It can be very easy to find yourself with different styles of picture frames, in a variety of colours and sizes hung throughout the house. What started years before as a well-thought-out interior with styles to suit each room has now become what can only be described as chaotic. Even though you have spent a fair amount of money when purchasing these frames from some top-notch stores and online retailers, the current result has the look and feel that you are a regular visitor to car boot sales. Don’t get me wrong, we all love a car boot sale and mooching round charity shops, but when you have spent plenty of cash, you would prefer the overall finish to match the spend.
It’s not that people should buy matching picture frames for everything, far from it. When doing this, it can look way too uniform and have the feel of a corporate office or one of the chain hotel brands. What we are looking to do is to find some kind of harmony in the chaos.
How to mix and match picture frames successfully
A good starting point is to keep a common thread. This could be as simple as framing only black and white photography or prints that are in the same artistic style in one of the rooms, but in a mix of different shapes and sizes. You could have different picture frame materials and colours as well if this is your preference. When sticking to a common thread, it enables you to go a little more wild with the frame options.
The next tip is to play around with scale and spacing. If every picture frame in a room is the same size and is spaced out in a rigid grid, not only would it look rather boring, but some may say, or at least think, that it looks and feels rather stiff. It’s advisable to mix things up rather than having such a uniform approach. For example, you could pair a large statement frame with a couple of smaller ones grouped tightly together. The way I like to think about this is that when you are at a dinner party, it is much better to hear a mix of voices in the conversation rather than everyone saying similar things, in the same tone, with the same volume.
Another strategy is to stick to only two or three main materials if you are looking to mix metal and wood frames. It can look especially impressive when you repeat the textures chosen in other areas of the room, such as with the lampshade or coffee table.
Before even getting to the stage where you are hammering nails into a wall, it is worth laying everything out on the floor so that you can see whether it looks as good in practice as it does in your imagination. It is usually a lot easier to change plans and to move things around before you actually start hanging the picture frames.