Interior Design: Common Living Space Wall Decor

I mentioned in this post that I was working on a project for the living room. Last week, I posted this post about blending styles to create a comfortable living space when you and your spouse have, uhhh... errrrrr... Different styles.

I'm happy to report that I was finally able to complete our living room decor this past weekend! This project has been on my brain for well over a year. I had every intention of doing this in the townhome that we used to live in... But never quite found the time to select what prints with what frames to create a cohesive theme. Yadayadayada. I just never did it, end of story.

Alas, I did manage to get around to it in our new home! Without further commentary, our living room wall decor:

The silver frames are from Crate & Barrel; the black frames are unknown! You'll see there's room to add more frames as we expand our family and we also have the option to rotate out the pictures within the frames to keep our wall "current."

We have a "great room" type of setup in our home, so that the living room, dining room and kitchen are all open to each other. While this is a large space, we also have four massive, floor-to-ceiling windows. These windows let in a wonderful amount of light into the room, but REALLY limit the wall space for any sort of artwork/decor. So while we have this big space, it's broken up quite nicely with the windows so that we don't have one (or more!) massive, blank wall to attempt to cover up.

What I like about creating a "larger image" by grouping together multiple smaller items/frames is that you can customize the look and size to the room and the wall space you're working with. So, if you have a reeeeeeal big space, you can use a larger number of larger prints/frames to cover the space; if it's smaller, you can mix and match sizes to achieve the effect you're after. Also, we happen to have four large pieces of furniture in the room (sectional couch, 6' bookshelf, 65" TV and entertainment center below wall-mounted TV - men and their large TV's, amirightladies?! Every time my husband wants to go to the movies, I ask, "Why?! We have a home theater complete with blinding screen and surround sound, better food, cleaner bathrooms and no obnoxious teenagers on their phones texting throughout the whole movie!" But I digress...)

The same concept applied with four pieces of art, all the same size in the same mat and frame. This is the only wall space left with all the large windows in our Great Room! The curtains also work to add some texture to the room.

Having smaller pieces on the wall provides some balance to the room, so that it's not dwarfed by all the "big" things in it. Creating a wall decor look sufficient for the space out of smaller items helps provide balance when dealing with a large space full of large furniture. It can also break up consistent shapes in the room. For example, if you have a rectangle couch, with a rectangle coffee table, with the rectangle of your TV all in the same room, you can "break up" that shape by creating an array of frames creatively on your wall. In the picture above, I used a square to break up the long rectangles of the windows.

That wraps up our common living space updates! Up next: our master bedroom. We're juuuuuuust about complete with what that room will look like, so expect a post about how I got creative in that large, dark space (it really is the antithesis of our Great Room from a lighting perspective!)