El Greco, Zurbaran, Murillo and Ribera defined a century of Spanish painting. Ten works show how they turned deep shadow into faith, poverty, and stillness.

For five centuries red was the costliest pigment a painter could buy. Six portraits, from van Eyck to Sargent, show how one colour signalled faith, wealth, and command.

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.

Searching for Gustav Klimt's The Kiss? This is the painting: 180 by 180 centimetres of oil and gold leaf, two clothed figures kneeling on a flowering meadow, painted at the peak of Klimt's Golden Phase. What the painting shows, why he used so much gold, and how to bring the fine print home.

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.

An engineer who became a sculptor, then a sculptor who became a draughtsman in colour. Three rules — balance, colour, movement — carried Calder's whole career.

Classical art prints that hold a long living room wall — Caravaggio, Sargent, Vermeer, Whistler. With size and frame brief.

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