Creating a Design Gallery

One of the biggest things I wanted to incorporate into my new office space was a gallery wall. I have been to a number of graphic design conferences and one of the things that I treasure is the free poster artwork they give away. I have so many of them but haven’t had a place to display them. The rest of our house is pretty neutral, so these have never fit in since the majority of them are so colorful. This area seemed like the perfect fit. It is its own space so it doesn’t have to coordinate with the rest of the house and it’s the space we work out of so having colorful inspiration around us is a needed thing.

Along with some of the posters, I plan on adding even more typography prints and some of Seans collectibles on the ledge. This room used to be part of the attic and the previous owner turned it into a room. That caused some interesting ceiling angles and also a funky bump out one the far wall. We wanted to make this look like an intentional part of the room. We did this by adding a wood cap to the ledge. All I did was get 10″x1″ select pine boards, stained it to match our flooring and popped them in place. There are a couple other places I will be adding wood accents and I love how it is adding a warmth to the room. The next thing we added was this awesome blue velvet futon sofa and for only $300 it’s a steal. I LOVE this thing. It’s comfortable and offers extra seating when we need it for guests.

One of the first things we did which I didn’t show you last week was paint the walls in Behr Irish Mist and replace the old pergo wood floors from the 80’s. We chose a rustic medium ash brown laminate floor which we are running through the whole house. This medium dark floor is much more my taste over the light oak colored floor that was here previously. Also, while the walls were previously white, they were in bad condition and just needed some cleaning up. I’m not 100% sure that I’m not going to paint this room again in a dark color, we’ll just have to wait and see.

One of the other challenges of this room was on this gallery wall was a large access door that goes to our furnace. I needed to cover it but still allow access easily. I ended up buying a large canvas frame from Ikea. I bought a digital piece of artwork to download from Etsy from one of my favorite artists on there, Dan Hobday, I downloaded it for about $9 and had it printed on vinyl. For a total cost of $50 I got an awesomely large piece of art that adds an awesome graphic statement.

The main idea behind this gallery wall is that over time we can rotate other pieces of art that we find or that has meaning to us. I love that this space can gather different inspirational items that will feed our creativity.