Where art goes in each room

A print is not a piece of decoration that works everywhere. It is a thing with a viewing distance, and rooms differ in how far away you stand and how long you look.

That is the whole argument. Everything below follows from it.

The living room, where the distance is long

You see this wall from four or five metres, from a sofa, for hours. Long looking is the one thing this room gives you that no other room does.

Which means detail pays here and nowhere else. A drawing with a hundred small things happening rewards the fourth month, not the first evening. The dense ink cities, the ones drawn building by building, belong in exactly this room.

Scale is the other half. A single small print above a three-seat sofa reads as an accident. Aim for a picture, or a group, about two thirds as wide as the furniture underneath it, and hang it so the bottom edge sits 15 to 25 centimetres above the back of the sofa.

If the room is already loud, with a patterned rug and a full bookshelf, do the opposite: one quiet image, large, and nothing else on that wall.

The bedroom, seen lying down

Two things are true here that are not true anywhere else. You see this wall from a horizontal position, and you see it in bad light, first thing and last thing.

So: nothing that demands attention. This is the room where a calm image earns its place, and where anything frantic will start to annoy you within a fortnight. We keep the quiet end of the catalogue together for this reason.

Above the bed, measure the bed rather than the wall. A 160 centimetre bed wants around 105 centimetres of picture, which in practice is two prints side by side rather than one.

The hallway, seen from one metre

Nobody stands back in a hallway. You pass through it, at arm's length from the wall.

Small formats win. A run of three at eye level, same size, same gap, does more than one large piece you can never see properly. Line drawings hold up well here, because at a metre you can read the line.

This is also the only place where hanging slightly high is fine, since you are looking slightly up as you walk.

The kitchen, where the air is the problem

Grease and steam travel further than people expect. A print hung near a hob will collect a film you cannot clean off paper.

Glaze anything you put in here, keep it small, keep it on the far wall. Or accept that this is where you put the print you like but are not precious about.

The bathroom, usually a bad idea

Humidity buckles paper, and it does it slowly enough that you will not notice until it is done.

If the room has a window that actually gets opened and the print is framed with a passe-partout, it can work. Without ventilation, do not. Plexiglass rather than glass, always, because of the wall it is hanging on.

The room behind you on video calls

A genuinely modern problem. Whatever is behind your head gets looked at by people who are pretending to listen.

One image, large, simple, readable at the size of a postage stamp, since that is how it arrives on the other end. Anything detailed turns into noise once the camera compresses it.

The child's room, hung at their height

The usual mistake is to hang at adult eye level, which puts the picture above the person it was bought for.

Drop it. And choose an illustration rather than a character, because the character has an expiry date and the illustration does not. There is a whole corner of the shop for this.

If you rent and cannot drill

Lean a large framed print on a shelf or a chest of drawers instead of hanging it. It looks deliberate, and in a room where nothing else is casual it reads as confidence rather than laziness.

Picture rails, if the flat has them, take everything with no holes at all. Adhesive strips hold small frames and will eventually let go of large ones, usually at night.

One rule that survives every room

The centre of the picture goes 145 to 150 centimetres from the floor. That is average eye height, it is what galleries use, and it is the reason you never feel you are looking up at anything in a museum.

Almost everyone hangs too high. Measure once and you will see it everywhere else afterwards.

Once you know the wall, the shop filters by orientation, which narrows things faster than scrolling does.