Wandplaner: planning a salon wall to the centimetre

Moving flat does something to your Instagram feed. One week you’re looking at moving boxes, the next your entire feed is interior ideas. I’m in that bubble now. And the bubble has a favourite: the salon wall.

The bubble

You know the look. Frames in different sizes, mixed with things that aren’t frames at all: a plant hanging on the wall, a skateboard deck, a record. It looks random. It isn’t. Every good salon wall is planned to the centimetre, it just pretends not to be.

And then there are passepartouts. Nothing is sadder than a nice frame with a print just slapped in cold. A passepartout makes everything a bit more classy. It also makes planning the whole shit a lot more complicated, because suddenly every frame has an outer size, a visible size and an opinion.

Paper? Please.

I didn’t plan this on paper, or with masking tape on the wall. Digital native, remember. This is exactly the kind of thing Claude builds really fast, and it did: a few prompts, about an hour, and the first version worked.

Then came the part that always takes longer. The good old designer perfectionism. The sideboard had to be in there with its real dimensions, so I could plan around it. The TV had to sit at the right height. The Ambilight needed its breathing room, so no frame gets too close. None of that was necessary. All of it was necessary.

Here’s a tiny version of it. Same idea, fewer frames:

What the real one does

The part Claude came up with

Some of it I never asked for. Where exactly the nails go, how high above the top edge, how to hang a skateboard deck with two brackets: Claude interpreted a lot of that on its own. I’m clearly not the first person to build something like this, so it pulled from somewhere.

Does the drill plan actually work? Honest answer: I don’t know yet. Ask me again after the drill.

What went wrong

Nothing, so far. Which mostly means the drill hasn’t touched the wall yet.

And yes, I’m aware of the irony. In my portfolio rant I make fun of greenfield projects built in an hour. This is one. The difference: it’s for one wall and one user, it has zero governance meetings, and I would never call it a design system.

The best side projects solve a problem nobody else has. Mine is 52 frames and one wall.

What’s next

Big plants on the floor, so the wall and the stuff in front of it can be planned together. Maybe a fancy lava lamp. Why not.

the finished wall, coming as soon as the drill is charged

Steal it

The planner is public. It’s in German, sorry. But German is just English with more consonants, you’ll manage.

Option one, for normal people: open it in the browser. Done. Your wall stays in your browser, nothing gets uploaded anywhere.

And if you plan your own wall with it, send me a picture. I’ll show you mine once it’s done.