Decorating Tip: Beef-up Your Architecture

An Eastlake Style Cornice

Rooms are more than just walls, floors and ceilings. A space is really defined by the architecture of the room. Whether your home is sleek and modern or overflowing with gingerbread, the character of your décor comes from the prevalent moldings and architectural details.


An easy and inexpensive way to change the look of a room is to add some decorative molding. The addition of crown molding gives a room a more finished look and radiates a comfortable sense of tradition. If you already have crown molding, adding a “picture rail” (a narrower strip of molding), four or five inches below the crown, will bring grandeur and height to the room. Picture rails were originally used, as the name would suggest, as a means of suspending pictures from the molding so that the delicate plaster of the walls would not be marred by holes.

Creating a cornice or a pediment above a door or window gives the opening more importance and also serves to make your room appear taller. Similarly, adding a chair rail or wainscoting gives weight to the room and can make it seem larger.

If the idea of using a miter box and a saw to cut molding seems a little overwhelming, you can always achieve the same effect with paint. Using painters’ tape and some creativity, you can create the look of paneling, cornices, and other decorative moldings very inexpensively. Use your imagination. Any room in your home can emulate your favorite style of architecture.