I’m 5 years into living at the same place, and my apartment still doesn’t really have much art on its walls 🥲 I’ve also been really interested in making big prints of my landscapes for awhile now, so I finally bought some large 36x48” frames to hang.
Trying several layouts before settling on the final one
I found a bunch of guidance online for how to hang large pieces of art above furniture, which I ultimately chose to ignore. Here’s my justification for why:
The art should be centered over the furniture:
This probably makes sense in a lot of cases, but when I marked out the setup with tape, it looked off. It actually felt like it threw the symmetry of the space off (and it felt too close to the wall to the right). I realized pretty quickly that the couch wasn’t the statement piece and visual focus of my living room — it was the coffee tables, which themselves were not centered wrt the couch. Centering the frames wrt to the coffee tables made things feel symmetrical again.
Maybe the takeaway here is to know what the “visual center” of your space is going to be and use it as the anchor for the rest of your furniture placement. It’s okay if something large like a couch is placed off center if there are other elements that can bring the space balance wrt the “visual center”.
The art should be 2/3 to 3/4 the width of the couch:
This seems like pretty solid advice overall especially if you’re centering the art over the couch, except I had no choice but to ignore it if I was going to place two 4’ frames side by side. I think it looks fine because the wall is huge and the 2 frames together fill about 3/4 of the horizontal space. If I were to just put one frame up, it would leave a lot of the wall empty, which I think would be awkward. Better to not have anything on the wall at all in that case.
Hang art 4-12” above your furniture (6-10” for couches specifically):
I went with placing the frames 1’ below ceiling and 2’ above the couch so the tops would be in line with the tops of the doorframes and my other large art poster.
Conventional wisdom says that the art shouldn’t be too far above the furniture to maintain visual cohesion, but my couches are pretty low. Most couches are 30-35” high, but the one in question is only 25” (side note: I like low furniture and light colors because it has less visual weight and can make a small space feel larger and more open). Putting big frames only 12” above the couch would make the bottom of the frame 3’ above the floor and the center 4.5’ above the floor, which would be awkwardly low. 2’ above the couch places the center of the frame at roughly eye level, 5.5’ above the floor (this also happens to be a rule of thumb for hanging art on a wall without furniture underneath). Also, this clears more of the picture over my floor lamp when viewed from the entrance.
I waffled a lot on this, but I ultimately prioritized overall alignment with other elements in the room and more normal viewing height over avoiding an awkward space between the couch and the art.
A lot of time was spent trying to figure out how to best hang these frames. My process if I ever have to do it again:
Determine layout/location of frames:
I was installing multiple large frames and wanted them to be perfectly level, so just winging it wasn’t an option.
I tried a couple of different ways to test layouts: painter’s tape to outline, cutting out pieces of paper to match the size of the frame and taping them to the wall, marking the corners of where the frames would be with tape. I thought the paper cutouts would be easier to move around on the wall compared to measuring/moving tape around, but it turned out to be really annoying to work with because I cut them out from a roll of seamless paper. Constantly fighting the curling from a 3x4’ paper added a lot of frustration. The gaff tape (easy cleanup like painter’s tape but strong like duct tape) that I had put on there kept getting stuck to the paper as it curled. I ended up just outlining with tape to test layout. Only marking the corners wasn’t enough to visualize such big frames and involved a lot of measuring. I think making the cutouts out of a flat piece of paper or the cardboard that the frame comes in will be the most efficient going forward.
My laser level really helped to ensure everything was level and aligned. I also drew lines/guides on the wall with a pencil when needed.
Determine which fasteners to use:
I knew that I wouldn’t be able to mount the frames to studs because the math just doesn’t work out (my studs are 16” apart), but I made the mistake of assuming that I would be able to avoid all studs and ducts when determining mount points. So I bought Monkey Hooks, which are super strong and easy to use when you can punch clean through the drywall, and only later realized that I needed different fasteners because one mount point was directly over a stud, and there was a 3’ horizontal span of ductwork behind one of the frames. I had to make another trip out to Home Depot to grab some 3M Claws, which are super strong but also don’t completely punch through the drywall. The frames weigh ~15lb each.
Next time around I would gather the following info ahead of time: weight of frames, mounting points, location of studs, location of ducts
Mark out of the mount points w/ pencil and make sure they’re level before installing fasteners:
Having a bubble level is helpful here.
Here are some pictures of the final result. Maybe it won’t take two whole days next time 🥲
