Frame wall decor: tips and ideas

by Paola Agostini (sissi_mum) 16/01/2018

Furnishing the walls with the frames and photos is not only an essential element of interior design: furnishing with paintings, posters or photos is often a way to finish the decoration of the walls, to illuminate a dark corner, to give character to a furniture in the entrance or to send a message of love in the nursery of the newborn or on the headboard of your double bed.

Although decorating walls with the frames seems simple, if you want a nice composition different from classic and regular alignments (three pictures of the same size in a row, for example), you must take into account some rules.

Frame wall decor: tips and ideas

First choose your style. You can choose a grouping of paintings, gallery style, or choose to support your paintings (with the advantage of not having to plant nails!) on shelves. A chapter apart deserves the arrangement along the walls of the stairs.

If you choose a gallery style, you should group together frames of different sizes. How can you be sure that you like it? You don’t want to plant a thousand nails and then not be satisfied with your composition, right?!

The solution is to take the measurement of your frames and make some test pieces in cardboard, which you place with the adhesive tape on the wall: so you will be sure of the global effect! Or you can create frames directly with paper tape. A good layout for the gallery style should always identify a fulcrum, a focal point (generally central, which will be your nicer photo/picture) and from here build in a harmonious way the arrangement, which depending on the wall can develop vertically or horizontally.

Here are some ideas and examples: try to harmonize not only the geometric layout, but also colors and styles of frames and images.

If you want to use shelves, maybe already existing in your entrance, or in the bedroom or in the living area, it is a little simpler. Surely your composition will develop in line, you only have to combine dimensions and geometries of the frames taking into account a slight overlap: here are some ideas.

We have chosen this solution using the upper shelf of our living room. On Wall-art.it we chose the posters that most represented us, both as a message and as a color/style: we made a small scheme on paper to make sure that the writings were not covered with the overlap:

Very nice is also this solution, taken from the Ikea catalog, where the frames are inserted in the library:

Very nice this idea that develops in line but replaces the shelf with a bar:

Furnishing the wall of a staircase is certainly a way to furnish a point that normally remains a little anonymous: in this case the focal line of your disposition should run parallel to the one that imaginary joins the thread of the steps. Here are some examples: