The simplest way to make a poster look built-in rather than added-on is to pull one or two colours from the artwork and echo them in the room — a cushion, a wall, a bar stool. Work from the poster out

Elisha Brown Bird’s poster for The Chap-Book (1896) is a fine example of the American ‘little magazine’ poster at its decorative peak. Architecturally trained and steeped in the ornamental Art Nouveau

A mat — the card border between a print and its frame — does more than fill space: it gives the image room to breathe, protects the paper, and makes a modest print look considered. The reliable choice

Penrhyn Stanlaws’ cover for Judge, the American humour magazine, comes from a Scottish-born illustrator who became one of the best-known creators of the American ‘magazine girl’ — the glamorous, fashi

A gallery wall of posters works when it reads as one composition, not a scatter of frames. The reliable method is to treat the group as a single rectangle: lay it out on the floor first, keep even gap

Louis Rhead’s poster for the Century Magazine’s 1894 Midsummer Holiday Number is a high point of the American magazine poster — flat decorative colour and strong outline in the manner Rhead had absorb

For a yoga or pilates studio, the quiet end of Art Nouveau is the natural fit: Mucha’s flowing, graceful figures and the softer decorative posters of the Belle Époque, whose calm lines and pale colour

Ethel Reed’s 1895 poster Folly or Saintliness is the work of the first American woman to win real fame as a poster artist — and one of the era’s most intriguing lost figures. A Boston prodigy celebrat

The natural wall art for a hair salon is Art Nouveau — above all Alphonse Mucha, whose flowing-haired women are the direct ancestors of modern beauty imagery. A salon is one of the few rooms where a p

Alphonse Mucha’s 1896 poster for La Dame aux Camélias, made for Sarah Bernhardt, is pure ‘style Mucha’ — a tall, quiet panel of a woman haloed in stars and flowers, drawn in the flowing line and soft