The living room is the hardest room in the house to hang art in, and the reason is furniture. Almost every wall already has something in front of it — a sofa, a sideboard, a television — and the art has to answer to that object rather than to the wall. Get the relationship between the two right and the room reads as designed. Get it wrong and it reads as decorated.
Measure the sofa, not the wall
The single rule worth memorising: your art should span roughly two thirds of the furniture beneath it. Sofas in most homes fall between 180 and 260 cm, which points to three answers.
| Sofa width | Target span | What works |
|---|---|---|
| 180 cm | ~120 cm | Two 70×100 side by side (144 cm), or one 100×140 landscape |
| 220 cm | ~147 cm | Two 70×100 with a 4 cm gap, or three 50×70 (154 cm) |
| 260 cm | ~173 cm | Three 70×100 (214 cm is too wide) — use 50×70 + 70×100 + 50×70 at 178 cm |
A corner sofa is measured along the wall it sits against, not around the corner. The full poster size guide lists every format in centimetres.
Two viewing distances, not one
A living room is the only room where people both sit still for hours and walk through. That splits the decision. Seated on a sofa, your eye lands around 110 to 120 cm from the floor — lower than the 145 cm centre used everywhere else. Standing in the doorway, you see the whole wall at once.
Where a wall is mainly seen from the sofa opposite, drop the centre to around 135 cm. Where it is the wall behind the sofa, the standing view governs, and the standard applies — see how high to hang art.
HILMA AF KLINT - THE TEN LARGEST, ADULTHOOD, NO. 7 PLAKAT
Bauhaus orange on blue poster
A Retrospective - Mark Rothko Poster
Pumpkin Forever - Yayoi Kusama Poster
Yayoi Kusama - Red Dots Poster
Bauhaus Woman 02 - David Wolf
The television wall
A television is a black rectangle that switches itself off, and art hung symmetrically around it draws attention to exactly that. Hanging one poster on each side turns the screen into the centrepiece of a triptych.
Two approaches work better. Put nothing on the television wall and give the art the opposite wall, where it is what people look at. Or run an asymmetric arrangement that extends past the screen on one side only, so the wall has a composition the television happens to sit in rather than a frame built around it.
Scale up rather than multiply
Living rooms have the largest walls in the house, and the most common mistake is filling them with small formats. Four 30×42 posters in a grid occupy less visual weight than one 70×100, and they add three more sets of edges for the eye to trip over.
If a wall is over three metres, 100×140 stops being a bold choice and becomes the correct one. Our large format range covers that size in both paper and canvas.
Frames that disappear
Living rooms usually already contain wood — floor, table, shelving. Oak frames tie into that and recede. Black frames assert themselves, which suits a graphic print on a plain wall but competes in a room that already has a lot going on.
All five sizes come in oak and black. The colour range stops at 50×70, so anything larger is oak or black. See what the frames look like.
Where to start
Everything in the living room selection is chosen to hold up at the distances above.