Focus of living room help (with diagrams!)

[KeirStarmerisMarkDarcy]

Looking for help working out placement of picture frames / art work in new home. I'm worried that there will be too many focal points if I'm not careful.
Where I'm moving is a Victorian cottage with the front room and dining room knocked through. You therefore have two fire places at either end of the room, and an alcove in the middle. I have drawn a diagram! The sofa is going to be in the living area (as per diagram) facing the fireplace with a large framed artwork on the chimney breast. This is already up and I love the way this area looks.

The question is now about the rest of that long wall and where to place my other frames. In the alcove between the two fireplaces (where the dividing wall used to be) I have a low mid century sideboard. In front of chimney breast 2 is the dining table. Note, chimney breast 2 has no actual fireplace so just a plain chimney breast.

In my last place I had a gallery wall (diagram attached) above my sofa. If I put this in the alcove above the sideboard, will that be overkill, given I've already put a frame up on the chimney breast?

Should I only reserve frames for the two chimney breasts and leave the alcove blank? It's quite a large wide space though so I'm not sure.

I guess that whilst knocking through the two rooms has provided a nice larger space, it could be a challenge to maintain the focus of each "area".

Diagrams attached!

Hopeful bump

I think if there is artwork on the chimney breasts, I would do wall shelving above the sideboard. Or replace sideboard with Welsh dresser style unit or something tall at least if affordable (or sideboard not sentimental!).

Keir's suggestion would work, but an alternative might be to have a gallery wall at right angles to the chimney-breast-facing the sofa. Maybe with a low bookcase or low lamp table or side table to the left of the sofa; the gallery of pictures could be above that. In that way, the pictures would 'mark out' the sitting area.

But it all depends on what happens in the rest of the room, behind the sofa, for example, and also on the size of the wall to be used as a gallery in realtion to the number of pictures you want to display on it.

Thanks @scottishnames. The wall to the left of the sofa is actually a window, as is the wall to the right of the dining area. Behind the sofa there are bookcases though.

If you are someone who likes art, fill the walls up. Put the pictures you like in spaces where you see them and make you smile. I sometimes put small pictures on narrow walls, eg just inside a door, to catch my eye as I walk past.

There are no formal rules for this - just stick things up.

Your diagrams are so good!
Which makes me think you have a much better eye than me...

But fwiw, I like a bit of clutter in a Victorian house, they suit it with the higher ceilings so that would be my first bash. Can easily be changed if it doesn't work.