Vintage Travel Posters and Cityscapes at Home: Style, Placement and Framing

There is a reason vintage travel posters never seem to go out of fashion. They were designed to make you long for somewhere else, and a hundred years later they still do. A flat-colour Alpine lake, a steamship pulling out of a harbour, a railway poster promising sunshine on a southern coast: these images carry optimism in a way very little modern decoration manages.

Cityscapes do something related but different. Instead of promising a journey, they hold a place still: a skyline at dusk, a rain-slicked boulevard, a bridge in morning fog. Together, the two make up some of the most versatile wall art you can own. This guide explains what defines the style, where each kind works best in a home, and how to frame it so it looks collected rather than bought.

What makes a vintage travel poster

The golden age of travel posters ran roughly from the 1890s to the late 1920s, when railways, shipping lines and resorts commissioned artists to sell destinations. The posters that have survived share a visual language:

• Flat blocks of colour rather than shading. Skies are a single blue, mountains a few stepped tones.
• Strong, simple composition. One landmark or one view, drawn to be read from across a railway station.
• Bold typography as part of the picture, often naming the place or the line in a heavy, elegant typeface.
• A limited palette, usually four to six colours, which is why they sit so easily in a decorated room.

Because these designs are from before 1930, most are in the public domain, and the Art Nouveau and early Art Deco influence, think of Mucha's flowing lines or the geometric confidence of the 1920s, gives them a sophistication that newer "retro-style" imitations rarely match. If you enjoy this period, our fine art prints and illustration wall art collections include work in a similar spirit.

Cityscapes: the quieter cousin

A cityscape can be a vintage illustration too, but today the term covers photography, painterly skylines and graphic line drawings. What they have in common is a sense of a specific place and a specific moment of light. Monochrome photographs of New York, Paris or Istanbul, Hopper-era paintings of empty streets, and modern long-exposure shots of a city at night all count.

Where a travel poster is cheerful and outward-looking, a cityscape is usually more atmospheric. That makes them easy to combine: a bright poster brings energy to a room, a moody cityscape brings depth. Browse our cityscape prints collection to see the range, from graphic skylines to soft, misty streets.

Where to hang them in the home

Hallway and entrance. Travel posters were born to be seen in transit, and a corridor is the modern equivalent. A row of three posters in matching frames, 30×45 cm (12"×18") or 40×60 cm (16"×24") each, turns a hallway into a small gallery and gives guests something to look at while they take off their coats.

Home office. This is where cityscapes come into their own. A large monochrome skyline behind a desk, 60×90 cm (24"×36") or 70×100 cm (28"×40"), is calm on video calls and gives the eye a horizon to rest on. A single travel poster of somewhere you would rather be is a gentler motivational tool than any slogan.

Living room. One large poster above a sofa works if the room's palette is already simple; let the poster bring the colour. In a busier room, a cityscape in black and white is safer and still makes a statement at 80×110 cm (32"×43").

Kitchen and dining. Posters for coastal resorts, wine regions and old railway lines feel completely natural near a dining table. Their flat colour stands up well to the bright, practical light of a kitchen.

Bedroom. Keep posters here soft in palette, a pale seaside scene for instance, or choose a cityscape in evening tones. A pair of small portrait posters above two bedside tables is a classic arrangement.

The travel wall. Many people build a wall of posters for places they have actually visited. It works best when every piece is the same size and frame, so the memories, not the hardware, are what varies.

Framing: period or contemporary?

You have two honest routes. The period route frames the poster the way a collector might have in 1925: a walnut or black wooden frame, or a thin gold floating frame for Art Nouveau-leaning designs. This flatters the cream paper tones and bold typography and suits traditional and mid-century rooms.

The contemporary route deliberately contrasts the old image with a modern treatment. A white floating frame, an oak floating frame, or a gallery wrap with no frame at all makes a vintage poster feel fresh and graphic, closer to a piece of modern design than an antique. In a minimal, Scandinavian or industrial room, this is usually the stronger choice.

For cityscapes, black frames are the default for good reason: they sharpen photography and echo the lines of the buildings. Monochrome cityscapes can also go frameless as a gallery wrap, where the image wrapping around the edge adds to the sense of depth.

Whichever route you take, printing on canvas rather than paper gives a poster a surface texture closer to the original lithographs than glossy paper ever does. All of our pieces are printed on 380 gsm poly-cotton artist canvas with archival pigment inks, so the flat colours stay flat and the reds and blues stay saturated for years.

Sizes and orientation

Original travel posters were almost always portrait and quite large, so the format rewards a tall, generous size. 50×75 cm (20"×30") or 60×90 cm (24"×36") in portrait feels authentic for a single poster. For a group, 30×45 cm (12"×18") or 40×60 cm (16"×24") keeps the grouping manageable on an ordinary wall. Cityscapes, by contrast, are naturally landscape; a wide 70×100 cm (28"×40") skyline or a panoramic 90×150 cm (36"×59") piece gives the city room to stretch. Most of our artworks are available in portrait, landscape and square, so you can match the format to your wall.

Bringing a sense of place home

Start with one piece that means something: the city where you live, the coast you return to every summer, the place you have not reached yet. Choose portrait for a poster and landscape for a skyline, pick a frame from the period route or the contemporary route depending on the rest of the room, and let that one piece set the tone before you build a wall around it.

When you are ready to find yours, our cityscape prints collection is the place to begin.