THE SALT & SOL BLOGS

Hamptons vs Boho Coastal — Which Style Fits Your Home
Two coastal styles dominate Australian interiors in 2026, and they pull in opposite directions. Hamptons coastal is polished, symmetrical, and decidedly grown-up — think tailored linen, navy and white, sash windows, panelled walls. Boho coastal is loose, textured, and more bohemian — woven rugs, raw timbers, mixed patterns, a sense of personal collection over coordinated set. They use a lot of the same building blocks (coastal palette, natural materials, plenty of white) and arrive at completely different rooms. This guide helps you work out which one suits your house and... Read more...
How to Build a Coastal Gallery Wall — Step by Step
A well-built gallery wall is the most flexible piece of decorating you can do. It works in any room, scales to any wall size, and lets you weave together different formats, frame styles, and subjects in a way a single piece never can. A poorly built gallery wall, on the other hand, looks like a junk drawer of mismatched art that someone hung in a rush. The difference between the two is mostly process. This guide walks through the actual steps we use when helping customers plan a coastal gallery... Read more...
Coastal Art for Kids' Bedrooms — What Works (and What Doesn't)
Kids' bedrooms are the easiest room to overdo with coastal styling. The temptation is to lean into bright cartoon dolphins, novelty surf-board shaped signs, and posters of tropical fish swimming through technicolour reefs. The result is a room that looks fun for about six months and embarrassing for the next eight years. Kids grow out of overtly themed rooms much faster than parents grow out of paying for them. The smarter path is to choose coastal art that suits children now and still suits them when they're twelve. This guide... Read more...
Aerial Coastal Photography vs Traditional Seascapes — Which to Pick
Two very different photographic traditions sit under the umbrella of "coastal art" and the choice between them often confuses buyers. On one side, aerial coastal photography — those drone or helicopter shots looking straight down on turquoise water, breaking waves, sweeping beaches. On the other, traditional seascape photography taken from the shoreline or close to water level. Both can be beautiful, both belong in coastal homes, and they do completely different things on a wall. This guide helps you work out which suits your space and your taste. We'll walk... Read more...
How to Style Coastal Art in a Non-Beach Home
You don't have to live within walking distance of the surf to love coastal art. Plenty of our customers are in inner-city Melbourne apartments, established Brisbane suburbs, leafy Sydney terraces, and Adelaide homes a long way from any coastline. The art still works in those spaces — it just needs a slightly different framing to avoid looking like you've imported a holiday house into a city home. This guide is about how to use coastal pieces in homes where everything else is decidedly non-coastal. The principle that runs through it... Read more...
How to Choose Large-Scale Wall Art for Your Living Room
The first time you see a 200 cm canvas in a real living room, two things hit you. The first is how much smaller it makes the room feel — counterintuitively, oversized art tends to make a space feel more grounded and intentional, not cramped. The second is how badly the wall reads without it once you take it down. Large-scale art is a different category to small framed prints; the rules around buying, sizing, and hanging are genuinely different. This guide is the conversation we have on the phone... Read more...
Best Colours for Beach-Style Living Rooms
The shorthand for "beach-style colours" used to mean white-on-white with a few seagrass cushions and a pale blue throw. It still can, but Australian coastal interiors have grown up over the last decade. The current generation of beach-style living rooms is warmer, more grounded, and more confident with colour than the version your aunt furnished her holiday house in around 2008. This guide covers the palettes that are working now, the colours to avoid, and how to anchor any of these schemes around a single piece of wall art. It's... Read more...
Why Canvas Prints Fade in Australian Sun (and How to Prevent It)
Australia gets some of the most punishing UV in the inhabited world. Our UV index hits 11 and 12 throughout summer in the northern states — readings that would be considered emergency-level in most of Europe. That same sunlight pouring through your sliding doors is what makes your home feel beautiful at four in the afternoon, and it's also quietly bleaching the artwork on the wall opposite. If you've ever taken down a canvas after five years and noticed the imagery is half a shade lighter where the sun hit... Read more...
Is Canvas or Framed Print Better for Humid Coastal Homes?
If your house is within sniffing distance of the ocean, the substrate you choose for your wall art matters more than the imagery does. Humidity, salt air, and sliding doors that stay open from October to April all do quiet damage to artwork that wasn't built for them. The question we get asked most often is whether canvas or framed paper prints hold up better in those conditions. The honest answer is that both can work — but only if you understand what each one actually does in a humid... Read more...
What Is Coastal Art Style? A 2026 Buyer's Guide
If you walked into ten "coastal" homes today, you'd find ten different versions of the same idea. Coastal art is one of the loosest categories in interior design — it covers everything from grainy black-and-white surf photography to soft botanical paintings of seaweed to bold abstract waves rendered in acrylic. There's no single look, and that's part of why people find it hard to shop for. This guide pulls the category apart so you can work out which version of coastal art suits the room you're decorating, and which pieces... Read more...
How to Decorate a Coastal Home Wall (Without Going Kitsch)
There's a particular dread that hits when you say "coastal style" out loud — the image of a wooden sign that says "Beach This Way" with a rope arrow, hung above a glass jar of shells, next to a cushion stitched with the word "Relax". That isn't coastal styling. That's a souvenir shop, and it's exactly what most thoughtful Australian homeowners want to avoid when they're trying to bring the feel of the ocean into a real, lived-in house. The good news is that proper coastal decorating is genuinely restrained.... Read more...
What Size Coastal Art Should I Choose for My Room?
The single most common mistake we see when people buy wall art for a coastal-style room is going too small. A 60 x 40 cm print floating above a 2.4 metre sofa looks like a postage stamp on a billboard, and no amount of clever framing fixes it. The good news is that sizing isn't guesswork. Once you know the rough ratios that designers use, choosing the right canvas or print for your room becomes a five-minute job rather than a six-week agony of indecision. This guide covers the practical... Read more...