Kitchens have the least free wall of any room in the house. Cabinets take the upper half, appliances and worktop take the lower, and what remains is usually a narrow band, a single end wall, or the space above a dining table. That constraint decides everything about what to hang.
Small formats, and more of them
This is the one room where the usual advice reverses. Rather than one large piece, kitchens usually want two or three small ones, because the available shapes are narrow rather than broad.
| Where | Format that fits | Note |
|---|---|---|
| Between wall units and worktop | 21×30 or 30×42 | Typical gap is 50-60 cm high |
| End of a run of cabinets | 30×42 or 50×70 | Measure before buying — this strip is often under 60 cm wide |
| Above a dining table | 50×70 or 70×100 | Treat as its own wall, see below |
| Above a doorway | 21×30 landscape | Only if the wall above is over 40 cm |
The two smallest sizes are A4 and A3, so standard mounts fit them. The three largest are exact centimetre formats, not A-sizes — the distinction matters when buying, and is explained in the poster size guide.
The dining table is a different wall
Where a kitchen includes a table, that wall follows dining-room logic, not kitchen logic. People sit there, so the eye is low. Centre at around 135 cm rather than 145, and size against the table rather than the wall: two thirds of the table length, same as a sofa. The reasoning behind the standard height is in how high to hang art.
Kaffe Guide Køkkenposter
Fruitlover - Raissa Oltmanns
Coffee First - Drama Later Artsy Edition
Good Morning Dive
Morning ritual - Coffee junkies
The Hundertwasser House - Enikő Marosváry-Kramcsák
Grease and steam are real
Worth being straight about this. A paper print within a metre or so of a hob will collect a film of cooking grease over a year or two, and it will not clean off the paper. Glass will.
So in a kitchen, framing is not optional in the way it is elsewhere. Keep unframed prints to the far end of the room, and put anything near the cooking zone behind glass. Our frames come in all five sizes in oak and black.
Subject matters more here
Kitchens are one of the few rooms where a literal subject works better than an abstract one. Food, drink, produce and botanical prints belong in a room about food in a way they do not elsewhere, and they give a small wall an obvious reason to exist. It is also the room where humour lands — a kitchen is somewhere people stand around and talk.
Three small prints in a row is the most reliable kitchen arrangement, and it needs the same equal gaps and aligned centres as any other. The gallery wall guide has the measurements.
Frame colour has more freedom
Because kitchen formats are small, the full colour frame range is available. White, dark brown, blue, green, red, yellow and pink all stop at 50×70, which is above the size most kitchen walls take anyway. A coloured frame in a kitchen reads as deliberate where the same frame in a living room can read as loud.
What to hang
The kitchen selection covers food, drink and botanical subjects in the formats that fit.