Designing Diva Interiors

Thanks to Geri for posting this frequently-asked question on Designing Diva’s Facebook page! ”How do you decide which pictures to hang on your wall? How do you decide it when enough is enough pictures?” While artwork is pretty subjective and everyone has a preferance (“Less is more!” to “show it all!”) there are a few rules I go by when hanging artwork and family photos for my clients. Read on to see what works for you!

1) When you prefer a bit less. The Rule of Three works with just about everything but it really helps when trying to keep walls from looking cluttered. Examples: A mirror with one wall sconce on each side. A large family portrait with two smaller ones off to one side. One print closely paired with a lamp and a shorter vase (as pictured, courtesy of Hello Metro). Three prints of the same size hung paralell to one another either vertically or horizontally.

2) When you just can’t decide what to use. The Rotatation method is your best friend! Your family is gorgeous and you want to show them off! But if you’re not ruthless with choosing which prints make it onto the walls you may quickly get a “shrine” look going on and nobody wants to be the wierd neighbor on the block. Your wedding  portrait hanging above the fireplace is one thing. 90 pairs of eyes staring back at you in every room, well that’s just creepy. I keep only a handful of family prints out at one time but keep an organized folder in my office of great memories that I don’t want to scrapbook- I want to show them off! So about every two months or so I rotate the photos out which also allows for the most recent ones to get fair play as well. I don’t recommend this for households with more than twenty or so frames in a room as this gets tedious with the number like that.

3) When you like to get busy! I’ll give you a moment to get your mind out of the gutter…. all better? For you artistic types you may prefer a more eclectic look with a mixture of portraits, hand-painted canvases and other forms of art to grace your walls. For this look there isn’t a stead-fast rule (but that’s okay because you creative minds don’t like rules anyway!) so I tell my clients to use whatever invokes the emotion they’re aiming for. If you want your home office to be a hodge-podge collection of local artists’ work because it makes you happy then so be it! If 100 black and white framed snapshots of things you find on your nature hikes calms you down, why not put those in your living room? My only recommendation is to watch how low and how high you hang pieces. Think eye level. And try to keep like art together (no abstracts with Western oils on canvas, for example).  Art shown above/right is the 8″x8″ mini abstract “Radiant” by Oklahoma artist Mark Yearwood.