Gridded Gallery Walls 101

There are lots of ways to make a gallery wall “hang together.” Shortly after we broke down 6 key tips for creating your own salon wall in our How To Hang A Picture blog series, The Wall Street Journal’s Kelly Michèle Guerotto profiled a New Higher-Impact Way To Hang Art—that is, framing uniformly sized pieces and hanging them in a tight grid formation—and deemed the interior look “a refreshing alternative to salon style hangings.”

Designer Jeffrey Bilhuber created a grid style salon wall with an array of artist Thomas Schütte's etchings. The finished interior is shown in the bookInterior Design Master Class’ (Rizzoli, October). Photo credit: William Waldron.

There's power in numbers. These symmetrical arrangements invite the viewer to draw connections between individual artworks, and the pieces form a larger complete work when displayed all together. Plus, there’s just something satisfying about the order and repetition intrinsic to this hanging technique.

British architectural and interior designer Ben Pentreath framed separate panels of a map to form a cohesive whole. The modern space is featured in his coming book English Houses’ (Ryland Peters & Small, October) Photo credit: Jan Baldwin.

New York designer Richard Mishaan chose Italian artist Massimo Vitali’s photos to create a full wall display in his client's dining room. Check out this amazing interior and many more in the book,Interior Design Master Class’ (Rizzoli, October). Photo credit: George Ross.

Achieving this interior style takes discipline. The artworks in a gridded gallery wall might be produced by the same artist or be in the same category. As Guerotto explains in the WSJ piece, “Any thread, such as genre or color scheme, can unify botanical prints, 19th-century silhouettes, even vintage wallpaper samples.” Artworks should also be the same size (a custom frame and mat can help equalize images that are slightly different dimensions) and hung very precisely. Any break in symmetry will be glaringly apparent, so a second pair of eyes when hanging is key.

In honor of this interior design trend, we rounded up 5 of our favorite framed and gridded salon walls.

1. We're loving this whole look—plus the looks within it! Inslee Fariss put together a high-impact wall showcasing her fashion-forward illustrations, floated in our White Gallery Frames.

Photo credit: @inslee.

2. We’ve recently seen some glorious triptychs in which artworks combine to form one large image when hung side by side. Case in point: Creative director and Hommemaker founder Orlando Soria's monstera plant paintings by his friend Erika Gragg, which sit pretty over his living room couch floated in our White Gallery Frames.

Photo credit: Sean Gin.

3. Artist and blogger Dabito's textile-based works in our Light Walnut Gallery Frames are the ideal type of artwork—same, same but different—for a gridded display.

Photo credit: @dabito.

4. This adorable nursery has sweet dreams written all over it, especially the row of Kate Holstein's gorgeous beach and mountain photography framed and matted in our White Gallery Frames.

Photo credit: @brittvandomelen.

5. They don’t say “so happy together” for nothing. Six of Kristi Kohut of Hapi Art's abstract artworks are perfect pals in our Antique Frames in Vintage Gold.

Photo credit: @hapiart.

Ready to get gridding? Head over to Simplyframed.com to get the wall party started.

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