the space now has the perfect kitchen. He installed custom cabinetry, stainless steel appliances and Turkish travertine counters.

He’s proud of the small things. “I can put a full gallon of milk in the refrigerator door,” he says. “And the Miele stove has so many settings—I never knew!”

For the Love of Art
Jeff Chappel loves art. But he is especially devoted to the sculptures and paintings of Alvar, a Spanish painter shown all over the world and locally in the Georgia Museum of Art at the University of Georgia in 2001.

Jeff’s living room and foyer are dedicated show spaces for Alvar’s life’s work, from his early oils to his modern vases and sculptures. “The reason I like his sculptures so much is because of the detail and the fact that you can touch and feel the dimensions,” Jeff says.

“We have a very creative family,” John says. His father is a watercolorist, and the couple started a graphic design business together right after they got married. “Becky was an editor and photographer, and Katie likes to take pictures now,” John says. “She’s like a little version of her mother.” Now they display the girls’ artwork on the wall on magnetic strips from IKEA. “It makes them feel good to see their artwork displayed,” John says.