Walk into most homeware shops and you'll find a wall of ready-made frames in standard sizes: A4, 10x8, 12x16. They're cheap, they're instant, and for a lot of things — a poster, a print you're not too precious about — they do the job. So when does it actually make sense to go custom instead?
The size problem ready-made frames don't solve
Ready-made frames are built around a handful of standard paper and print sizes. The moment your piece falls outside those — an odd-shaped canvas, a vintage print with unusual proportions, a textile like a shirt or a christening gown — you're stuck trimming the artwork to fit the frame, or living with awkward gaps under a mount that was never sized for it. Custom framing starts from the object itself and builds the frame, mount and glazing around its actual dimensions, so nothing gets cropped or squeezed.
What you're really paying for with custom framing
The price difference between custom and ready-made isn't just the frame moulding. It's the decisions made along the way: which mount board won't discolour the paper over time, whether the glazing needs to filter UV light, how the piece is mounted so it can be removed later without damage, and whether the materials touching the artwork are acid-free. None of that is visible when the frame is finished — it only shows up years later, in how well the piece has held up.
When ready-made is the sensible choice
It's worth being honest that not everything needs custom framing. A temporary print, a piece you might replace in a year, or anything where the emotional or financial value is low — ready-made is often the right call, and there's no reason to overspend on it. Custom framing earns its cost when the piece is one you want to still have in good condition in twenty or thirty years: original art, family photographs, memorabilia, or anything that can't be replaced.
A middle ground: reframing what you already have
You don't have to choose once and live with it forever. A piece that's currently in a ready-made frame can often be reframed properly later — the same artwork, better glazing and mounting, no need to start from scratch. It's a reasonable way to prioritise: buy ready-made now for the things that don't need it yet, and bring in the pieces that do need proper preservation-minded framing when the time comes.
Bringing a piece in
If you're not sure which category something falls into, that's a normal question to bring to a framer rather than guess at — seeing the actual piece makes it much easier to say whether ready-made will genuinely hold up or whether it's worth the custom route. At Versus Arts, our Hackney studio is set up for exactly that kind of conversation before any decision gets made.
