How to hang art at home in cool ways
Home Goods Intel Special feat. natural-dye curtains, a dope new sofa, beautiful mobiles, great mugs, frameless hanging techniques & more
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Blackbird Spyplane — we don’t just wear clothes well and travel to cool places well. We also chill inside homes well.
This is why we’ve become a beloved destination for Home Goods Intel. And today we’ve got a shimmering assortment of exactly that, including:
A dope, instant-classic, deceptively simple sofa drops today, made in the USA and designed by a living legend of minimalist design,
Mobiles, mugs, plates,
Beautiful natural-dyed curtains,
How to hang pictures framelessly with panache,
And more.
Let’s get to it —
A Spyfriend wrote in asking about how to hang visual slappers at the crib … au naturel:
“how do i put up paintings and prints without a frame?” social.media.account2
Erin and I (Jonah) are partial to frames, and few are more pleasing to us at the moment than simple vintage regs silver ones, e.g. the frame below, which has hung at my parents’ place in New York for decades around a Fernand Léger lithograph they found at a flea market. These kinds of frames used to be way more common, but now your best bet for finding one is at a thrift store.
However, our own preference notwithstanding, we recognize the unfussy swag and beauty you can achieve via frameless approaches, too. Tacking or even just taping a picture to the wall is sometimes unfairly maligned as a stunted dirtbag move, of a piece with plopping a mattress on the floor sans bedframe and washing your sheets twice a year, but we disagree that this is uniformly true: It’s all in how you do it.
Case in point: the beautifully cooked, creased and crinkled poster hanging behind German arthouse-movie swag king Franz Rogowski in Passages (2023), above. It appears to be secured with nothing more elaborate than double-stick tape, and yet it looks fantastic: chill and unpretentious, maybe a little louche, but not “bummy.”
There was zero loucheness or bumminess and more “architectural studio vibes” last month in Paris when we hit the Wolfgang Tillmans show at Beaubourg: We loved how they’d installed immense inkjet prints and small c-prints alike using 1) nails and white binder clips and 2) pristine and precisely cut rectangles of Scotch tape at their corners. No more no less.
Seven other frameless maneuvers that we’ve seen firsthand & which are confirmed fire: