Art

Art Above the Sofa

I fell in love with this book full of beautiful illustrations by Tony Sarg (with an introduction by Jonathan Adler) while shopping at Anthropologie a few months ago. It’s called Up and Down New York. The palette was perfect for the colors in my new living room, so I bought a copy on Amazon and…

I fell in love with this book full of beautiful illustrations by Tony Sarg (with an introduction by Jonathan Adler) while shopping at Anthropologie a few months ago. It’s called Up and Down New York. The palette was perfect for the colors in my new living room, so I bought a copy on Amazon and picked out my favorite images to frame.


I use these great frames from Target in almost every project I’ve worked on the past few months. They are cheap ($16.99) and great for groupings.

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New York is our favorite city and it’s fun to see the renderings of familiar places from back in the day. Coincidentally, most of the images we chose to frame are of places downtown, near my husband’s firm.

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China Town, 1920’s

All in all, I’m happy with the way the grouping looks – especially for the price tag. I like how the black and white frames play off my graphic curtains and the colors in the artwork really blend well with the upholstery fabrics in the room.

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26 thoughts on “Art Above the Sofa

  1. Perfect!! That totally completes the room. I'm such a sucker for symmetrical grid groupings of things. And I love using illustrations from books as wall art. (I was going to post today about using pages from a calendar.) Thanks for the wonderful inspiration.

  2. Jenny-looks dynamite! The pictures are so personal this way, too. Saw something at IKEA lately, they put the text pages in frames and every few frames alternated with a favorite book cover. Might especially be neat to include pages with highlighting or notes from a favorite lit class. I have really enjoyed seeing this room come together, you deserve a vacation!

  3. I hadn't checked your blog in depth in a few weeks – what changes! It looks great, and the business side looks like it's coming together.
    I love your style!

  4. looks great, as usual! I desperately need some frames, but I can't find any ready-made ones that will work with what I need to be framed — ugh!

  5. It looks beautiful! I love all it. I did something similar with my curtains in the new guest room! I can't wait to show you. I just love stripes.

    Love the artwork. I love find great books and then getting to use the images as art!

  6. It isn't often that I don't pick and choose elements of someone else's room thinking I like this but not that etc… But everything here is gorgeous! The colors, the crewel, the stripes…YUM!

    Question: do you use a tray for your ottoman? What kind do you use and how do you find yourself using it?

  7. This looks wonderful! I actually have this book sitting on my coffee table—bought it at Fish's Eddy in NYC last summer, and I love flipping through it and dreaming about the next time I'll be in New York. I really love how the illustrations look in your living room and it's great that they mean something special to you. Keep up the great work—your room looks amazing!

  8. first of all, as a former New Yorker I love and own this book, and second of all this is so funny because we are actually using this same idea right now for a client but using the book This is New York!

    I am really so in love with this room!

  9. I'm fairly new to your blog (I LOVE it!) and I wanted to know about your curtains. I've been looking for affordable ones with horizontal stripes forever! I think I'm going to have to go custom by adding ribbon or sewing my own. Where did you get those lovlies?

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