Picture Hanging 101

Perfect Positioning

How high can you go?

"When hanging paintings, galleries use an arbitrary 59 or 60 inches from the floor to the center of the art, which puts it at eye level," Nordan says. It's a good idea to place your central piece by this method, and position other pictures around it. "In our dining room, I asked my husband to sit in a chair so I could gauge the distance from his head to the bottom of the chandelier," she says. "By determining this visual space, I then placed my art -- and it worked!"