Blending Various Molding Trim Styles

By Mark Clement

Create a new room look for an old room by blending various trim styles and building a home-improvement design vocabulary.

The Madison Avenue advertising culture categorizes the magazine in your hands as a “shelter book.” Too many shelter books are packed with pretty pictures of homes and a few buzz words, but there’s often not a syllable about how to actually make it happen. As a contractor and homeowner with my own fixer-upper, I’ve been handed my share of pictures cut out from shelter books and been asked: Can you make my dining room look like this?

The answer is usually yes, but in figuring out how to pull it off there’s been an unintended consequence: I’ve built a design vocabulary. And, now that I have it, I use it more than I ever thought. Truthfully, the nuance of design isn’t something I gave much bandwidth to as a young carpenter, but lo and behold, it’s an essential tool. I use it in every client meeting—especially those that involve my own home. More and more I’m called into an empty room (a cube of drywall) and tasked with turning it into something spectacular, and on a budget, naturally.

This is a labor of love because I adore houses, especially houses imbued with the charm of an identifiable architectural style, which I find is usually expressed in trim details. And it’s trim work that brings me to the thrust of this piece: Bolding the Molding is “how-to” heavy, but its ulterior motive is to blend design sensibility with steel-on-wood detail for uniquely crafting new spaces.

While I welcome you to adopt the trim techniques shown here (all I ask is, as Kevin Costner said in Bull Durham, “When you speak of me, speak well”), I hope it fires some synapses to those more esoteric elements of design—stuff like proportion, mass, shadow, light and subtlety. Those elements form the outline of the drawings we “color in” with our miter saws and nail guns.

Crowning Glory

To say there’s a bewildering assortment of crown moldings to choose from is an accurate statement. To narrow the field I walk the aisles of my lumber yard and home center and grab samples of the profiles that jump out at me. Then, I take cut-offs home (or to customers) and put them up in a ceiling corner, step back (or I stand on a ladder while my wife or customer steps back) and we take a look. It’s an effective—and cheap—way to test out different looks, styles and sizes.

A note about molding sizes: Most houses I encounter have an 8-foot ceiling. Whereas higher ceilings afford more design flexibility, the 8-foot height usually truncates the mass of the molding you can use to anything 4-1/2 inches and under. Forcing an oversize molding into a too-small room—while tempting—overpowers the space. And, it comes too close to standard window casings, leaving you barely a sliver of wall space for paint. One way to gain space for a larger crown assembly in an 8-foot tall room is to incorporate trimless windows. (Editor’s Note: Learn how to do this at www.extremehowto.com, by reading Mark Clement’s article, “Add Flare with Trimless Windows.”)

The trimless windows of the house shown allowed room to combine a lovely MDF crown from Lowe’s new EverTrue brand molding (www.lowes.com). And, because I had the extra inches above the window, I beefed it up with base-molding backers along the wall and ceiling, delivering just the right mass and shadow line, elegance and detail for this room.

Installing the Crown

The first thing I do in a project like this is to use blue tape to mark the stud locations. This allows me to find the studs quickly without punching holes in the drywall to locate them.