What to do with walls

Recently I moved office for the fourth time in the same building, this time to the top floor with all the other retired emeritus and honorary staff into the area we fondly call the retirement village! With each move, I have taken the opportunity to cull all the old exam scripts for shredding and any other accumulated stuff that no longer has a use - a great exercise in editing out the clutter. With a team of enthusiastic lab staff, the move took about an hour, but it was only this week that I felt that I had truly moved in. The significant activity was the hanging of pictures and a map, which made the room look complete. 

This set me thinking of the role of the vertical surfaces in the design process - often designers spend many hours working on the horizontal dimension, the planning and furniture layouts, as this influences the main building activities and constitutes the bulk of the expenditure of a project. So what is the part played by the walls? As an experiment, I turned the clock back to simulate my living room before the pictures were hung...

My living room with no pictures

I left all the other "finishing touches", such as the pot plant, curtain, scatter cushions and inevitable books on the coffee table, to allow for a direct comparison.

The identical view with the pictures

This room has quite a formal layout, with the centrally placed couch and the matching bookcases to both sides. I have two quite large prints, the smaller one in a grey mount so that the frames are approximately the same size to balance each other above the two bookcases. In the middle, I did not have any suitable picture, but the space really cried out for something so I did the four small ink sketches and used identical frames so that they read as one visual unit. When hanging these, I spent a bit of extra effort to make sure the spacing was exact and that they all lined up perfectly - for picture hanging tips, you can have a look at a blog I posted last year.

The things you put on your walls say a lot about you, not just your design taste, but what interests you and what is important to you. The two prints in my living room both bring back special memories - both were gifts and each with a 'back story'. I am also lucky to have been gifted a number of artworks by my friends and family, so my walls are a reflection of them. When hanging these special works, I try to give them their own 'space', loosely following Japanese design philosophy. With the monoprint by my sister, Elizabeth Beard, I have set up a composition of a vertically proportioned bookcase and a very special pottery bowl, but the picture is the focus of attention.

This monoprint, in its double mount, creates a focal point

Even in my kitchen, I have used artwork to enliven the space and create visual interest - a miniature by a friend whom I remember every time I look up when chopping onions or stirring a sauce. This and its companion work, both the size of a postcard, are in very simple white mounts and frames to give them more presence without overwhelming the delicate paintwork.

A miniature by Peter Shreve in my kitchen

Not all of us have talented friends or the courage to put up our own efforts, but this should not stop us from making the most of our vertical 'real estate' to make our spaces look complete. Photos are an obvious route, especially with the printing options available for different sizes and surfaces, including textured paper and canvas. You can choose photographs of particular beauty, of special significance, or to remind you of an event or a group of people. One thing to consider, though, is that photos of people will tend to draw the entire focus of the room, so it is critical to place these carefully, where your guests can see and appreciate them, but where they do not draw attention away from the rest of the room or the live humans in it. The same can be said about mirrors, but here with the added caveat that few people enjoy looking at themselves for any length of time and can become quite self-conscious especially when eating.

The mirror in my dining room is framed to look like another picture

I have placed the mirror in my dining room in one corner, with the dual advantage that none of my dinner guests would be looking directly at it, and in reflecting the side of the room and through the doors of adjacent rooms, it makes a small space seem much bigger. 

Another option, if you don't have artworks, is to use artefacts that have a special meaning or that you find attractive. I have a collection of woven bowls that I found at various craft markets that set up a visual continuity between dining room and kitchen, with their association with traditional eating practices.

My basket collection sets up a visual 'conversation' between two rooms

When designing for the vertical surfaces, it is important to get a balance of background to object, and to use blank space consciously, as counterpoint to the more 'active' areas of wall. But where a wall 'needs something', one can be quite inventive: I have a collection of artefacts next to my front door, mostly gifts from my family from various travels. Here I have been careful to group them together so that they read as a visual unit - it is so easy when putting up smaller objects for them to look like they are randomly floating in space. Before you start hammering in nails or picture hooks, it is a good idea to lay out the objects on a table and rearrange them until you get a harmonious composition.

My artefact collection and key hooks next to the front door

What you put on your walls will often say more about you than anything else in your space, so it really is worth the investment of your time and effort to make the rooms look complete.