Wall Art for a Kitchen

A kitchen is the hardest room in the house to hang a picture in, and it is usually the last one anybody tries. There is heat, there is steam, and most of the wall is already taken. None of that makes it impossible — it just means the decisions are narrower than in a living room, which is good news, because there are fewer ways to get it wrong.

Where not to hang it

Three places, and they are the ones people reach for first.

• Directly above the hob. Rising heat and cooking grease will reach anything within about a metre. Paper cockles, and grease does not come off matte stock.
• Beside the kettle or a steam oven. The plume goes further sideways than you would guess. Leave 60 cm (24 in) of clear wall.
• Above the sink, if the window is beside it. Not for damp — for glare. Art facing a window at close range spends most of the day washed out.

Everywhere else is fair. The wall opposite the cooking run, the end of a galley, the strip beside a doorway and the space above a dining end are all dry, and all usually empty.

The wall between the cabinets is tall and narrow

This is why kitchen art is different. In most rooms you choose the shape of the piece; in a kitchen the room has already chosen it. What is left after the units and the splashback is a vertical strip, often 40–60 cm (16–24 in) wide.

Every print we make is a vertical, which suits that strip exactly. For a gap that size, 11 × 17 in (28 × 43 cm) or 12 × 18 in (30 × 46 cm) sits comfortably with a margin of wall each side. Go wider than the gap and the piece looks jammed in; the wall around a print is part of the composition.

If you have a whole free wall — the one you see from the table — a single 18 × 24 in (46 × 61 cm) holds it better than three small ones scattered about. Our size guide has the full chart in centimetres.

Hang it standing, not sitting

The dining room rule — drop the centre to seated eye level — does not apply here. Kitchen looking happens on your feet, so the standard centre of 145–152 cm (57–60 in) is right.

Above a run of worktop, leave at least 35 cm (14 in) between the surface and the bottom of the frame. That keeps the print clear of whatever gets set down, and clear of the backsplash line.

What to put there

The default kitchen picture is a word on a board — a slogan, a coffee cup, a fork the size of a door. It is cheap to buy and it stops being funny in a month. The alternative is not to avoid food as a subject, but to stop treating it as a joke.

Two things last in a kitchen:

• Light. A kitchen is a daylight room. A picture painted in the light the room actually has at eleven in the morning — a jug throwing a long shadow, a shelf seen from below against a bright ceiling — belongs there in a way a dark night scene does not.
• Plants, drawn plainly. A single herb or a branch in line and wash reads as a botanical study, not a decal. It also survives the room being messy, which a busy image does not.

Colour: sage and olive green, terracotta, cream and warm plaster all sit with wood, brass and green cabinetry without fighting them. Our wall colour guide works through matching to what is already in the room.

Framing and the damp question

Glaze it. In any other room an unframed or clipped print is fine; in a kitchen a sheet of glass or acrylic is what makes the difference between wiping the frame and replacing the print. A simple frame with a mount also lifts the paper off the backing board, which lets air move behind it.

Our stock is 180 gsm archival matte — scratch and water resistant, which covers a splash but not a year of steam. Behind glass, in a dry corner of the room, it will outlast the cabinets.

Every print is made to order in the USA and dispatched within 10 business days, with 2–5 days in transit.