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Your first gallery wall: a 20-minute guide

A good gallery wall looks effortless and expensive. The secret is that it's neither — it just follows a few simple rules. If you've got a bare wall, a handful of frames and twenty spare minutes, here's how to arrange them so the wall feels curated rather than cluttered.

Step 1: Pick your wall (2 minutes)

Look for a wall that people naturally face — above a sofa, along a hallway, up a staircase, behind a bed. You want a bit of breathing room around the edges; a gallery wall crammed corner-to-corner loses its charm. Roughly a metre or more of clear wall is plenty to start.

Step 2: Choose an anchor (3 minutes)

Every good arrangement has one piece that leads — usually the largest, or the one with the most colour or meaning. Everything else arranges around it. Decide whether your anchor sits in the middle (for a symmetrical, calm look) or off to one side (for something more relaxed and modern).

Design the wall on the floor first. It's the one trick that saves you from a wall full of nail holes.

Step 3: Lay it out on the floor (5 minutes)

Don't hang anything yet. Put your frames on the floor and move them around until the grouping feels balanced. A few pointers:

• Keep the gaps even. Aim for a consistent 5 cm or so between every frame. Even spacing is what makes a mixed set look intentional.
• Balance the weight. Don't let all the big or dark pieces bunch on one side. Spread visual weight across the group.
• Mix, but rhyme. Different sizes and orientations keep it lively; a shared thread — similar frames, or a colour that repeats — keeps it coherent.
• Odd numbers feel natural. Three, five or seven pieces tend to sit more comfortably than even, blocky counts.

Step 4: Make paper templates (5 minutes)

Trace each frame onto newspaper or scrap paper, cut them out, and tape them to the wall with the low-tack tape you'd use for painting. Now you can stand back and judge the whole layout before a single hole is drilled. Shuffle the paper until it's right.

Step 5: Hang from the centre out (5 minutes)

Start with your anchor and work outward. The classic rule: the centre of the arrangement should sit at eye level — around 145–150 cm from the floor to the middle of the group. Mark your nail points through the paper templates, then tear the paper away as you hang each piece.

Where a changing frame fits

Here's the modern twist. Reserve one spot in your arrangement for a piece that changes — a colour e-ink frame like CanvasBT. Everything around it stays fixed and familiar, while that one frame rotates: a print in spring, a family photo for a birthday, something festive in December.

It keeps a gallery wall feeling alive without you ever touching a nail again. And because e-ink is matte and paper-like, it sits happily among printed frames rather than glowing out of place like a screen would.

A few finishing touches

• Stick small felt pads on the bottom corners of each frame so they sit level and don't mark the wall.
• Step back to the far side of the room now and then as you go — arrangements read differently up close.
• Leave room to grow. The best gallery walls get added to over the years.

That's it. Twenty minutes, no fear of the drill, and a wall that looks like you knew exactly what you were doing all along.