The “new” place is really starting to come together! This week I worked on a gallery wall at our apartment entrance.
Designing a gallery wall can be a daunting process…finding art or prints you like that also coordinate with your color palette takes a lot of time. Then actually putting together a layout that works in your space can be equally as challenging. Keep scrolling for my tips to designing a cohesive gallery wall…
Here’s the wall before …
These shelves are raw edge mango wood, with a rich walnut finish! The longer shelf is 3′ and shorter is 2′ (also available in 4′) and I found them at World Market. They have a good selection of mix & match shelving and brackets. We did not love the brackets they suggested to go with this set and ended up buying these iron ‘L’ shaped brackets from Etsy.
This is the perfect space for dropping keys, sunglasses and other miscellaneous items when you walk in the door.
Here are my tips for designing a cohesive gallery wall:
- Start with an anchoring photo – on my wall, the Poppy print is the anchoring piece. Start with your largest piece at the bottom of the gallery and build the rest of the layout around it!
- Set a cohesive color palette – dark green is the primary color in my design. If you’re feeling overwhelmed, black and white is a timeless and beautiful look! See how I created a B&W photo ledge in my bedroom.
- Mix styles – the key to the perfectly ‘imperfect’ gallery wall is having a mix of textures, styles & mediums. Including a glossy personal photo next to a line drawing or watercolor adds interest to your wall.
- Level as you go – level each image as you hang it so you’re working off of an accurate grid. I also suggest evenly spacing photos 1-2 inches apart for a professional feel.
- Mix frames – start with two colors and don’t be afraid to use different style frames. I stuck with black and gold!
And please, lay everything out before you start banging holes in you wall!
I already had a random collection of black frames, but wanted to add in some gold frames to break it up. I found all of the new frames on Amazon except for one, which I needed in a custom size, that I found at Custom Picture Frames.com. I was surprised at how affordable the custom frame was!
This wall is about 3ft wide, but the phone and intercom speaker at the top left gave me some restrictions when putting together the gallery layout. I thought I mapped out my frames correctly, but once they arrived, I realized I had mis-measured the height I had to work with.
The ‘Manhattan’ and ‘Brooklyn’ map prints I found about a year ago at a shop in Brooklyn, but the other prints are from Society6. The frame at the top left was not part of the original layout and I didn’t have any horizontal art to fill the frame, so I ended up quickly making a piece of plaster art to fill the void. I’ll have a tutorial on that soon!
I’m so happy with how the gallery turned out! If you’re still feeling stuck, Framebridge offers printed gallery wall layouts so you’ll know exactly where to hang your frames.
*Melissa
