Disclaimer: this post is not an advertisement, we bought all the items listed in the post ourselves.
It all started with the buying of a TV. We used to have a projector, but it was old and not bright and we got tired of the long ritual of turning it on and setting it up, and it didn’t really fit the need to “put something on the background during breakfast”, so we started to think about buying a TV. The idea of getting a black rectangle on the wall did not make me very happy, so I started looking at how a TV can be beautifully decorated in a modern interior, and what kind of TVs there are. I almost immediately came across Samsung The Frame and various examples of rooms where this TV looks very nice. The cool thing about this TV is the removable frames that look like picture or art frames and the Art mode, which allows you to put pictures or photos and also choose to decorate them.
When I saw these pictures, I immediately wanted, first of all, this TV itself, and secondly, a wall with posters and photos, on which the TV would look like one of the posters, rather than a black rectangle in my interior.
We had just moved into a new apartment and there was a matching wall. My plan was for it to be the compositional center of the entire apartment.
For a while the TV hung lonely on the wall (yes, it was that black rectangle) while I considered hanging posters. We bought a classic Ikea sideboard as a quick and easy solution to the question of “where to store all the cables and the console”.
We brought a few of our own posters and photos back from the last apartment, so we wanted to deal with them first, rather than rushing out to buy something new. We had a printed wedding photo from Iceland, an illustration of a whale found in a store in Reykjavik, a poster with a map of Copenhagen (where we got married), the first abstraction I ever bought that I accidentally broke the glass from back at the last apartment, and another abstract poster I bought in an impulse to “add bright colors”.
I had a rough idea in my head of how the posters should hang, but since I really love Photoshop and also needed a visual presentation of the idea to my husband, I made a collage with the future hangings. At the same time we discussed ideas for future photo posters and buying a second sideboard to create a single long storage system for books, magazines and all the little things you usually need in the living room.
By the way, I think it’s always better to make an extra sketch and spend a little time on it than to drill unnecessary holes in the wall if you can.
I ordered an replaceable frame for the TV to give it even more of a framed art look. The TV itself has a collection of art that you can put on the standby screen, or you can connect to a huge library of art from various galleries for an extra fee and put on Van Gogh paintings in very good quality. Or you can upload your drawings and photos through a special app, turning your TV into a huge photo frame. I like to alternate between abstracts and summer landscapes taken on vacation.
A few months went by. Our apartment gradually filled with things and changed with us. At some point I started to realize that a neutral white shelving unit might have been a good quick fix in the beginning, but with the posters on the wall and decor around, I wanted a shelving unit with more character, color and texture. The choice fell on the FJÄLLBO sideboard, from Ikea. I’ve been looking at the whole FJÄLLBO collection for a long time, it’s not the most typical Ikea theme and I like the idea of combining this industrial character with the soft Scandinavian decoration and furniture that we have. And I also wanted to add more dark colors to the apartment.
The sideboard fit perfectly and made our art wall even more interesting. And there is a lot more storage space in it, and thanks to the lattice doors we didn’t have to keep the door open every time to play a console, so the sideboard solved a few small problems at once.
With the start of the pandemic we started to spend a lot more time at home and finally decided that it was time to finish “the wall project” as we called it. We decided to buy another sideboard, but we had some doubts about the remaining space by the wall. We could play with the height and buy a tall sideboard from the same collection and arrange a small bar there, but something about this idea embarrassed me. Probably the whole composition reminded me of the Soviet unit wall (such was called Stenka, a sort of the furniture unit that would cover a whole wall and would have room for showcases in which the family would usually display the best things they own) and the perspective of getting such a monster did not make me feel very happy. In the end we decided to leave the space empty and eventually put some kind of plant or a floor lamp there.
We decided on the composition of the posters much faster. What I lacked in the existing arrangement was a poster, proportional to the TV, because as you know if you want to hide a stick, hide it in the woods, and it is better not to hide a huge TV set among small pictures, but to have something proportional to it. At the same time, we decided to replace one of the existing posters to have a matching color scheme. Bright poster with squares now stands nicely in the bathroom near the mirror. A small picture of a hand and cups drew my husband, and I printed on beige paper.
In addition to the collage this time I marked the future hangings on the wall with paper tape, which allowed me to drill holes in the right places very quickly.We bought and installed a second sideboard, and I unscrewed and removed the doors to add lightness to the whole structure and to be able to see the collection of books and magazines (well, hello Stenka, apparently this is part of my cultural code after all).
That’s how the whole composition finally came together. I left space for other posters and photos, because they will definitely gradually appear and our wall will continue to evolve with us. Home improvement is a continuous process, because we are changing and growing in our views and preferences constantly, which means that our understanding of home is constantly changing.
As I wanted, the art wall became the center of the apartment and the first thing (after the balcony) that people look at when they come to visit us. It is quite possible that after a while I would like to change something, to paint the wall in green and completely change the composition and color scheme of the posters. We’ll see 🙂
If you like my vision of a cozy and nice-looking interior and want to make your home more pleasant with my help, you can book one of my interior services. I will be happy to help you create the home of your dreams.
