The first step to turn a house into a home is to add your personal touch to it. This you can do in hundreds of ways. Put in furniture of your choice, decorate with showpieces, books and vases, hang beautiful curtains and what not. One of the best ideas for decorating your walls is to display pictures in photo frames. Hang them or put them on shelves, put photographs in them or display writings, cluster them together or put one big frame on a wall. Even if you have no photos but a beautifully painted wall and some antique photo frames you can just hang them tastefully and your room would belong to a class of its own. No matter what you do with photo frames, they stand out as one of the best time tested interior décor options.Photo Frames and MattingYou can add class to even ordinary photos by choosing the right photo frame and the right matting (piece of thin paper or fabric placed between picture and frame that adds to the beauty). Photo frames come in a large variety of materials (wood, metal, plastic, glass, gilded), shapes (square, rectangle, oval, round, diamond) and colors (black, brown, white or any color). Colorful matting can make pictures look vibrant, traditional white matting makes it classy while black matting makes pictures appear swanky.Places to Put Your Photo FramesPut them anywhere you like. As long as the arrangement is nice, they are bound to look nice.
Wall behind your bed: Usually the wall behind the bed is left vacant and hence it is a great wall to decorate. You can decorate it by putting multiple frames with photos of the occupant of the particular bedroom or you can put pictures of all the people in the family. You can even opt for one large frame and instead of photos, hang a painting. The number of frames can vary according to the size of your wall or your personal choice.Behind the sofa: If your living room sofa obstructs the wall the wall behind it then it is a good place to display photos. Family photos in the living room mean all your guests get an idea about your family as well as your taste.On the staircase wall: Why waste the space? Just line up the wall with photos of all your favorite memories. But keep in mind that the wall is long and narrow. Therefore it is almost imperative that you put more than one picture.On windows: If you have a window which you can use as a shelf you can place photo frames on it with a variety of other showpieces.On shelves: You may have a shelf in your home dedicated to photos and paintings. If you have that luxury, use it to its zenith.Cover up a flaw: You can cover up an eyesore or hide anything that you do not want everyone to see.Arrangement of Photo Frames
No matter how much any one suggests it, hanging photo frames is not an exact science. You can hang them however you like. If you are hanging one or two photos the layout cannot be an issue. But if you want a photo montage using different sizes of frames, the balancing may get a bit tricky. Here are a few tips for frames arrangement:
- Choose a point of focus. It can be a picture in the biggest or the most beautiful frame. It can also be a picture which is subjectively most important. Arrange other pictures in smaller frames around this picture.
- All the photos in the montage can have the same kind of frames and matting or can be completely different from each other. But try to maintain a theme because mixing the sophisticated with the casual and colorful may not work.
- If you want to go for mix and match go for photos and prints or posters.
- Before you hang your photos on the wall, arrange them on the floor and decide which layout you like the most. This way you will damage your walls less.
- One good way of creating a balance is choosing a center line and placing similarly sized frames on both sides of the line.
- If you want to display a number of photos but do not have the space for a number of photo frames, make a collage of different photos and put them in one photo frame.
- Instead of photos you can even put beautifully designed fabrics, dried flowers, colored leaves, greeting cards and anything that can be put in a frame and put up for display.