How to Hang Pictures Like a Professional in Your Home

Start With a Plan on Paper

Hanging a picture well is 80 per cent planning and 20 per cent drilling. Before you reach for the drill, decide exactly where everything is going — on paper, not on your wall. Measure the wall you're working with and sketch it to scale on a sheet of A4. Then cut paper templates for each frame, using the actual external dimensions, and shuffle them around on the page until the grouping looks balanced. If you can, lay the real frames out on the floor first. It's far easier to move a picture across a rug than to fill and repaint a hole.

A few rules of thumb will keep a group looking deliberate rather than accidental:

• Keep the gaps between frames consistent — 5cm to 8cm works well for most groupings. Uneven gaps read as a mistake, even when they aren't.
• Align the centres of frames rather than their edges when you're hanging a row at the same height. Different frame sizes will then look intentional.
• Treat a group as one shape. A cluster of six small frames should occupy the same wall area as one large piece.
• Use an odd number of pieces where you can. Three or five tend to sit more easily on the eye than four.

Once you're happy with the arrangement, keep the paper templates — you're about to use them again.

Test the Height With Masking Tape

This is the step most people skip, and it's the one that saves the most regret. Tape your paper templates to the wall in the planned positions and live with them for a day. You'll notice things you can't see in a sketch: how the arrangement sits against the light from the window, whether it crowds the door frame, whether it feels too high when you're sitting on the sofa.

In general, the centre of a picture should sit at roughly 145cm to 152cm from the floor — around eye level for most adults. But context matters more than any number:

• Above a sofa, leave 15cm to 25cm between the bottom of the frame and the top of the backrest. Any higher and it will float.
• Above a sideboard, console table or bed head, aim for the same relationship — the art should feel anchored to the furniture beneath it.
• In a hallway or on a staircase, follow the rake of the stairs with the bottom edge of the frames, climbing as the stairs do.
• In a room with high ceilings, you can go a little higher, but never so high that you have to crane your neck.

Choose Fixings That Suit Your Walls

Getting this wrong is why pictures end up on the floor. Identify your wall type before you drill anything, and use a cable and pipe detector — it costs very little and can save you a fortune.

Plasterboard walls. A plain rawl plug will pull straight out of plasterboard under any real weight. Use a hollow-wall fixing instead. Self-drilling metal cavity fixings are quick and neat for light and medium loads. For anything heavier — a large glazed frame or a mirror — use a spring toggle or a metal cavity anchor, which spreads the load across a much wider area behind the board.

Solid walls. Brick, block and stone need a masonry bit and the correct-sized wall plug. Drill into the face of a brick rather than into the mortar joint, which is softer and crumbles. Match your drill bit to the plug, not to the screw, and drill slightly deeper than the plug so dust has somewhere to go.

Dot and dab walls. Plasterboard bonded to a solid wall with adhesive leaves a void behind the board. You'll need a longer fixing that passes through the plasterboard and bites into the masonry behind it.

Whatever you use, make sure the screw or hook is rated comfortably above the weight of the frame. Glass and solid wood are heavier than they look.

Mark, Drill and Level

Work out where the hanging point will actually sit once the picture is up. With a taut picture wire, the hook needs to be higher than you'd think — measure from the top of the frame down to the point where the wire is pulled tight, then transfer that measurement to the wall. With D-rings and a cord, the same principle applies.

For anything wider than about 40cm, use two hooks rather than one. It stops the frame tilting and spreads the weight. Mark both points, check them with a spirit level or a laser level, then drill. A strip of masking tape on the wall makes a handy line to work to and catches most of the dust.

• Angle picture hooks very slightly upwards so the wire can't slide off.
• Stick small rubber bumpers on the bottom corners of the frame to stop it tilting away from the wall.
• Keep the wire angle fairly shallow — a very steep V pulls the frame forward.

Making Pictures Work in Small Rooms

Small rooms respond better to fewer, larger pieces than to many small ones, which chop up the wall and make the space feel busy. A single generous frame above a bed or sofa can make a room feel bigger, not smaller. Where floor space is tight, use pictures to draw the eye upwards: a tall, narrow arrangement or a full-height stack on a chimney breast adds height without stealing an inch of floor.

Hang art lower in compact rooms so it relates directly to the furniture, and place a mirror opposite a window to bounce light around the space. And don't overlook awkward spots — the narrow strip beside a door, the wall above a radiator, the gap between a wardrobe and a corner. Those odd slivers of wall are exactly where a well-placed picture earns its keep.