Johannes Vermeer painted his hometown of Delft from the south bank of the river Schie in about 1660-61. The picture is the only major townscape Vermeer ever produced. It shows a five-second moment of weather over the city just after a rainstorm. Marcel Proust saw it in 1902 and again in 1921, called it "the most beautiful painting in the world," and used it for his greatest passage on art and mortality in In Search of Lost Time.

In 1937 Theodor Adorno coined the term Spätstil — late style — for the paintings, drawings, and music a great artist makes in the last decade of life, when the rules they had spent half a century mastering begin to dissolve. A reading of five painters working in old age: Rembrandt's last self-portraits, Goya's late self-image, Hokusai's eighty-eighth year, Cézanne's final Mont Sainte-Victoire, and Monet's water lilies at the Orangerie.

The powder room is the smallest, most concentrated wall in the house. Six painting choices that earn their place on it — small enough to read at a glance, considered enough to hold up to close looking.

The stairwell is the most awkward vertical in the house — diagonal sightlines, two different eye-levels, ceiling that climbs as you do. Six layouts that solve it, from a single landing anchor to a stepped gallery wall.

The wall a visitor sees in the first three seconds tells them what kind of home this is. Six entryway compositions — single anchor, vertical portrait, quiet still life, gallery cluster, large-scale landscape, and intimate Cassatt — and the rules that hold each one together.

The wall above the sofa breaks more living rooms than any other. Six rules — width, height, anchor, orientation, colour temperature, and framing — and the paintings that prove each one.

A reading nook is the most demanding interior in the home. The room is small. The lamp is on. The chair holds you for hours. The art on the wall has to compete with neither the book in your hand nor the light overhead — it has to deepen both. Loud paintings exhaust the corner. Decorative posters thin it out. The right anchor reads as company. Below are seven compositions that work in a reading nook. Each centres on a single quiet painting from the canon — Caravaggio, Vermeer,

Ten curator-tested ways to decorate a large blank wall — single oversized prints, salon walls, triptychs, diptychs, leaning consoles, and minimalism done right.