You’ve had the photo shoot. You’ve fallen in love with the portraits. Now comes a surprisingly tricky question…
What size should you put on the wall?
After 18 years of helping families choose artwork for their homes, there’s one thing we see again and again: people nearly always choose too small.
A photograph can look enormous when you’re holding it in your hands. Put that same photograph above a sofa, bed or fireplace and suddenly it looks tiny.
So, how do you get it right?
Start with the wall, not the photograph
One of the biggest mistakes is choosing a print size without thinking about where it will live.
A 16×12 inch portrait sounds quite large. On a little side wall, it might be perfect. Above a three-seater sofa? It could look completely lost.
Before choosing your artwork, think about the space you want to fill.
Is it going above the fireplace? Over your bed? In the hallway? On a large empty wall in your kitchen or living room?
The bigger the furniture and the more open the wall, the more visual impact your portrait needs.
As a rough guide, artwork above furniture often looks best when it fills around two-thirds of the width of the furniture below it.
That’s much bigger than most people initially imagine!
Why we nearly always choose too small
There’s a very simple reason.
When you’re looking at a photograph close up, your brain judges it in relation to you, rather than the room.
A 30-inch piece of wall art held in front of you feels huge.
Walk several metres away and place it above a large sofa and it becomes part of a much bigger picture.
This is why we always encourage our clients to think about where their portraits are going before deciding on sizes.
We want you to walk into your room and think WOW!
Not…
“Maybe we should have gone bigger.”
How to start a family picture wall
I absolutely love a family picture wall, and my biggest tip is don’t make it too uniform.
It doesn’t need to look like a perfectly measured grid. In fact, I think picture walls often look better when they grow naturally over time.
Start by choosing a frame colour or combination that will tie everything together. You might decide that every frame will be white, for example, or stick to natural beech wood.
That way, the actual frame styles can change. You can have different sizes, different mouldings and slightly different shapes without the frames becoming the main event.
The portraits should always be the stars.
When you start hanging them, try to keep the gaps between each frame roughly the same. They don’t have to line up perfectly though. Staggering your frames creates a much more relaxed look and, importantly, leaves you somewhere to go next!
Don’t feel you have to fill the entire wall immediately.
Leave gaps. Build outwards. Add another portrait when the right one comes along.
We have a wall at home that we’ve been building since the kids were babies. It has grown with us, one photograph at a time, and it gives us so much joy.
Every picture takes us back to a different moment.
That’s what makes a family picture wall so special. You’re not really decorating a wall. You’re building your family story.
]Mix up your portrait sizes
A gallery wall can also be a brilliant way to display photographs from different stages of family life.
You could start with one larger statement portrait and then build smaller images around it. Mix landscape and portrait orientations. Add close-ups alongside wider family photographs.
The variation makes the whole collection interesting.
Perhaps one day it includes your pregnancy portraits, then your newborn photographs, first birthday, first day at school, holidays, missing teeth, teenagers…
There are no rules about what deserves a place.
If it makes you smile, put it on the wall.
Choose photographs you want to see every day
Don’t get too caught up in matching photographs to your cushions!
Your home will change. You’ll redecorate. Sofas will be replaced and walls will be repainted.
Choose the portraits that make you feel something.
That enormous newborn yawn.
The photograph where your toddler is laughing uncontrollably.
The family portrait where everyone is actually looking at the camera for once.
Or perhaps the quiet one. Your baby curled against your chest, tiny fingers wrapped around yours.
Those are the photographs you’ll still care about years from now.
Your photographs deserve to be seen
We take more photographs than any generation before us, yet so many of them never make it beyond our phones.
And that’s such a shame.
There’s something completely different about seeing your family on the walls of your home every single day.
For your children, there’s also a lovely message within those photographs:
This is us. This is our family. You belong here.
So start with one.
Choose a photograph you absolutely love, give it the space it deserves and put it somewhere you’ll see it every day.
Then, as your family grows and those special portraits come along, keep adding to it.
Because the best family picture walls aren’t created in an afternoon.
They’re created over a lifetime.
