Where Not to Hang a Painting in an Arizona Home

Most advice about hanging art is about height and spacing, which matters. But in a desert house the more useful question is which walls to leave alone, because a few of them will quietly work against a painting for years.

Here are the five I would think twice about. And I want to say up front that every home I have ever walked into has had plenty of good walls, so this is a short list of exceptions, not a list of problems.

The wall the afternoon sun crosses

Not the wall facing the window. The wall the sun actually reaches. Those are usually different walls, and it is easy to get them backwards.

Stand in the room around four in the afternoon in summer and simply look at where the bright shape lands on the wall. That shape is the thing to avoid, and everything else in the room is fair game.

Directly above a fireplace you really use

Run it, then touch the wall. If it is warm, choose a different wall. If it is not, you are fine. It is that simple, and most Valley fireplaces pass easily.

Beside a return or supply vent

This one gets overlooked constantly. A vent blowing across a canvas gives it a small climate all its own, drier and cooler or warmer than the rest of the room, cycling on and off all day.

It also moves dust across the surface continuously, which on a textured piece adds up faster than you would think. A few feet of clearance solves it entirely.

A bathroom with a real shower in it

I wrote a whole piece on this once because it comes up so often. A powder room is usually fine. A primary bath where two people shower daily is a humidity chamber, and it swings from very wet to very dry several times a day.

If you want art in there, and it is a lovely place for it, choose something built to handle it or something framed under glass with a proper seal.

The entry with the transom above the door

Beautiful feature, and very common in newer homes here. The trouble is that a high window like that throws a hard band of light onto the opposite wall for a couple of hours a day, and that wall is almost always the one people want to put art on.

Watch it for a day before you commit. Sometimes the light misses entirely and the wall is perfect.

The good news

North facing walls, interior walls, hallways, dining rooms, and the wall you see when you first walk in are all typically excellent, and that is most of the house.

If you want a second opinion on a particular wall, send me a photo and tell me which way it faces. I look at rooms like this all day and I am happy to tell you what I see. If you would rather just watch new work as it finishes, the Collector's Circle sees everything first.

Warmly,

Dani