IO – Before successfully becoming a tennis star, Maria Sharapova had ideals that might be beyond the expectations of her current fans.
“Growing up, I really wanted to be an architect. That was my real passion,” Sharapova said as quoted by purewow.
Now, aside from being a tennis star, Sharapova also founded Sugarpova’s candy company.
Because of her tennis career, Sharapova was able to experience different kinds of architecture during her travels, and developed a keen sense of design from a young age.
“I think I acquired a certain taste and aesthetic while I was traveling because I understood what I didn’t like more than what I liked,” she explained. “And then when I had the opportunity and made the money to build my own home, it was really a labor of love.”
Her house, by the way, is so stunning that it was recently featured on the cover of Architectural Digest.
Sharapova described her personal home design style as “very minimal but warm and detail-oriented. I look toward more of a Scandinavian and Japanese mix of influences and maybe Belgian as well.”
The Sugarpova founder worked with an interior decorator for her home but noted that “a home is never really finished.” “I come home and think, ‘Oh, there’s that nook in the corner that could really use something I saw at the market in Paris.’ It’s always an evolution and that’s what I love about design,” she shared.
Evolution is something that’s also played a role in her company, which she launched in 2012. The idea for a candy company was born out of a memory from her early years in the United States when she saw people putting whatever kind of candy they wanted in bags at a movie theater. It was something she’d never seen in her homeland of Russia, but when she would have a good practice, her parents would reward her with a lollipop or chocolate bar.
Now, Sharapova owns her line of chocolates, truffles and gummies galore, the most recent of which took two years to perfect.
Whether decorating a home or sourcing ingredients for gummies, it seems all good things take time.
Sharapova is set to play the China Open in Beijing next and then the Linz Open. The five-time Grand Slam winner commented on how it feels to be a citizen of the world: “And I still, I hold a Russian passport and have an American green card.
So, I find myself at the visa offices very often, whether it’s a Schengen visa to Europe or a British visa, or a Chinese visa that I’ll be getting for the few tournaments I’ll be playing at the end of the year,” she said as quoted by tennisworld. (rp)