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I don’t want to squelch any creative ideas you may have when it comes to placing wall art in your home. If you are inspired to hang art in a specific spot, it never hurts to try it out and see how it looks.

On the other hand, if you’re new to collecting art and are looking for guidance, here’s an easy way to start thinking about where to place your artwork.

Pretend you’ve never visited your house before and take a brief tour. Start at your front door and walk through the entry, living room, and dining room to identify the ‘key wall’ in each room – the wall which is most visible as you enter the room. As you enter the bedrooms and bathrooms, identify which walls are most visible from each doorway. More often than not, these key walls are going to be good locations for your first pieces of original art. Down the line you will start thinking about placing art on your secondary walls too. But for now, if your art is strategically placed on those key walls, you probably need fewer pieces than you think to impact your surroundings.

Make a master location list of your key walls (include wall measurements) as you do your walk through. Take the list with you when you’re shopping for artwork so you know where you can place the art you will inevitably see and love.

Once you have purchased key pieces of artwork for your most trafficked rooms, then start thinking about artwork for hallways, transition spaces and secondary walls.

Prioritizing art placement in this way will maximize the impact of your purchases. Think about it, if you make the effort to buy original art but it only fits in your guest room or back hallway, the buzz you get from collecting original artwork is going to wear off faster than a New York minute. Try this approach to art placement at the beginning of your foray into art collecting. Knowing where you will put the art you love will help you feel good about your purchases. By the time your art collection rivals Herb and Dorothy’s, you can put your Motherwells on any wall you want and nobody will dare question your judgement.

Photo: Eric Plasecki

Sometimes I think the most interesting and expressive ways to display art are created by taking a chance and doing something unexpected. If you are somewhat creative, why not try using the way you display art on your walls as another way to change the way people interact with it?

This is such a great way to display many photographs and still have a clean uncluttered feel.
Photo from Martha Stewart

I love how the television blends in as another piece of art and how randomly the art is hung on the wall.

This one is a great example of how to tie accessories in with the art itself. The vase and flowers echo the colors and fiery bits of red in the photography. Asymmetrical and lots of white space.

This was a wall at the Paul Smith store in London (left from apartmenttherapy.com) and San Francisco (Right, shot by me). It fills every bit of space, using many different types of frames, art, styles, colors and dimensions. It would be a great way to combine a bunch of mismatched things on one wall in a home as a focal point. Just one wall though I would think, a whole house like this might be overwhelming!

Break some rules, hang things off-center, in a space too small, too crowded and mismatched. If there is something about the collection that relates to each other somehow such as a frame color, or the medium (ie: all b/w photos) it can be the thing that ties it all in together. Or perhaps that thing is the fact that none of them have anything to do with each other at all! The point is to have fun, be creative and play with it. It is art after all.