How to Decorate a Hallway

The keys go on the first flat surface inside the front door. In a lot of houses here that’s a chair nobody ever sits on, and within a year it’s holding the post as well, and the beach bag, and the hallway has turned into a sort of waiting room for things on their way somewhere else.

Hallways get decorated last because nobody spends any time in them. They’re also the first thing anybody sees, so they colour the whole house on arrival, and getting one right takes surprisingly little. How to decorate a hallway is mostly a question of a slim console with a mirror over it and a lamp that isn’t on the ceiling. Shoes are the other problem, and we’ll come to them.

The console, and a mirror lower than you think

Depth is what people get wrong with consoles. Corridors here tend to run between 90 centimetres and 1.2 metres wide, and in that space anything deeper than about 30 centimetres starts catching hips and shopping bags (25 is often plenty). It’s the length that can be generous. Where the hallway is really the first two metres of an open-plan ground floor the rules relax, because the console is simply the first piece of furniture in the room.

The mirror usually goes up too high. We hang them with the centre at roughly 150 centimetres off the floor, which looks low on a bare wall and turns out right once someone stands in front of it; any higher and what most people see is the ceiling. In a dark entrance a mirror also doubles whatever light there is (more on that in mirrors to enlarge a space).

A lamp, before anything else

If we could change only one thing in most hallways, it would be this. Plenty of older Algarve houses have one small window by the door or none at all, and a front door facing north means the hall stays dim from January to December. One bulb in the ceiling is the usual answer, and it makes the place feel like a corridor in an office.

A lamp on the console, with a warm bulb in it, is the first thing you see coming home at night. That alone does most of the work. In a long hallway a wall light at the far end helps as well, and why it all works is in the importance of lighting.

Shoes, and the floor under them

Shoes are the clutter nobody escapes. The best answer we know is a bench whose seat lifts, so they go inside and you have somewhere to sit while you put them on; coats can go on hooks behind the door, out of sight whenever it’s open. If the hallway has an awkward recess, a slim cabinet made to measure for it swallows more than you’d expect.

The floor in most houses here is terracotta or stone. Beautiful, but cold and echoey as a first impression, and a runner fixes that. Choose one that copes with sand: flatweave wool or jute, both in our guide on how to choose a rug. Sand isn’t the only thing that comes through the door, either. In spring and autumn the levante leaves a fine layer of dust on everything nearby, which is a good reason to prefer sealed wood or stone to untreated cane on the console (furniture care covers the wiping).

The hall collection is in both H&P Mobiliário e Decoração showrooms, in Albufeira and Armação de Pêra, arranged the way it would be at home, which is a better way to choose than one photograph at a time. Come and have a look. The chair by the door can go back to the dining room.