Living with the work
Clients and colleagues in your house
6 min read ▪ 30 August 2026
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A guest can tell you what they think. A client cannot, and the judgement lands somewhere you never see. Willem van der Krieken maps the route instead of the room.
Is nude art at home a problem when clients visit?
Decide it by route, not by room. A business visitor sees perhaps four surfaces of your house: the hall, the room you sit in, the way to the table, and the downstairs cloakroom. Keep that route neutral and hang the direct work off it. The difference from a social guest is that a client cannot say what they think, so you never get to correct it.
- The downstairs cloakroom is the trap: alone, door shut, nothing else to look at.
- A study with a door removes the whole question in one move.
- If clients come weekly, this is a decision about your house, not about a visit.
The one difference that matters
A friend at dinner who finds a painting startling can say so, and you can answer, and by the pudding it is over. That entire mechanism is missing with a client.
A business visitor has to have no reaction. They will not mention it, you will not know whether it registered, and if it did register it goes into a judgement about you that gets made somewhere you are not present. There is no correction available because there is no conversation.
That is not a reason to strip the house. It is a reason to be deliberate, because the ordinary tools — hang it well, say three sentences, move the conversation on — do not work here. The three sentences assume somebody asks.
Map the route
The useful move is to stop thinking about rooms and think about the path a visitor physically takes. Most people's houses are large and most business visits use a very small part of them.
Walk it yourself, from the front door, at their pace, and look up. That takes two minutes and it produces a short list of walls — usually three or four. Every other wall in the house is outside the question entirely, which is a far better outcome than the vague sense that the whole ground floor is now a problem.
The four surfaces a business visitor sees
| Surface | How long they are in front of it | What to do |
|---|---|---|
| Hall and entrance | Ten to fifteen seconds, coat in hand | Neutral, or the least direct work. This is the wall that sets the tone |
| The room you sit in | An hour or more, seated, one fixed direction | Nothing on the wall the visitor faces. Side walls are fine |
| The route to the table or kitchen | Seconds, walking, at an angle | Almost anything works. Passed obliquely is the easiest condition there is |
| The downstairs cloakroom | Two minutes, alone, door shut | The one to think hardest about. See below |
Row two is the one people get wrong. They clear the hall and then sit a client for ninety minutes directly facing the living room wall — which is a great deal more exposure than the hall ever was. Seated eye level and a fixed direction are the same conditions that make a dining room wall a bad idea in the room-by-room guide.
The cloakroom trap
Everybody uses it, everybody uses it alone, the door is shut, the room is small, and there is nothing else in it to look at. It is the most concentrated viewing condition in the entire house, and it is the room people most often treat as a joke wall.
A downstairs cloakroom is a genuinely good room for a small canvas, as the bathroom article sets out — it is dry, it has a door, and the wall is at arm's length. But it is a good room for that canvas when the people using it are your friends. With clients in the house it is the single wall most likely to produce a judgement you never hear about.
If you use the house for work at all, this is the one wall worth deciding on purpose.
If your house is your office
There is a difference between a client who comes once and a practice run from home: a therapist, a coach, a physiotherapist, a photographer, anybody who sees people weekly in their own front room.
At that point it stops being a question about a visit and becomes a question about the room, and the answer is straightforward. The working room is a working room, and it gets the same consideration you would give any other professional space. That is not censorship of your own house; it is the same distinction anybody who works from home makes about a dozen other things.
What that buys you is the rest of the house, unconditionally. A study, a landing, a bedroom wall, a stairwell — none of them are on any client's route, and all of them are better walls for this work than a front room is. The stairwell in particular gives you the height and the distance that a ground floor never will.
What this is not
This is not an article about whether owning the work is professionally risky. It is not, and the framing is worth resisting: a painting in your home is not a statement made at work, and treating it as one concedes something that nobody actually asked you to concede.
What it is, is a practical accommodation for one specific asymmetry — that a person who is in your house on business cannot tell you what they think. That asymmetry is real for cleaners and tradespeople too, and the cleaner, the plumber and the painting deals with the version where you can simply say something in advance, which you usually cannot here.
If you are choosing a canvas for a house where clients come, the register of the work matters more than the room does. Lindsey (The Mirror) at 100 × 80 cm reads as a portrait first; several others do not, and that is exactly the distinction to be making. The whole collection is worth walking through with the route in mind.
Questions people ask
Is it unprofessional to have erotic art at home if clients visit?
No. A painting in your home is not a statement made at work. What is worth planning for is the asymmetry: a business visitor cannot say what they think, so any reaction goes into a judgement you never get to answer. Plan the route rather than stripping the house.
Which walls should I keep neutral for a client visit?
The four surfaces a business visitor actually uses: the hall, the wall they face while seated, the route to the table, and the downstairs cloakroom. Walk it from the front door and look up. Every other wall in the house is outside the question.
What about the downstairs toilet?
It is the trap. Everybody uses it alone with the door shut, in a small room with nothing else to look at, which makes it the most concentrated viewing condition in the house. It is a good wall for a small canvas among friends and the riskiest one with clients.
What if I see clients at home every week?
Then it is a decision about the room rather than about a visit, and the working room should be treated as a working space. That buys you the rest of the house without conditions: a study, a landing, a bedroom or a stairwell, none of which are on a client's route.
