Displaying Art and Mirrors in the Home

1st April 2024
by Emily Williams

Such a big part of our jobs on both our Hospitality and Residential teams is the artwork and mirrors.

When we are designing a scheme, the art should always have its’ own place and we don’t believe in fully matching our art to the scheme. It’s much nicer if it feels slightly mis-matched, to give a sense of curation and authenticity to the piece.

We will always begin with the layout of the room or property and allocate where the ‘hero’ pieces of art or mirrors should be placed. We will consult our clients at length as quite often they have pieces they would like us to use or certain photos that they would like included.

Budgets can vary enormously for even our most discerning of clients and we believe you can get wonderful pieces at any price point.

For this development, there was a huge wall in the main reception and we knew it would be a big piece. We commissioned an up-and-coming artist to create this wonderful vibrant abstract piece that would frame the whole room.

For another project, we were fortunate to work with a fabulous art consultant Alison Heath who sourced some beautiful pieces from Lagos, our client’s main residence. You may not have access to a consultant but do consider things that mean something to you, be it, an artist from a place you associate with or subjects you enjoy such as landscape’s, animals, portraits etc. To see more of this project click here

We also love to combine artwork and mirrors and mount art on mirrors. This is quite a job and involves a fair amount of coordination, but it is a fantastic way of making the art a real feature.

 

 

 

 

 

 

When using mirror, we will often commission bespoke sizes and frames as well as sourcing antiques or reproducing antiques. The mirror here was a reproduction of an Italian antique mirror that I sourced for my home years ago and have never found a similar one. So we worked at length with our mirror specialist to fully replicate the detail to the perfect size for this project.

Lastly, it can be great to make a feature of mirror and cover a whole section of wall. In this kitchen dining area, there wasn’t much natural light so we added a wall of antique mirror behind the banquette.

Top Tips

  • Always measure the space you plan on hanging your art or mirrors to check it fits.
  • If it’s a very heavy piece, you may need to reinforce the wall with a pattress, seek advice from an art hanger or builder.
  • For antique mirrors, we like to go to Lillie road antiques, Fiona Macdonald, Rose Uniacke or sites like 1st Dibs, and Pamono have fantastic selections.