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Designing an Artful Office

My colleague Erik just moved into a new, larger office at work. Last week, he asked would I like to help him decorate his new corporate digs? Do dolphins swim?!

The Goal: A tastefully modern office that felt like home to Erik.

The Plan: Develop a theme based on Erik’s existing art collection and office furniture.

The Plan in Action: Erik’s furniture has a lot of warm earth tones, and his personal art collection includes B&W sailing photography prints and an angelic pencil portrait of his daughter. His art preferences tend toward Abstract Art and black & white photography.

Looking for art to extend and enhance his collection, I found a great assortment of Abstracts with earth tones. Abstracts and B&W photography prints are naturally complementary, so that made things pretty easy. I also found him some "soft contrast" photography prints by Alan Blaustein that beautifully echo the feel of Erik's pencil portrait.

To keep things interesting, I used different frames on each piece: warm walnut frames to go with the furniture and art color palette; classic black frames to play off the B&W photography; and stainless steel frames to bring in a modern element.

Because the office had a lot of wall space, I hung the matching frame groups together to create an interesting yet unified feel between the different pieces. I also made sure to align the tops or bottoms of the pieces to give the room a symmetrical feel. And voila: Mission accomplished!

I’d love to hear about your adventures in office decorating! Post a comment and drop me a line.