A gallery wall is one of the fastest ways to transform a blank space into something that feels personal, layered and considered. Yet most people put it off for years because one question stops them cold: where do I even start?
After 50 years of framing Brisbane’s art, photos and memorabilia, we’ve helped hundreds of customers plan gallery walls – from three-frame hallway clusters to floor-to-ceiling staircase displays. This guide walks you through the whole process: choosing a layout, picking frames that work together, getting the spacing right, and hanging everything without turning your wall into Swiss cheese.
A gallery wall is a curated arrangement of multiple framed pieces – art, photos, prints or objects – hung together as a single visual display, usually four or more frames.
The magic of a gallery wall is that the collection becomes the artwork. Individually modest pieces – a holiday photo, a child’s drawing, a concert ticket – gain presence when they’re grouped with intention. That’s also what makes gallery walls forgiving: you don’t need expensive art, you need a plan.
Before you touch a single frame, decide where the gallery wall will live and measure the available space.
The best walls for galleries are ones you see often and pass slowly: hallways, staircases, the wall behind a sofa or bed, or a dining room wall. Measure the full area you want to fill, then apply a simple rule: your arrangement should fill roughly two-thirds of the wall width, the same proportion you’d use for a single large artwork above a sofa.
Note anything that constrains the space – light switches, air conditioning vents, furniture height. Above a sofa or console, plan for the bottom row of frames to sit 15–25 cm above the furniture.
There are three classic gallery wall layouts, and choosing one upfront makes every later decision easier.
Grid layout. Identical frames in even rows and columns. Clean, formal and architectural – ideal for a series (botanical prints, black-and-white family photos) and for modern or minimalist interiors. The catch: grids are unforgiving. Every measurement must be exact, and all frames must match. Ready made frames in standard Australian sizes make this much easier.
Salon (organic) layout. A varied cluster of different sizes, orientations and even frame styles, built around a loose centre line. This is the most popular style because it grows with you – you can add pieces over time. It suits mixed collections: photos alongside art, large pieces alongside small.
Linear layout. A single row or column of frames, aligned along their centres. Perfect for hallways, above bedheads, or along staircases (where the line steps up with the stairs). Simple, elegant, hard to get wrong.
If you’re doing your first gallery wall, a salon layout of five to nine frames is the sweet spot: enough pieces to feel curated, few enough to manage.
Frames don’t need to match – but they do need a common thread.
A gallery wall holds together when the frames share at least one of these three elements:
A reliable formula for a mixed wall: two frame colours maximum, one matboard colour throughout, and one “hero” piece – your largest frame – placed just off-centre to anchor the arrangement.
This is also where custom framing earns its keep. Odd-sized pieces – a kid’s painting, a jersey pocket of memorabilia, a panoramic photo – rarely fit ready made sizes. Getting those pieces custom framed to match the rest of your wall keeps the collection cohesive instead of compromised.
The single best gallery wall tip we can give: lay it out on the floor first.
Even better: trace each frame onto paper (baking paper or newspaper works), cut out the shapes, and blu-tack them to the wall. You’ll see exactly how the arrangement feels at full scale before committing to a single hole – and you can mark hook positions straight through the paper.
Leave 5–8 cm between frames, and keep that spacing consistent across the entire arrangement.
Consistent gaps are what make a gallery wall look professionally hung rather than scattered. Tighter spacing (around 5 cm) reads as one unified block and suits grids; looser spacing (up to 10 cm) gives salon walls breathing room. Whatever you choose, keep it uniform – the eye forgives mixed frames far more readily than mixed gaps.
For height, hang the arrangement so its visual centre sits at eye level – roughly 145–155 cm from the floor to the middle of the overall grouping.
Start from the centre and work outward.
Use proper picture hooks rated for each frame’s weight. Adhesive hooks are tempting, especially for renters, but they have real limits – we’ve written about when sticky hooks are (and aren’t) safe for artwork. For anything heavy, glazed or irreplaceable, use a wall-appropriate hook or anchor.
The most common gallery wall mistakes are hanging too high, spacing inconsistently, and buying frames before planning the layout.
Start small: pick your wall, choose five to nine pieces, and lay them out on the floor this weekend. A gallery wall doesn’t have to be finished in a day – the best ones evolve.
If you’d like help choosing frames that work together, browse our ready made frames online (we ship Australia-wide), visit us at Ashgrove or Capalaba, or book our mobile showroom and we’ll bring frame and matboard samples to your wall – so you can see exactly how your gallery will look before a single hole is drilled.
