House & Dwelling Wall Art

House & Dwelling Wall Art: Strong Examples and Weak Ones

A weak house picture is a symmetrical front elevation with every window the same size, drawn flat, with no idea whether anyone lives there. A strong one has evidence of habitation: a light on in one room and not the others, a bicycle against the wall, washing, a crooked chimney, weather on the render. The difference is not skill, it is whether the artist looked at a real building.

Perspective is the other tell. Buildings drawn straight on, with no convergence, look like elevations from an estate agent's brochure; a slight angle, a low viewpoint, or a roofline running away from you gives the image depth and makes the house feel like somewhere rather than something. Rows of terraces and hillside villages work particularly well for this reason.

These pieces carry a personal weight that most subjects do not, because people buy them to stand in for a place they lived, visited or left. That is a good reason to be fussy about architectural style. A whitewashed Mediterranean village and a red-brick Victorian street are not interchangeable, and a near-miss on the style will nag at whoever it was meant to remind.

Hallways and stairwells take this subject better than anywhere else. Buildings are made of verticals and horizontals, which suits a wall you walk past rather than sit in front of, and a row of them up a staircase reads as a street. In a sitting room, one is usually enough; three start to look like a property portfolio.

Run one check on any candidate: cover the roof with your thumb and see whether the rest still reads as a building with a life in it. Houses are easy to make charming with a nice roofline and nothing underneath. If the walls, windows and ground around them hold up on their own, the piece will keep working long after the novelty of the shape wears off.