Buy art · Reference
Nearly everyone hangs art too high.
It is the single most common mistake in a room, it is free to fix, and the correction is one number.
Arithmetic, not opinion. The numbers on this page are calculated, and the working is shown so you can check it yourself.
The number
The centre of the artwork sits 145 cm from the floor. That is the museum and gallery convention — it comes from the imperial 57 inches, which is 144.8 cm — and it is chosen to put the middle of the work at the eye level of an average standing adult.
Note what is being measured: the centre of the piece, not the top, not the hook. For a 50×70 print hung portrait, the centre at 145 cm puts the top edge at 180 cm and the bottom edge at 110 cm. People who hang by eye almost always end up higher than that, because a picture held up against a wall at arm’s length looks right considerably above where it belongs.
The same rule governs a group: with a gallery wall, it is the centre of the whole arrangement that goes to 145 cm, not the centre of any one frame.
When to break it
Above furniture, come down. A sofa, bed head or sideboard changes the reference point — the art now relates to the furniture rather than to the room. Aim for 15–25 cm between the top of the furniture and the bottom of the frame. On a standard 85 cm sofa back that puts the bottom edge around 100–110 cm and the centre somewhere near 135 cm, a little below the gallery number.
Keep the group narrower than the furniture. The usual guidance is that an arrangement above a sofa should span roughly two-thirds of the sofa’s width. Wider than the furniture and it stops reading as a pair.
In a room where people sit, drop it. A dining room, a reading corner — anywhere the viewer is seated rather than standing — can take art 10–15 cm lower without looking wrong.
Very high ceilings do not mean very high art. This is the mistake that feels most logical and looks worst. The rule is set by human eye level, and eye level does not move when the ceiling does. Fill the extra height with a taller arrangement or a bigger piece — not by sliding the same picture upwards.
Spacing within a group
5–8 cm between frames, whatever their size. The instinct is to scale the gaps up with the frames; resist it. Tight, even spacing is what makes a collection of different pictures read as one object. Much beyond 8 cm and the wall between them starts to compete, and you have several things on a wall rather than an arrangement.
The nail is not where the top of the frame is
Every measurement above describes the frame. The nail goes higher than the bottom of the wire but lower than the top of the frame, because a hanging wire pulls up into a shallow triangle when it takes the weight. On a typical print, the nail ends up about 5 cm below the top edge of the frame — pull the wire taut with a finger and measure the gap to the frame top before you commit.
Frames with a fixed sawtooth hanger instead of a wire have no sag at all, so the nail sits directly at the hanger, usually 2–3 cm below the top edge.
Or skip the arithmetic
Enter the wall and the prints, and the planner gives you every nail position measured from the floor and the left-hand wall edge — wire sag already accounted for.