Gallery Wall

I definitely need to buy a level from Home Depot!

I’ve been dreaming of a gallery wall for a long time now. Although I have so many fun photographs from our travels to showcase, I needed to wait until our living room was freshly painted to hang anything permanently.

A note on the paint color: I decided on Benjamin Moore White Dove for the walls because I knew we were going to have a lot of colorful art and did not want the wall color to compete. Because the room only has two windows, I also wanted to make sure it felt as light and airy as possible. White Dove on the walls makes the space feel more open and holds more light during the day.

I would highly recommend hanging a sample of the color on your walls and watching how the color can change throughout the day. At times, our White Dove appears to have warm brown/tan undertones and at other times it can appear a creamier yellow.

Here is a close up of the frame. This photo was taken at Claude Monet’s garden at Giverny, a small town about an hour and a half outside of Paris.

It took me awhile to decide what type of frame to use in my gallery wall. I considered using all white frames, all brightly colored frames (I particularly liked a bright lime green) or to go with natural wood. Ultimately, I settled on natural wood and purchased these frames from Pottery Barn (linked here). I ordered the 8x10 size in Rustic Wood. I purchased them in-store at the King of Prussia Mall because I wanted to work on the project that same day. Lucky for me they were (and still are) on sale!

The rustic wood frames ended up working really well with the style of the space. As we have so many wood elements in the room already, the frames work to elevate the warm tones and lift the eye away from the heavy furniture that is low to the floor. It also helps tie together the various different types and colors of wood we have in the room because each frame itself is slightly different in color.

I wanted the gallery wall to be a great conversation starter so I chose photos of our travels instead of too many selfies! I had all of the photos printed at CVS which is a very convenient option as they are usually ready for pickup within just an hour or two from the time you place your order. Most of the photos were taken on my Samsung Galaxy Note 9 and the image quality is high enough that they turned out well even for being printed quite large.

I hung the frames by first measuring to the center point of the wall space I had designated for the gallery. Once I had the center frame hung, I decided how much space I wanted between each of the frames. I decided to leave 5.5” of wall showing between the frames. This filled in the entire wall space nicely and did not make the images feel crammed together.

I had to measure carefully and stuck to the old adage, “measure twice cut once.” I was able to space everything relatively evenly by adding together the 5.5” plus the additional number of inches to reach the hanging wire. Luckily, Alex was on the couch with a beer to do the calculations on his phone.

The frames are only somewhat “locked in” in terms of placement. Because I chose a combination of horizontal and vertical images, I can only swap around images with the same direction. I did lay out all the images in their frames on the ground first to test both spacing and the way the colors in the images worked together but I feel like the gallery wall shouldn’t remain the same forever so I plan to change out photos after future travels.

You may have noticed that the corner of each frame has a beautiful detail that isn’t shown on the Pottery Barn website. You can see it well in this picture.