Discover the art of hanging pictures
Expert advice can make your walls look sensational, says Mark Palmer
Some habits seem to be hereditary. on seeing a picture that wasn’t straight, my father couldn’t resist adjusting it and then standing back to admire the result.
I do the exact same thing. There’s something about a picture that isn’t straight. It smacks of laziness and incompetence.
After all, no one in his, or her, right mind wants to have a wonky picture. But that’s the easy bit. Far trickier is deciding which pictures should go where. How high should they be? Should you mix old with the new? If you’re putting a pair of paintings together how close should they be to each other?
What makes it harder is that there are no definitive rules. It’s personal preference — except perhaps when it comes to height, with most experts agreeing that the centre of the picture should be as near as possible to eye level.
After that, it’s up to you. or, in my case, a battle with my wife. This came into sharp focus after a ceiling collapsed in our London house, wreaking havoc.
Fortunately, we got on famously with our appointed loss adjuster — partly because on his first visit he saw a couple of framed photographs of Bob Dylan and we were able to bond over whether Blonde on Blonde was a better album than Highway 61 Revisited.
The water damage meant that most of the house had to be redecorated, so all our pictures and mirrors had to come down.
I wanted everything to go back as it was; my wife wanted to ring the changes. For example, in what we refer to as my ‘office’ we always had one wall groaning with pictures in traditional ‘salon style’.
THE salon way of hanging pictures harks back to France in the 17th century when art graduates held public exhibitions and had to hang their paintings from floor to ceiling in the hope of fitting them all in one room.
I like the look. It was popular in the eighties and Nineties, but took a bashing when minimalism came to the fore and our heads were turned by white walls.
Somewhat in desperation, we decided to call in an expert in the form of Danillo Cooper, from Hanging by Design ( hanging
bydesign.com), who has hung everything from guitars, surfboards and fossils to sculpture, family photos and mosaics.
‘No wonder you are at odds with each other — because there is no rule of thumb,’ said Cooper. ‘I happen to like symmetry but others don’t.’
Cooper charged £70 for an hour of intense work. His experience and eye were invaluable. one rule he follows is that no picture should line up with the top of a door or with the top of, say, a mantelpiece.
‘You want to break it up so that the eye focuses on the picture.’ Interior designer John mcCall ( mccall
design.co.uk) says there are two schools on pictures; first as trophies and displayed as such, with a single picture dominating a wall or, second, with an entire room dedicated to one subject and ‘ hung in groups to create a narrative’.
That sounds fine if you live in a huge pile, but what about the vast majority of us who make do in more modest dwellings?
‘A plain wall, not necessarily white, is still considered the best backdrop to display pictures,’ says mcCall. ‘Don’t be frightened of hanging large pictures in small spaces, the effect can be dramatic. And never hang a small picture in the middle of a large wall.’
If you do opt for the salon style, or when placing pairs of pictures next to each other, what gap should you leave?
‘I always say two inches. It might not seem a lot but anything more and the impact is nothing like as strong,’ says marcus Wells, who runs Haviland Designs.
What strikes me — and contrary to what I thought before our ceiling collapsed — is that moving your artworks around is no bad thing. There were several pictures that we did not want to put back up at all.
Why? Because we realised they weren’t much good and that a bare white wall was a far more interesting option.