11 Living Room Wall Decor Ideas for Indian Homes

Most living room wall advice is written for houses that are not shaped like Indian ones. These eleven ideas assume what is actually true here: apartments with a defined sofa wall, warm evening lighting, and a household that entertains.

1. Treat the sofa wall as one decision, not several. The wall behind the sofa is the wall everyone looks at. One large piece, or a considered set of three, beats five unrelated frames.

2. Get the height right. Centre of the artwork at roughly 145 to 150 cm from the floor. Above a sofa, leave 15 to 20 cm between the sofa back and the base of the frame.

3. Match width to furniture. Artwork above a sofa should span roughly two thirds of the sofa's width. Too small is the single most common mistake.

4. Use texture where light is warm. Indian living rooms are lit warmly in the evening. Flat printed surfaces go dull under that light. Texture picks it up.

5. Give a devotional piece its own wall. Ganesha, Shiva, Radha-Krishna work best on a north or north-east wall with space around them.

6. Build a gallery wall around one anchor. Choose the largest piece first, place it slightly off-centre, and build outward.

7. Use the wall above a console. Entrance and corridor consoles are usually under-decorated, and this is the first wall a guest sees.

8. Repeat a colour, not a subject. A room reads as considered when pieces share a palette, even when the subjects have nothing in common.

9. Do not hang art on every wall. Empty wall is what lets the occupied walls work.

10. Consider a textured wall covering instead of art. Sometimes the answer is not a piece on the wall but the wall itself, in linen, silk or jacquard.

11. Pull the scheme together with soft furnishing. An embroidered cushion echoing the artwork ties a room together for a fraction of the cost of another piece.

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