Home Style: Enliven your home with artwork

In my opinion, nothing makes a room feel warmer, infuses it with personality or makes it feel "finished" like artwork. If you'd like to fill your walls with arrangements of art that look stunning, here are some tips to get you started.

Most people like to move furniture around to keep their spaces feeling fresh. I move my artwork.

When I get the urge to mix things up a bit, I wait until Dan has left the house (he dies a thousand deaths every time he sees me drive yet another nail into the walls) and I go on a picture-hanging spree. I experiment with new groupings, moving pieces around, pairing them with unexpected partners and rotating in new artwork to replace pieces that have grown tired.

The longer I work in the decorating industry, the more convinced I've become that artwork makes the biggest difference when you're trying to make a house into a home. For instance, not long after my friend Melanie moved into her condo, I asked her how she liked her new place. Her response was tepid. It just didn't feel like home, she sighed. So I asked Dillon, the art-hanging guru of Nell Hill's, to help Melanie perk up her place with artwork. All it took were some carefully constructed montages and Melanie fell in love with her new space. It's amazing how powerful art is!

I've asked Dillon to give us some pointers on how to warm up those wide-open walls in our homes.

Before he pulls together an arrangement of art, Dillon picks one key piece of artwork that will serve as a focal point. For today's example, he selected a large, lovely landscape framed with a classic gold wooden frame. He hung the piece several inches above the furniture so we can accessorize the top of the furniture without covering up the artwork. He's letting the gold tone of the frame and the darker colors in the painting determine the color palette for the grouping: gold and black.

Dillon never has a set plan when he starts to create an art grouping. But before he hammers in a nail, he does have an idea of what he wants the finished product to look like and uses that as his guide as he experiments with the pieces he selects and where they are placed.

In this case, he decided he wants to create a symmetrical look using traditional artwork in a black-and-gold palette. So he's picked a variety of art pieces that vary in shape, size and medium. First to go up is a horizontal landscape in an ornate gold frame. Dillon centers this fetching piece above the large painting like a crown.