How to measure a wall before you buy wall art

Most disappointment with wall art is about scale, not taste. A print that looked generous on a phone arrives and reads like a postage stamp above a three-seat sofa. Three measurements, taken in five minutes, avoid nearly all of it.

1. The width of what sits below

Art above furniture is read against that furniture, not against the wall. A common working rule is that the piece — or the full span of a set including the gaps — should cover roughly two-thirds of the furniture width.

A 72-inch sofa therefore wants about 48 inches of art. That might be one wide canvas, or three 16-inch panels with two-inch gaps between them. What it is not is a single 16 × 24 inch frame, which will float in the middle looking lost.

2. The free height between furniture and ceiling

Measure from the top of the sofa back or the sideboard to the ceiling. Leave six to eight inches of clear wall above the furniture, and do not let the frame crowd the ceiling line. What is left is the height you can actually use.

3. The eye line

Gallery hanging convention puts the centre of a piece at about 57 to 60 inches from the floor, which is average standing eye level. In a room where people mostly sit — a living room, a dining room — dropping it slightly is often better.

Then mark it in tape

Cut lengths of masking tape and mark the outline on the wall. Live with it for an evening. Tape costs nothing and tells you more than any product photograph, because it shows the piece at true size in your own light.

If the tape rectangle looks small, do not buy the size you first wanted. Go up.

A note on our listings

Every piece we sell states its finished size in inches, and multi-panel sets list each panel separately so you can add up the span yourself. If you have the wall measurement and want a second opinion on which size fits, send it to us — that is a question we can answer quickly.