Paintings for the Home

Pictures are the last layer of a room and the first thing people get wrong, almost always in the same way: hung too high. Everything else — style, frame, subject — is free. The height is not.

The centre of the picture sits at 145-155 cm

This is the height at which museums hang work, because it is the eye level of a standing adult. Almost everyone hangs higher on instinct, and the result is a picture that floats and loses its connection to the furniture beneath. Above a sofa or a chest the reference changes: leave 15-25 cm between the top of the piece and the bottom of the frame. In a room where people sit low — a living room with a low sofa — you can drop the centre to 140 cm, because the eye comes from lower down.

Grouping follows simple rules

Several small pictures work only if they are treated as a single object. Leave 5-8 cm between frames — consistently, the same gap throughout — and align either the top edges or the centre line of the group at 145-155 cm. The whole group should cover between half and two thirds of the width of the furniture below it. If the pictures differ in size, place the largest low and to the left: the eye reads the group from there and the rest appears balanced of its own accord.

The frame ties the picture to the room

On old pieces the frame is often worth more than the painting inside it, and it is almost always what connects the work to the furniture. A warm timber frame beside walnut or oak furniture ties the room together effortlessly; a gilded one demands to be the only gilded object in the space, or it argues with everything else. Practically: keep pictures out of direct sunlight, which fades pigments within a few years, and away from damp external walls. And for a heavy frame use two hooks rather than one — it hangs straight and stops shifting every time a door slams.