Question · Choosing a size
What is the 2/3 rule for wall art?
The 2/3 rule says a picture hung above a piece of furniture should be about two-thirds as wide as the furniture beneath it. It is a decorating rule of thumb, not a standard anyone enforces.
Take the width of the sofa, bed or sideboard, multiply by roughly two-thirds, and that is the width to aim for in the frame. A 200cm sofa suggests something around 130cm across, which in practice means one large piece or a pair hung together with a small gap counted as part of the span. The reason it works is proportion: an image much narrower than that reads as an afterthought floating in space, and the eye notices the gap rather than the picture.
Treat it as a starting point rather than a law. It says nothing about height, nothing about a wall with no furniture under it, and it breaks entirely in a stairwell or a narrow hallway. The fuller version of the same thinking is in what size wall art to choose, and the failure mode at the other end is covered in can wall art be too big. Our framed prints come at A3 and A2, so the pairing trick is often the easier route to that width.
Written by Craig Fearn, Aphelion Prints.
From the journal