Wall Art Curation: A Guide to Building a Cohesive Collection at Home
How to think about scale, spacing, lighting, and narrative when hanging art in domestic interiors — from a single statement piece to a salon wall.
Camille Drouin
The most common mistake in domestic art installation is not about the art — it is about the architecture. A painting hung too high, a print lit from the wrong angle, a sculpture placed where it cannot be circled: these are failures of space, not of taste.
The Grammar of Hanging
The center of any single artwork should sit at roughly 145cm from the floor — eye level for the average viewer. This is the single most useful number in domestic art installation, and it is violated in nearly every home we visit.
A salon wall is not a storage solution. It is a composition, and compositions require a logic — even if that logic is only visible to the person who made it.
— Interior designer, Paris
Treat your walls as a curatorial project. Define a hanging line, light from above at 30 degrees, and leave breathing room — negative space is a framing device.
The goal is not to fill walls but to create relationships — between objects, between rooms, between the art and the life that moves through it. The best domestic collections feel inevitable, not because they are perfect, but because they have been considered.
Curated Publications
Essential monographs and criticism, selected by our editors.
