Guide: How high should a picture hang on the wall?
How your pictures hang on the wall has a big impact on the look of your home. It's a good idea to be careful when hanging your chosen picture, and to use this guide as a starting point, which gives you the right formula for how high posters should hang on the wall to look their best.
The golden formula: How high should pictures hang?
Many of us judge how high a poster should hang on the wall based on our own measurements – and we like to do it standing up while holding the chosen poster up on the wall in front of us. This often results in our posters being placed far too high in relation to what is actually optimal for the expression in the room. But what should we do instead? How do we find out how high pictures should hang above the sofa or other furniture – or on the completely bare wall, where the picture should really shine?
The formula for perfectly hung posters
How high should posters hang? We often look at our hung posters from a seated position, and therefore posters should not be placed as high on the wall as you might think. In the vast majority of cases, a suitable height for hanging posters will be with the center of the poster placed 145 cm above the floor. The correct location can be calculated using the following formula: 145 cm + half the height of your poster and then subtract the distance from the screw to the top of the poster. For example, if the poster is 70 cm high and the screw is to be placed 3 cm below, the calculation will look like this: 145 cm + 35 cm minus 3 cm = 177 cm. Your screw will therefore need to be screwed into the wall 177 cm above the floor.
Should there never be any deviation from the rule?
Of course you can! Take our formula as a guideline and decide for yourself how high you want your pictures to hang. Hang all pictures at the same height, or experiment with the look that different heights of your posters give. If you have the perfect spot in your home for a particular poster, you should of course use it, and you can move your chosen posters around as often as you like when you want a new look. It is also a good idea to create a picture wall with posters in different sizes, hung at different heights – perhaps in a specific shape or as a cluster or cloud. No matter how high your pictures hang on the wall, they help to create lots of personality for the home, where it is wonderful to step inside and really feel at home.