How to plan a gallery wall — a free, room-by-room playbook.

Pull a tape measure across the full available wall — from one hard edge to the other (a corner, a door frame, a window trim). Write down the width and the height in centimeters and inches. Then mark the obstructions: light switches, thermostats, vents, sconces, the top of the couch back, the height of the headboard. These are the things that constrain your composition later, and they are easier to draw on a notepad than to rediscover with a stud finder at 11pm.

Find the horizontal center of the usable wall and mark it with a light pencil tick. Almost every composition style — symmetric, asymmetric, even chaotic salon-style — orients itself relative to a center point. If you skip this step, your layout will drift, and you'll end up rehanging.

There are four base styles. Pick one before you start, because the style controls every downstream decision: how many pieces, what sizes, what spacing.

• Tight grid. Identical frame sizes, identical spacing, in a 2x3 or 3x3 arrangement. Reads modern, calm, slightly editorial. The hardest one to mess up.
• Salon-style. Dense, eclectic, mixed sizes. Frames almost touch. Reads collected, gallery-like, a bit maximalist. The hardest one to get right.
• Asymmetric anchor. One large piece offset to one side, two or three smaller pieces on the other. Reads dynamic, intentional, and works in awkward spaces (next to a doorway, around a window).
• Spotlight. A single statement piece, oversized, with deliberate negative space around it. Reads confident. Cheapest if the piece carries weight on its own.

If you're unsure, default to the tight grid. It's the safest first gallery wall and the easiest to evolve later.

The standard print ladder is 8x10, 11x14, 16x20, 18x24, and 24x36 inches (roughly 20x25, 28x36, 41x51, 46x61, and 61x91 cm). Stick to two or three sizes pulled from this ladder. Mixing five or six sizes reads as noise. Using only one size reads as a furniture-store print pack.

A workable starter: one 24x36 as your anchor, two 16x20 as supporting pieces, and three 11x14 as filler. That's six pieces, three sizes, and enough variety to feel composed.

Aspect ratios matter more than absolute size. Mixing tall portraits (2:3) with wide landscapes (3:2) and squares (1:1) is the single fastest way to make any layout feel intentional, even before the frames are chosen.

Use a 5 cm (2 in) gap between every pair of frames as your default. This is the sweet spot: tight enough that the wall reads as one composition, loose enough that each frame still gets its own breathing room.

Tighter spacing (3 cm) reads as a single dense composition — good for salon-style. Wider spacing (8 cm or more) reads as separate pieces sharing a wall — fine for spotlight, wrong for a grid. Whatever you pick, hold it across every gap. The inconsistency is what readers notice, not the specific centimeters.

Measure spacing center-to-center on the frames, not edge-to-edge. Edge-to-edge looks correct on the wall and wrong in a photograph because frames have visual weight beyond their physical edge.

You have two real options. The first is to cut paper templates — kraft paper or newspaper, sized exactly to each frame — and tape them to the wall with painter's tape. Move them around for an hour. Live with the layout overnight. This is the time-honored approach and it works.

The second is to use a free digital gallery wall planner — one that previews the layout at real centimeters on your screen, so a 60 cm-wide print on the screen is actually 60 cm wide on the wall. You can drag, swap, and reframe in seconds, then export a layout to follow when you hang. We built one because the paper-template approach took us a full afternoon every time and we kept eyeballing the spacing.

Whichever route you choose, mock the layout before you touch drywall. This single step prevents 80% of regret-driven rehangs.

Place the largest frame first. If you're going symmetric, center it on the horizontal center mark you made in Step 1. If you're going asymmetric, place it 15–20 cm off-center on the side that has more usable wall.

Build the rest of the layout outward from the anchor. Add the second-largest pieces next, balanced across the anchor. Fill in with the smallest pieces last. This order is what stops the layout from drifting upward — the most common mistake when people start small and add larger pieces over time.

The anchor's vertical center should sit at roughly 145–155 cm from the floor — gallery eye level. If the wall sits behind a sofa or bed, the anchor moves up to clear the furniture (see Step 7).

A gallery wall is never just a gallery wall — it's a gallery wall above a sofa, above a bed, climbing a staircase, lining a hallway. Each of those rooms has its own ratio rules.

• Above a couch: the gallery should span roughly two-thirds of the couch width. The bottom edge of the lowest frame should sit 20–25 cm above the couch back, no higher. Going wider than the couch reads cluttered; going narrower reads timid. Full above-the-couch guide.
• Above a bed: stay 15–20 cm above the headboard. Width matches the bed, never overhangs. Use canvas or acrylic glazing, not heavy glass — earthquakes and headboards have an unfortunate history. Full above-the-bed guide.
• In a bedroom (side walls): hang lower than the standard gallery rule because viewing happens from sitting up in bed. Bias the palette warm and low-saturation — the brain reads bright color even at low attention. Full bedroom guide.
• In a living room: pick exactly one focal wall (above-sofa is the default ~70% of the time), size to the dominant furniture rather than the wall, and plan around the room's lighting shifts. Full living-room guide.
• On a staircase: ignore the eye-level rule. Frame centers follow the slope of the stairs, not a horizontal line. Each frame center sits roughly 145 cm above its own tread. Full staircase guide.
• In a hallway: hang slightly higher than gallery eye-level (155–165 cm), because most viewers walk past rather than stand still. The pieces need to read at a glance.

Once the mock-up looks right at arm's length, walk back 3 meters and look again. The eye reads the composition very differently at distance than up close. A gap that looked tight from a meter away can read as a hole from across the room.

Take a photo of the wall with your phone. The camera flattens the composition the way the eye does at distance, and exposes imbalances the in-person view forgives. Look at the photo on a small screen. If something feels heavy on one side, it is.

Adjust. Take another photo. When the photo looks right, commit to the nails. This is the last cheap moment in the process — everything after this involves drywall.