A summer house is not a small home, it is a building that spends half the year unheated, and paper notices. From October to April the inside of a closed summer house tracks the outside temperature, the air holds moisture that has nowhere to go, and every cycle of cold night and mild afternoon moves damp into and out of anything absorbent. A poster is a large, thin, absorbent sheet. It is the item in the room least equipped for that.
What actually happens to an unframed print
Paper takes up moisture across its whole surface and swells slightly; when it dries it does not shrink back evenly. Unsupported, the result is a sheet that ripples, corners that lift and curl, and tape or putty that lets go at the first cold snap — usually in January, when nobody is there to notice. The larger the sheet, the worse it is, because the unsupported area grows faster than the edges that hold it.
| Format | Unsupported paper area | Edge length to hold flat |
|---|---|---|
| 21×30 | 0.06 m² | 1.02 m |
| 30×42 | 0.13 m² | 1.44 m |
| 50×70 | 0.35 m² | 2.40 m |
| 70×100 | 0.70 m² | 3.40 m |
| 100×140 | 1.40 m² | 4.80 m |
A 100×140 sheet has more than twenty times the free area of a 21×30 and only about five times the edge to restrain it. That ratio is the whole problem: an unframed print in an unheated house gets visibly worse the bigger it is. Formats and their exact measurements are in the size guide.
What to do instead
Frame it. A framed print is held flat between the frame and its backing along the entire perimeter, which is precisely the restraint an unframed sheet lacks, and it also puts a barrier between the paper and the room air on the front face. This is the one setting where framing is not a matter of appearance — it is what makes the purchase survive the winter. Oak and black cover all five sizes in the frame range; the coloured finishes stop at 50×70.
Then choose where it goes:
- Internal walls, not external ones. An exterior wall is the coldest surface in the building and the first place condensation forms. Hang on a partition wall instead — the difference is larger than any choice of print.
- Out of direct sun. Summer houses are built for light, and a south-facing wall gets many more hours of it than a flat does. Fading is the second most common complaint after rippling.
- Not in the unheated porch or the outbuilding. Anywhere that is effectively outdoors is outdoors as far as paper is concerned.
- Smaller rather than larger. On the evidence above, several 30×42 or 50×70 pieces are a safer bet in a summer house than a single 100×140.
Winnie Møller - Fantasi i Himlen 1
Winnie Møller - Skovens Blomster 1
Tree of Life - Thomas Nordentoft
Tree of Life Collage - Thomas Nordentoft
A Beautiful Day - Boris Draschoff
Birds In the Sun - Boris Draschoff
Two honest limitations
We do not sell poster hangers, washi tape or mounts, and in a summer house that is just as well: hangers leave the sheet loose in the middle, tape releases in cold damp air, and a mount is another layer of card doing the same absorbing. The only accessory we stock is a single wall hook, listed in the accessories. If you want to know what a mount is and why it is normally used, there is a separate guide — but it is not the answer here.
The other limitation is that no paper print is genuinely indifferent to an unheated building. If a house sits closed and cold for six months a year, expect a framed print to be fine and an unframed one not to be, and expect anything on an external wall to age faster than the same print in a flat. Canvas is the more tolerant material of the two we offer, and it exists in our range at the largest size, in the 100×140 selection.