Art advisory
See it on your wall before you decide
Choosing art for a room is guesswork until you can see the scale of it. Tell us what you are after and we will put real pieces on a wall at their true size — yours, if you have a photo of it. Nothing here is a mock-up: every work shown is one you can buy today.
Nothing matches all of those.
Still not sure? That is what the appointment is for — we will come back to you with a short list chosen for your room rather than for the catalogue.
What we do
Choosing art for a room is not the same as liking a painting
A piece can be good and still be wrong for the wall it is on — too small for the span, too busy for the room, hung at a height that makes it look like an afterthought. Advisory is the part that gets those decisions right.
We look at the wall, not the catalogue
Send a photograph and the measurements. The span of the wall, the light it gets and the furniture under it decide more than taste does — a 40 cm piece above a three-seater sofa will always look lost, however good it is.
Scale before style
As a rule a piece should fill about two thirds of the furniture beneath it, with its centre at around 152 cm from the floor. Get that right and a modest work looks considered; get it wrong and an expensive one looks like a mistake.
A short list, not a catalogue
You get three or four pieces chosen for your room, with the reasoning for each and what we would do instead if the budget were different. A list of two hundred is not advice, it is a shop.
Framing, hanging and the rest
Mount colour, frame depth, whether it should be glazed, how to fix it to that particular wall. The parts people discover after the piece arrives are the parts worth asking about beforehand.
What an art advisor actually does
Five jobs. The first two are what people expect; the middle one is what they are glad of afterwards; the last two are what they did not know to ask about.
- Market guidance What a body of work is doing and why. Which artists are being collected, which are being talked about and not bought, and where a price has run ahead of the work. The point is not to chase a market but to buy without paying for somebody else's enthusiasm.
- Acquisition and sourcing Finding the piece, not browsing for it. That means approaching artists directly, watching for the work that never reaches a public listing, and being ready when it does. Most of the pieces worth owning are not sitting on a website waiting.
- Authentication and due diligence Provenance, condition, signature, and whether the work is what the seller says it is. This is the unglamorous part that stops an expensive mistake, and the part most buyers skip because the piece in front of them looks right.
- Valuation What it is worth now, for insurance, for resale, or simply to know whether the asking price is reasonable. A valuation is a reasoned argument from comparable sales, not a number somebody felt like saying.
- Logistics and installation Crating, transport, insurance in transit, framing and glazing, and the fixing that actually holds on your particular wall. Handled badly this is where work gets damaged, and it is entirely avoidable.
Still not sure?
Bring the photograph and the measurements. There is no charge for the conversation and no obligation at the end of it — if nothing we have suits the room, we will say so.