If I were to try and sell you a per­fume that smells amaz­ing, but was pack­aged in a jam jar, you prob­a­bly would­n’t buy it (or maybe you would giv­en the recent trend for cock­tails in jam jars!). Any­way, if I were to present it in a styl­ish bot­tle that would lool well on your dress­ing table, then you’d be more tempt­ed, even if it were only water in the bottle!

The job of a frame is first­ly to show­case and sec­ond­ly, to com­mand atten­tion. We are also inher­ent­ly attract­ed to what is pleas­ing to the eye, and so a framer must com­bine these ele­ments when fram­ing your spe­cial paint­ings, posters or mem­o­ries. When we are asked to frame a crick­et bat or a foot­ball jer­sey, a diplo­ma, or even a med­ical instru­ment, we know that it means some­thing spe­cial to the per­son, and so we must treat it as such.

Pic­ture fram­ing is some­times as seen as sim­ply plac­ing wood around a pic­ture and putting glass on top of it. Some­times, rarely, but some­times peo­ple ask us to “just put a frame around it so that I can hang it up”. That’s just not what we do, we need to remind them that once you hang a pic­ture up, it’s going to be up for a poten­tial­ly very long time, pos­si­bly ten or twen­ty years! If it is not pleas­ing to the eye you are going to get tired of it very quick­ly.  We’ve seen it before, it will grate on the mind that some­thing will have to be done about it, and so it will have to be either framed again, or tak­en down and pos­si­bly hung in the dark­est cor­ner of your house.

The job of a framer is to have an eye for the cur­rent fash­ion and design aes­thet­ic as well as impec­ca­ble time­less taste, take a sym­pa­thet­ic look at the item to be framed and also keep in mind the long-term pro­tec­tion of the item. Under­stand­ing what the cus­tomer likes and offer­ing sug­ges­tions based on all of these fac­tors is the goal, all with­out los­ing the aes­thet­ic or sen­ti­men­tal appeal of the item or picture.

Most of this comes with expe­ri­ence, we do this day-in, day-out, so we know what we’re talk­ing about. We know tra­di­tions and we spot trends, fram­ing is real­ly an art and craft combined.