What to put above a bar cart

The wall above a bar cart is part of the cart. An unstyled wall makes even a perfectly arranged cart look temporary — like something delivered rather than placed — and it is the most common unfinished element in a home bar setup.

Three numbers decide it: how high, how wide, and how many pieces.

How high: 6 to 10 inches above the top shelf

The gap between the top of the cart and the bottom of the frame should be roughly 6 to 10 inches. Closer than 6 and the two objects merge into one confused mass; further than 10 and the art stops relating to the cart and starts floating on the wall by itself.

Cart heights run 32 to 36.5 inches, so the bottom of the frame lands somewhere between 38 and 46 inches from the floor. That is below standard gallery height, which is normal — art hung above furniture relates to the furniture, not to a room's eye level.

How wide: about two-thirds of the cart

A piece roughly two-thirds to three-quarters of the cart's width reads as belonging to it. On a 24 inch cart that is a 16 to 18 inch frame; on a 33 inch cart, 22 to 25 inches.

Narrower than half the cart's width and the art looks lost above it. Wider than the cart and the cart looks like it wandered underneath something that was already there — which is occasionally the effect you want in a large room and rarely elsewhere.

How many: one

One piece, most of the time. Two small frames above a cart almost always reads as indecision, because a cart is a small object and a pair of frames divides an already-small area.

The exception is a genuinely deco arrangement, where symmetry is the point — two matched pieces flanking a center line works, because it is doing something deliberate rather than hedging.

When a mirror beats a picture

Three situations:

• A dark corner. A mirror throws light back into the space, which is the same reason mirrored shelves exist — see glass versus mirrored shelves.
• A cart in a hallway. Mirrors belong in circulation space, and a cart in a hallway is usually a placement decision made under constraint.
• A collection worth doubling. A mirror behind bottles makes six look like twelve, which is the cheapest way to make a six-bottle cart look fuller without adding bottles.

What else works

• A single shelf. One floating shelf about 12 inches above the cart adds storage without floor footprint, and it is the natural extension of the argument in bar cart versus floating shelves.
• A wall sconce. Light on a bar cart is genuinely useful and almost nobody does it. A cart in a dark corner with its own light is transformed.
• Nothing, if the wall is already busy. A cart against wallpaper or exposed brick does not need anything above it, and adding some is how a corner becomes noisy.

The order to do this in

Place the cart, style the cart, then hang the wall. Doing it the other way around fixes the art at a height and width chosen before you knew where the cart's top shelf would land — and the 6 to 10 inch gap is measured from that shelf, not from the floor. The styling method itself is in how to style a bar cart.