Welcome to the first in a new series of columns by Hannah Carvell, as she joins Ideal Home's Open House to share her thoughts on decorating a creative home and juggling style with a busy family life.
As a screen printer, and maker and seller of art I am very lucky to be sent pictures all the time of how people have styled my screen prints in their own homes. I adore seeing the mix of interiors and love nothing more than trawling Instagram and ogling all the delicious home and reno accounts. I am a fan of a good gallery wall (although I know all too well from experience, hanging one is not an easy task and cannot be rushed). My own home is overflowing with art – I don't just love making it but also collecting it – which isn't as pretentious as it sounds, I promise! Art is completely subjective and not every piece needs to be an expensive masterpiece bought from a gallery to spark joy in your home.
My top tips for choosing art in your home
1. Don’t follow trends
And this is key. Don't buy art for the sake of having something on the wall. I have fallen foul of this rule myself in the past. I won’t name the print but I saw it in every Instagrammers house a few years back and ended up purchasing and framing the piece. With mass produced prints, I always find the colours just don’t pop like a hand made piece (I guess I am spoilt getting to screen print and play with colour all day, but cheaper machine printed prints tend to be printed in CMYK which mutes colours hugely).
It's deceptive looking at a curated edited picture on instagram but when it arrived in the post I was underwhelmed. I had this print hanging in my house for a while, I didn’t love the colours, it just wasn’t really me I was blindly following a trend. When we packed up and moved house, this was not a piece that came with us. The art I treasure and hang on my walls are things I actually adore, and as you have to look at those walls every day surely that should be your goal? Don’t get me wrong I have an Andy Warhol and David Hockney print or two, there is a place for mass produced prints, and that's when the artist you love is so expensive that you could never get even close to owning an original.
2. Invest in Meaningful art
I have amassed a large collection of art over the years and its a complete mix. I have a few very special pieces, such as the ones my husband and I have gifted each other over the years on special occasions. Years ago on our first wedding anniversary (which is supposed to mean “paper”), we both independently commissioned the same artist (Sally Muir) to paint a portrait of one of our pets. She was someone we had both admired the work of and seen her in her hometown of Bath the previous year. She realised we had both independently assigned her with the same task and did two very different pieces for us to gift each other: my adored and departed Dachshund painted on a brown paper bag, and for me to give my husband the dog we had bought together after we were married. These pieces feel like family heirlooms, I adore Sally’s work but these are partially special to us.
On big birthdays we tend to mark with art, I am very lucky to have an original Anthony Browne Gorilla drawing from a favourite childhood book, not a day passes where I don’t walk past the piece and admire each detail. In my twenties we were fortuitous to live on Columbia Road (in a high-rise flat, some of my best years) which meant we had the likes of Nelly Duff and street Artists like Ben Eine on our doorstep, we have bought pieces from our favourites over the years when we could afford it and they still bring us joy over a decade later and take us back to that time. On my 40th I asked my mum and husband for pieces of Art, a glorious print from Art by Villain “Captain Pride” in all his rainbow glory and a stunning print of rainbow dogs by Holly Frean.
3. Art doesn’t have to be expensive
Alongside the 'special' pieces mentioned above, my home is full of prints I buy from other artists I follow mainly on instagram. I have treasured pieces made by family members and my children over the years, I can’t resist an auction and have some fabulous antique framed art picked up for next to nothing that makes up a complexly eclectic mix of mediums and styles on the walls of my home. For a fabulous curated collection of independent artists try Holly and Co and of course instagram has a glut of fabulous makers to follow and buy from. I always end up buying pieces when I travel, be that a small ceramic fish I have found in Portugal, an antique framed portrait of a pair of bulldogs bought from an auction wandered into on a city break in Toulouse or a small Mexican Wrestler picked up in the Hippy Markets of Ibiza. I love to collect plates to hang on my kitchen walls and this can be an inexpensive way of adding colour and art, artists like Margo in Margate sell hand painted plates at a fraction of the cost of buying one of her original paintings. I have plates I’ve found in Paris Flea Markets and Anthropologie always has a fabulous selection of plates by brilliant artists. I am a a magpie for colour and interesting things and these make up the mix of art I have hanging in my home. Not often expensive, but always things that bring me immense joy and good memories.
