How to Hang Art on Concrete Walls in Kenya (Without Wrecking the Wall)

Most hanging guides you'll find online assume drywall — the soft, hollow gypsum-board walls common in American and European homes, where a simple nail or a plastic anchor does the job. That advice doesn't transfer well here. The overwhelming majority of walls in Kenyan homes, from Nairobi apartments to Nakuru bungalows, are solid — concrete block or brick under plaster, sometimes with a skim coat of cement render. That single difference changes almost everything about how you should actually hang something.

The hardware that actually works here

Standard drywall anchors are close to useless on a solid concrete or plaster wall — there's no hollow cavity for them to expand into. What you actually want is a hardened steel picture hook with an angled pin built in, sold specifically for concrete, cement, and cinder block. These are widely available at Kenyan hardware retailers and on Jumia, usually in small, medium, and large sizes rated by weight capacity, and the installation genuinely is as simple as it sounds: position the hook, tap the pin straight into the wall with a hammer at the angle printed on the packaging, done. No masonry drill, no anchor plug, no dust cloud.

For anything heavier — a substantial framed canvas, a piece with a solid wood frame rather than a light print frame — you'll want a proper masonry drill bit and plastic wall plugs rated for the actual weight, driven with a screw rather than relying on a hammer-in pin. As a rough rule: hammer-in steel pin hooks handle light-to-medium framed prints comfortably; anything that needs two people to carry it into the room should get a drilled, plugged, screwed fixing instead, full stop.

Working out where, exactly

The most common hanging mistake, regardless of country, is hanging too high — a habit left over from taller ceilings and a general instinct to leave "breathing room" above furniture. The standard picture-hanging rule that actually works in practice: the centre of the artwork should land at roughly eye level, which for most adults works out to about 145–155cm from the floor to the centre point of the piece, not the top of the frame. If the piece is hanging above a sofa, console, or headboard, a better reference is 15–20cm of clearance above the furniture rather than measuring from the floor at all — that keeps the visual relationship between piece and furniture tight regardless of ceiling height.

For a wall with nothing else on it, work out the exact hanging point before you touch the hammer: measure the artwork's height, measure the hanging wire or D-rings' distance from the top of the frame, and do the arithmetic so the piece lands where you actually intended rather than eyeballing it and hoping. A tape measure and five minutes of arithmetic beats three extra holes in a concrete wall you'll then need to patch.

Grouping more than one piece

If you're hanging a cluster rather than a single piece, treat the whole group as one visual unit rather than hanging each piece independently. Lay the arrangement out on the floor first — genuinely, on the floor, in the actual spacing you're planning — before a single hook goes into the wall. Standard spacing between pieces in a grouped arrangement runs 5–8cm; tighter than that and the grouping reads as cluttered, looser and it reads as disconnected, like pieces that just happen to share a wall rather than a considered arrangement.

Once you're happy with the floor layout, the easiest way to transfer it to the wall without repeated measuring is to trace each piece's outline onto craft paper, cut the shapes out, and tape the paper templates to the wall in the planned positions — then hang directly through the paper, tearing it away once the hooks are set. It looks slightly ridiculous mid-process and saves an enormous amount of concrete-wall patching later.

What actually holds up over time here

Beyond the hanging itself, a few things matter specifically because of Kenyan conditions. Plaster walls, especially in older buildings, can be softer and more prone to crumbling around a hook point than solid poured concrete — press a fingernail into the wall near your intended hanging spot first; if it dents easily, that plaster is soft enough that a heavier piece may need to find a stud or a more solid section of wall rather than relying on the plaster surface alone to bear the weight.

Humidity matters too, particularly along the coast or during the long rains — a picture hook's steel pin won't rust meaningfully over a normal hanging lifespan, but check that any exposed screw heads or D-ring hardware on the frame itself are a rust-resistant finish if the piece will hang somewhere genuinely damp, like near an unshaded window that catches driving rain, or in a coastal home without much climate control. And keep anything you're hanging away from direct exterior-wall contact where you can — exterior walls run cooler and can sweat condensation on the inside during temperature swings, which is exactly the kind of dampness that damages a frame's backing board over years, even if the wall itself looks perfectly dry day to day.

Fixing a mistake hole properly

You will, at some point, put a hook in the wrong spot. On a concrete or plaster wall, a small patch job is genuinely simple and worth doing properly rather than just moving the piece to cover the mark. For a small pin-hook hole, a dab of ready-mixed filler or even ordinary toothpaste in a genuine pinch will fill it flush; let it dry fully, then a light sand and a dab of matching paint from a small touch-up pot finishes it invisibly. For a larger hole from a drilled anchor, a proper masonry filler applied in thin layers (it shrinks slightly as it cures, so one thick application often sinks and needs a second pass) gives a cleaner, longer-lasting result than trying to do it in one go.

Keep a small pot of your wall's actual paint colour on hand if you're planning to hang and rehang things over the years — colour-matching a patch months or years after the original paint job, from memory or a paint-shop scan of a faded wall, rarely comes out quite right, and a saved original tin solves that problem before it exists.

Hanging on tile, glass, and other non-standard surfaces

Bathrooms and some kitchens in Kenyan homes are frequently tiled well above the areas that actually need it, which leaves genuinely limited plain wall space for hanging anything — and drilling into tile carries its own real risk of cracking if it's done without the right approach. If you do need to hang something on tile, a masonry bit specifically rated for tile and glass, used at a slow speed with light, even pressure (never full drill speed and pressure straight away, which is what cracks tile), is the safer approach — and it's genuinely worth practising on a spare or hidden tile first if you've never drilled tile before, since the technique really does differ from drilling plain concrete.

An easier alternative for anything lightweight in a tiled space: strong adhesive hanging strips rated for tile and smooth surfaces, sold at most Kenyan hardware and homeware retailers, which avoid the drilling question entirely for anything under their stated weight limit — check that limit against your actual piece's weight rather than guessing, since these strips fail quietly (the piece simply falls) rather than warning you first.

Picture-perfect isn't actually the goal

One thing worth saying plainly: a slightly imperfect hang, a millimetre or two off level, genuinely doesn't matter and isn't worth the fourth hole in your wall to fix. Use a small spirit level once the hook is in and adjust the piece on the hook rather than re-hammering, and accept "close enough, looks level from across the room" as the actual finish line. The goal is art on your wall that you enjoy looking at, not a laser-measured installation — perfectionism here mostly just produces more holes.

Renting versus owning changes the calculation

If you're in a rented flat, the whole hanging question deserves a slightly different approach than it would in a home you own outright. Hammer-in steel-pin hooks are genuinely good news for renters specifically, because the mark they leave — a single small pinhole — is about as unobtrusive and easily patched as wall damage gets, considerably less of an issue at move-out than a drilled and plugged hole. Command-style adhesive strips, rated for the weight of light frames, are worth knowing about too as a genuinely no-damage option for lighter pieces, though they perform less reliably in humid conditions than their packaging sometimes suggests, and are worth testing on an inconspicuous spot before trusting them with anything you'd be upset to see fall.

Whatever method you use, photograph the wall before you start and again once everything's patched at move-out — a small, well-documented habit that heads off disputes over deposit deductions before they start.

If you're moving between rentals often, it's worth keeping your hanging hardware rather than leaving hooks behind each time — a small, labelled box of hooks, wall plugs, a spirit level, and a hammer is a genuinely useful thing to own and carry from place to place, and it means every new flat starts from "I have what I need" rather than another hardware-store trip before the first weekend.

A final word on patience with concrete

Compared to drywall, hanging on concrete or plaster genuinely takes a little more forethought — you can't casually reposition something with a second nail the way softer walls forgive — but that same solidity is also why work hung properly on it tends to stay exactly where you put it for years, with none of the sagging or loosening that a drywall anchor can develop over time under sustained weight. The extra five minutes of measuring at the start buys considerably more peace of mind than it costs.

And if a piece ends up slightly off level after all that care, that's fine too — a small spirit level and a gentle nudge on the hook fixes it in seconds, and it's a far smaller problem than the one you'd have created trying to avoid it by hammering three extra test holes into a solid wall you now need to patch instead. Solid walls reward a little patience up front; they're not asking for perfection, just enough care not to need a redo — and once it's up properly, it tends to simply stay up, for years, without a second thought — which is really the whole point of doing the measuring right the first time.

When to just get help

If you're dealing with a genuinely heavy piece — a large framed canvas, anything with glass over about 60cm across, or several pieces going up at once in a considered gallery-wall arrangement — it's worth the relatively small cost of having a local framer or handyman do the actual installation. Most framing shops that sell you a frame will also hang it, or can recommend someone who does this routinely, and it removes both the physical risk (a large glazed piece is genuinely awkward and occasionally dangerous to hang solo on a ladder) and the risk of a mis-drilled hole in a wall that's more expensive to patch neatly than the installation would have cost.

If you're building a considered collection over time rather than hanging one piece once, it's also worth knowing what you're hanging in the first place — [ArtCollect's browse page](/browse) has originals and editions from East African artists with real dimensions listed, which makes this whole planning process — hook size, spacing, hanging height — considerably easier to work out before the piece is even in the room.