Field Report: Everyone is Framing Everything
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SPY agents, tasked with intercepting communications between in-the-know assets and engaging in constant, tireless cultural reconnaissance, regularly file field reports on new and meaningful trends. Some of the trends they monitor will change how we live. Field Report captures those early leads to keep you informed on what might be the next big thing.
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People with the best interior design taste are loading up on frames. Big frames, small frames, preset frames, custom frames, they can’t get enough. They take on their blank spaces, turning small apartments into cluttered galleries. It’s a natural thing. Without floorspace, personality climbs the wall.
While white-painted apartment walls are fine, there’s a benefit to framed pieces. They aren’t just for posters, painting, or photographs of trips to Tulum. They are for rugs, school pennants, taped-up Reservoir Dogs posters from college, newspaper clippings, and dried flowers. Smart decorators use what is at hand, whether that’s a friend’s painting (later to be declared a masterpiece and sold at auction to pay for a home in Montauk) or a ticket to Spamalot. The key to making this eclectic approach work? Frames. Frame everything. Frames, everywhere. Frame frames.
“Homes are like galleries depicting our lives,” wrong people will gently explain. But homes are not galleries. Galleries are sprawling, open rooms largely devoid of furniture. While this is also describes certain homes in Beverly Hills, those represent an outlier. Most thoughtfully decorated homes are not galleries, but salons. Salon-style rooms, where there are tons of things that describe our lives hanging in clusters and groups, each one telling a different story from our past. That’s what people are eager for and that’s what makes a room feel cozy and welcoming. Salon-style hanging, the format of creating clusters of pieces hung together that span walls like growing ivy on a lattice, isn’t new, but is effective.
But most 30-year-olds don’t have a vast collection of oil paintings and etchings. And that’s fine. Frames can make everything read as “art” by giving it visual significance. Framing non-art also catches people by surprise. A bit of sneaky dada-ism can be a conversation starter for a dinner party or friendly stop-by, which is why there has been such a proliferation of deep-set frames.
An abridged list of framed things found in a well-appointed, but small Manhattan apartment:
A paper menu from The Odeon signed by friends at a dinner party
A letter from David Sedaris
A Perfect Attendance Award from High School
A drawing of a hot dog on notebook paper and ballpoint pen
A business card
The cover from the first issue of a zine
Depending on how one feels about zines, these things aren’t art. But, hung together, they do form a portrait. They paint an image of a life. They illustrate a point about what the framer, the hanger, the homeowner value. Because of this, a little gallery wall can create a specific sense of place. Visitors learn something.
And it works well visually. A bit of structure – all those right angles – can make a space feel larger than it actually is. College dorm rooms feel oppressive not only because they are small, but because they tend to be presided over by large movie posters. From 2003 to roughly 2010, Uma Thurman and her yellow jumpsuit made thousands of freshman claustrophobic. A framed key won’t do that. At least not if it’s thoughtfully placed.
When building out salon walls, start with bigger items in the center and work outward to smaller pieces. Don’t consider texture or what is a photo versus a piece of paper versus a matchbook. The randomness of these things makes it charming. Consider the size of the frames and tones of wood (or veneer) and mix them up! Here’s a few options that are always in style:
Blick 8×10 Frames
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The bigger the better. Start with larger items at the center of a salon-style cluster and work outward to smaller framed pieces. These larger ones from Blick are study and simple. They’re also pretty cheap at just $10 a frame.
Custom Frames from FrameItEasy
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For bigger items that one might have, in college, just tapes to the wall, like film posters, or things printed in odd dimensions, have a custom one made. It makes a world of difference in how it looks up on the wall in your home. Frame It Easy is really simple to use and only requires carefully measuring the piece you’re looking to produce.
Bulk Amazon Frames
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Even for someone who doesn’t keep a lot of smaller doodads like the above, you can still get the right salon-style look by getting all your memorable photos off an iPhone and onto the wall. These bulk frames are really simple and look just as great as spending a ton on expensive ones.
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