Design Dilemmas
Episode 75. How to plan and hang a gallery wall, from start to finish. From how to frame it through to where to put it and what to stick it up with. Ten easy steps to make it simple.
I’ve always loved a focal wall. When I was a teenager my walls were adorned with posters of Wham and Bucks Fizz (if you didn’t want a primary coloured leotard and rip off skirt, were you even there in the eighties?). For me, it’s like pulling a collection together. I first started curating wall displays when I was collecting art deco mirrors - picked up cheaply in charity shops and house clearance sales, individually they were pretty but fairly non descript. Group seven together and they become a focal point, an area of attraction to draw your eye. I realised that the same applied to wall art - individually, you might give it a quick glance and move on. But include a piece in a gallery wall display and you can’t help but investigate further. It’s impactful, in your face bold and most of all interesting.
The first hardcore gallery wall I ever put up was in my dining room. I’d seen a photograph on Pinterest (the root of all evil when it comes to redecorating temptation) of a Georgian house where the home owner had created a gallery of epic proportions. They’d kept the rest of the room simple, no patterns or loud colours. This meant that the wall was the main feature, there was nothing else to distract you.
I started small with maybe five frames, then over the course of the following months added gradually until the entire wall was filled with art prints. I was totally smitten. I loved the way it stood out, I loved the way that it included both prints and personal memories, pictures of my family merged beautifully with typography and charity shop finds. In our previous home, I included many areas of gallery hang and am intending to do similar in this new one - they never fail to make me happy.
Which leads me on to the purpose of this Substack post. One of the questions that I am regularly asked is, how do I create a gallery wall? So many of the people who contact me worry that they won’t ‘get it right’. The answer to this is simple - it’s your gallery wall, you decide how it will work. There are no set rules, what you put on your wall should purely be based on what you love. If you love it, it will come together. But there are things that you can do to help you create a display that will make you happy. We have talked about this before some time ago, but I thought it was worth a refresh as there are LOADS more of you now so worth extending it to a bit more detail. Here’s my ten step plan to the perfect gallery wall.
You can READ ON by becoming a paid subscriber which means that not only do you receive four free posts a month but you’ll also get an eight EXTRA posts a month (including all my plans for our new home) plus Chat threads so you can join our blossoming community. You’ll be able to access my archive to read ALL of my past posts (including recipes and travel write ups) for the price of one coffee a month. I would thoroughly recommen!