11 Simple Ideas for Your Living Room Wall Decor

Art above a sofa should be about two-thirds of the sofa’s width, and the centre of it should sit roughly 145 cm (57 inches) off the floor. Nearly every living room wall that looks wrong is wrong on one of those two numbers. The eleven ideas below all come back to them.

I have been painting and shipping prints for living rooms for years, and the question I get is almost never “what should I hang?” It is “why does mine look like it is floating?” The answer is usually scale, occasionally height, and only rarely the artwork itself. So before the list, the two measurements worth knowing.

How big should living room wall art be?

Two-thirds of whatever sits beneath it. A 210 cm (83 inch) three-seat sofa wants an arrangement about 140 cm (55 inches) wide. A 150 cm (59 inch) loveseat wants about 100 cm (39 inches). Below roughly half the width, the art stops belonging to the furniture and starts looking like a stamp on a large envelope.

Almost nobody sells a single print 140 cm wide, which is why sets exist. Three 11x14 inch (28 x 36 cm) prints hung with 5 cm (2 inches) between them span 94 cm (37 inches). Three 16x20s (40 x 50 cm) span 130 cm (51 inches) with the same gaps — that is the arrangement for a full-size sofa. Two 12x16s (30 x 40 cm) span 66 cm (26 inches), which suits a console table or a narrow chimney breast.

Measure the wall before you shop, not after. It is the single thing that separates a room that looks decorated from a room that looks like things arrived and were put up.

How high should you hang it?

Centre the arrangement 145–150 cm (57–59 inches) from the floor. That is roughly gallery height and roughly average eye level, and it works in almost every room in the house.

The exception is above furniture. Above a sofa, ignore eye level and leave 15–25 cm (6–10 inches) between the top of the sofa back and the bottom of the frame. Any more and the art drifts; any less and it looks like it is resting on the cushions. If following that rule pushes the centre above 150 cm, follow the rule anyway — the relationship to the sofa reads more strongly than the relationship to the floor.

Eleven living room wall decor ideas, with the measurements

1. One oversized piece above the sofa. The simplest option and the hardest to get right, because it has to be genuinely large. For a 210 cm sofa you want something near 140 cm (55 inches) wide. If nothing that size fits the budget, use a set instead — three prints reaching the same width will always beat one print at half of it.
2. A set of three in a row. The workhorse. Three 11x14s with 5 cm gaps give you 94 cm; three 16x20s give you 130 cm. Keep the gaps identical and align the centres, not the tops. Most of what I make comes as sets of three prints for this reason.
3. A set of two for a narrower wall. Two 12x16s at 66 cm, or two 11x14s at 61 cm (24 inches). This is the arrangement for the wall beside a doorway, above a console, or in the gap between two windows. The sets of two are sized with those spots in mind.
4. A gallery wall. Lay it out on the floor first and treat the whole group as one rectangle — then apply the two-thirds rule to that rectangle, not to any single frame. Keep 5–7 cm (2–3 inches) between every pair of frames, the same gap throughout. Uneven gaps are what make a gallery wall look accidental rather than collected.
5. A vertical stack on a tall narrow wall. Two prints, one above the other, 5 cm apart, centred on the wall. This is the fix for the strip of wall beside a chimney breast or between a window and a corner, where a horizontal row will never fit.
6. Floating shelves with leaning prints. Two shelves, about 40 cm (16 inches) apart vertically, with prints leaned rather than hung and overlapped by about a third. It lets you change the arrangement in a minute and it forgives frames that do not match.
7. A mirror opposite a window. To actually move light around a room a mirror needs to be at least 60 cm (24 inches) wide; smaller than that and it is jewellery, not a light source. Hang it so it reflects the window rather than the ceiling.
8. Wall planters in a stagger. Three planters, 25–30 cm (10–12 inches) apart horizontally and offset vertically by about half that. A straight row of three reads as shelving; a stagger reads as planting.
9. A basket collection. Odd numbers, and vary the diameter by at least 10 cm (4 inches) between neighbours. Three or five baskets of visibly different sizes look composed; four of the same size look like storage.
10. A woven or macramé hanging. These need clear wall to work — at least 90 cm (35 inches) of uninterrupted width, with nothing else competing. Give one the whole wall or do not use it.
11. Colour-matched art rather than more art. If a room already has enough on the walls but still feels unsettled, the problem is usually that the art and the textiles are in different colour families. Picking prints in the colour already in the room — the cushions, the rug — does more than adding another frame. I went through how to do that in what colour art goes with sage green walls.

Which one should you do first?

Measure the wall behind your sofa and work out two-thirds of the sofa width. If that number is over 120 cm, you are looking for a set of three. If it is under 80 cm, a set of two or a single larger print. Then pick the colour from something already in the room rather than from the shop.

Everything else on this list is worth doing, but none of it fixes a wall where the scale is wrong. Start there, and the rest of the living room wall art becomes a question of taste rather than a question of geometry.