One of the most commented on feature in our home is our wall of gallery ledges. I’m personally, not a huge fan of most gallery walls, where they’re so hard to get right, but ledges are a lot more approachable to me. I love swapping out art with ease without needing to make more holes in the wall and treating the ledges as an ever-changing home for my most favourite pieces of art.
These gallery ledges previously lived in our apartment, where they helped to draw attention away from our TV.
Now they live stacked in the living room of our house. To get the spacing right between the ledges, I measured the frame of the tallest piece I wanted to showcase, added 4-5” extra and divided up the evenly, allowing for a row along the bottom to lean against the wall (and hide a wall outlet).
And I’m constantly changing them up:
One of the best things about the ledges is that I can display art pretty much as soon as it arrives in the mail, by popping one piece out and popping the new one in within a matter of minutes. They’re practically foolproof. When it comes to arranging the frames, I just try to balance colour and medium throughout the shelves and make sure not to have frames of the same size next to one another. Adding in DIY black and white abstract stuff help to add interest without adding colour too.
I also love adding tea lights on the shallow ledges to help fill up some space visually on the more sparse ledges. Bonus: they look great at night with the candles lit.
I get asked all the time about the source of our ledges, and unfortunately they’re a style West Elm no longer carries. But, I did some digging and found some very similar ones here and here.
And because I’m so often asked about the sources of the art displayed in our gallery ledges, from top to bottom and left to right in the below image. A few are originals, so links drive to the artists’ available work.
One, Angela Chrusciaki Blehm | Two, Artfully Walls | Three, Katherine Freeman | Four, Katy Garry | Five, Danielle Kroll | Six, Artfully Walls | Seven, DIY
Since I know you’re going to ask, the metal black gallery frames that I use are these -where, I’d just note that the glass is a bit fragile. This is the oversized frame, that was a great find and looks awesome in person.
For sourcing art, I love finding new artists on Instagram and hunting down pieces on Etsy and Minted, as well as printing off photos from our travels that remind me of my favourite vacations.
