About This Style
The Family Crest is the version of your family you would present. The Whole House is the version that exists.
It paints everyone on the sofa at the end of a day: people slightly untidy in weekend clothes, the child wedged between the adults, the dog's head across somebody's lap, the cat on the arm refusing to participate. Nobody is arranged. The composition works because that is genuinely how a household sits, not because anybody was told where to go.
The treatment is contemporary painterly realism with visible brushwork, lit with warm lamp light mixed into the last of the daylight, colour held to a muted domestic range. The room is loose. The faces are not. That contrast is what stops it reading as a photograph with a filter and makes it read as a painting somebody chose to make.
It is the most-lived-with picture in the catalogue. Formal portraits get admired; this one gets glanced at every day, and the reason is that it does not ask anything of the people in it. Nobody has to have been having a good hair day.
It handles three to four subjects in any mix of people and animals, and it is the natural choice for a household where the animals genuinely outnumber the people.
Frequently Asked Questions
How many people and pets can be in it?
Three or four subjects in total, in any mix. Two adults with two pets, two adults and a child with one pet, one adult with three pets: all of these work.
Do we need a photo of everyone together on the sofa?
No. Send one clear photo per person and per pet. We build the sofa scene ourselves, which is a good thing, because getting a dog, a cat and a child to sit on a sofa at the same time is the problem this style is solving.
How is this different from The Family Crest?
Same cast, opposite register. The Family Crest is a formal Renaissance group portrait in period dress. The Whole House is a modern candid in the clothes you own. Choose the Crest for an occasion and the House for a living room.