Wall art room by room: nursery, home office and hallway

Every house has three walls that stay bare longest: the nursery, the room the laptop lives in, and the hall. They each want something different.

Nursery

Children's wall art does not have to be cartoons. Real animal photography works better and lasts longer — a child grows out of a smiling giraffe illustration by four, but a photograph of a foal stays on the wall until they leave for college.

• Size: 8×10″ or 12×16″. Big enough to see from a cot, small enough not to loom.
• Height: hang low — around 120 cm to centre — so it is at the child's eye level when they are standing, not the adult's.
• Subject: animals with faces. Foals, lambs, dogs, the goat. Soft, quiet images rather than dramatic skies.
• Safety: two fixings, not one, and never glass directly over a cot — an unframed print or a set of small prints on the opposite wall is safer.
• Sets of three in matching frames read as considered and give you something to point at and name.

Start with farm animal prints or dog wall art.

Home office

Whatever is behind you is on every video call, and whatever is in front of you is what you look at all day.

• Behind you: one 12×16″ or 16×24″, centred, hung so it clears your head in frame. Landscapes read better on camera than busy animal portraits, which pull focus.
• In front of you: something with depth — a road, a valley, an open field. Looking at distance every so often is the closest thing to a break a desk gives you.
• Avoid glass if a window faces the desk; reflections on a glazed frame will wreck both the view and the call. Unframed or non-glare is safer.
• Colour: cool greens and greys hold up on a screen; heavy warm gold can make a webcam shift colour.

The landscape prints collection is the one to look at.

Hallway

Halls are narrow, badly lit and passed at speed. Treat them accordingly.

• Small and repeated. A row of four or five 5×5″ prints in matching frames at a consistent 145 cm centre line does more than one big piece.
• High contrast. Detail is lost in dim hall light — go for strong shapes and black and white rather than subtle tonal work.
• Stairs: follow the pitch of the stairs, not the floor. The method is in the hanging height guide.
• Spacing: 5–8 cm between frames, identical the whole way along, or it looks accidental. The gallery wall guide has a paper-template trick for this.

What each room costs

All excluding postage. Half of every order goes to Forever Home Sanctuary.

Browse the full shop or the animal wall art collection.