How to: select the right dark wood picture frame

Written by chris pink on November 21, 2014 in Picture Framing

Traditionally, and for as long as pictures have hung on walls, dark wood frames have been used to adorn prestigious paintings around the world.

While light wood offers a popular relief effect, and a way to enhance a painting or print by making it stand out starkly from the wall, dark wood lends a class and quality of its own.

This makes it the ideal choice for oil paintings, and, consequently, has made it the natural favourite for both landscapes and portraits.

Dark doesn’t have to mean shapeless

Selecting the right dark wood frame for your painting or print begins with considering all the options. Once, you’d have struggled to find anything but classic dark oak, but nowadays picture framing offers a wide range of options. Be sure to discover them all!

Our advice is to go with a profile that has an interesting shape to it. If you’re looking for blocky dark wood frames, we do those, but we also do smooth, curved picture frames where the grain comes through.

We also offer a range of picture frames which sit somewhere between light and dark wood, as well as frames which are finely polished.

The matching effect and why gold works so well

Another big reason why dark wood frames have remained so popular, of course, is that they perfectly match dark wood furniture and décor. This allows them to easily work in many rooms of such a home.

Looking for something in dark wood but a little lighter and slightly more striking, perhaps? In that case, our suggestion is to take a look at the wide variety of dark oak and gold frames we do.

Just like frames you’ll see hanging in famous galleries, these frames have a gold slip or inner that reflects the light of the frame and gives a nice edge to your art-work – perfect if you don’t want your dark oak frame to overwhelm both the piece and the wall it adorns.