Most business owners approach art in the office the way they approach the carpet: something has to be there, it should not offend anyone, and the designer will handle it. The result is the art you see in every waiting room. Nobody looks at it, which is exactly what it was chosen for.

Art is not an accessory. It is a meeting point between a person and a space, and in a workplace the person is not only you. It is every client who sits across from you, and the work on your wall speaks before you do.

What clients read on your walls

Three things, in about this order.

• Taste. An original work, framed for the piece and hung at the right height, tells a client that details are attended to here. A stretched canvas print from a catalog tells them the opposite, and they notice even when they cannot say why.
• Character. A law firm that chooses a quiet, serious painting is saying something different from a clinic that chooses warm color and figures. Neither is wrong. What matters is that the choice is deliberate and matches how you actually work.
• Confidence. A single strong work in the room where decisions are made says more than ten small ones in the corridor. Fewer, better, larger is nearly always the right answer in a workplace.

How I choose it: four questions

1. Who are you, really? Not the brand book. What you love, where you come from, what you want the day to feel like. The best office art is personal, because personal is what people trust.
2. Who walks in? A patient in a clinic needs calm. A client in a law firm needs to feel that the place is steady. A creative studio can afford to provoke. I choose for the room's real audience.
3. What does the room allow? Wall size, sightlines from the door and from the visitor's chair, natural light, the color of the joinery. A work has to hold the wall from across the room, and it has to survive the lighting you already have or the lighting we add.
4. What is the budget, and what is it for? One anchor work and two supporting pieces is a different plan from a corridor of twelve photographs. I build the plan to the budget you approve, and because I buy through direct relationships with artists, the cost of the work itself often comes down.

A home office in Caesarea: horses and music

A client with a home office in a luxury residence in Caesarea had two loves, horses and music. Those two words were the whole brief. I looked for artists living and working in his country of origin, so that the work would carry something of where he came from, and we acquired one existing painting and commissioned a second work specially from the same artist.

The office now has two works that belong to one person and to no one else. A visitor understands within a few seconds who they are dealing with, and the client sees his own life on the wall every morning. That is the whole test for art in a workspace: it should be true, and it should be yours.

Where the art goes

Reception and the entrance take the anchor work, the one that sets the tone. The meeting room takes something that rewards a long look, because people spend an hour there. Your own office takes the most personal piece. Corridors and waiting areas can carry a series, editioned photographs or works on paper, hung as one group rather than one per wall.

For clinics I lean toward warmth and calm: color that softens the room without becoming decoration. For firms, weight and quality: fewer works, better made, well framed. For a home office, the Caesarea rule: choose what is yours.

What I handle

Working with luxury hospitality groups, I have built art concepts for the lobby of the Waldorf Astoria in Chengdu, the bar and guest rooms of the St. Regis in Amman, and restaurants and staterooms for Holland America Line. The discipline is the same for a firm of six people: research, selection, negotiation, production, framing and installation, on a defined timeline and an approved budget. You approve the direction and the works. I manage everything in between, and the job is done when the work is on the wall and you are fully satisfied.

If you are building or refreshing a business space, write to me with a few photos of the rooms and a sentence about what you do. If your interior designer is already on the project, read how the two of us work together. If this is the first serious work you are buying, start here.