Tips for Upgrading the Interior of a Home

Upgrading a home’s interior often involves fresh paint, new flooring or updated light fixtures. But one of the best ways to enhance home interiors is to upgrade the millwork throughout.

High-quality millwork turns a home into a sophisticated sanctuary. Millwork details add beautiful finishing touches to the home, tying together rooms, creating focal points and ensuring a cohesive style. Custom millwork adds architectural interest, with professionally crafted moldings, archways, mantels and more.

Below are four different ways to enhance home interiors with custom millwork.

1. Install Crown Molding

Crown molding is making a comeback in modern home design, as designers seek to blend contemporary sleekness with rich decor details. Today, modern, custom crown molding can make a smooth transition between the ceiling and walls.

Designing contemporary crown moldings for a home’s interior requires understanding each room’s proportions. Rooms with high ceilings, primarily highly trafficked spaces like living rooms and kitchens, need more substantial crown moldings to balance the white space and add further dimension.

Rooms with average or low ceiling heights can also benefit from moldings. Designing scaled-back moldings for around windows and doorways can help make the room appear larger, brighter and more pulled together. Moldings add depth and can help make a room feel more spacious when strategically placed and used in the appropriate measurements. These design features draw the eye upward, creating the illusion of taller ceilings.

Some popular custom crown molding styles include the following.

• Traditional: Traditional crown molding is a classic three-piece style of trim. You may see it in interiors of Craftsman-style homes and other more conventional designs.
• Cove: Unlike traditional crown molding, which provides a sharp 90-degree multi-dimensional trim, cove or curved molding softens a home’s corners and angles. Cove molding has a concave semicircular profile and is typically less ornate than traditional molding.
• Flat: Flat molding is a sleek and simple trim style that can achieve the same effect as traditional crown molding but in a more streamlined look. Flat molding can enhance the junction of walls and ceilings, around windows and doorways or as baseboard molding.
• Bead and pearl: For a more intricate trim style, choose a bead or pearl design for crown molding. Consisting of a row of rounded shapes, these detailed trim designs are ideal for homeowners seeking a polished home interior style.

Applying crown molding in precise locations throughout your home is a beautiful upgrade to make using custom millwork.

2. Add Wall Frames

Wall frames, also known as picture frame molding, are a stylish interior trim designers use to add architectural interest. With a look that mimics a picture frame, wall frames add visual depth to tall or expansive walls. Wall frames break up large portions of white space throughout the home as an alternative to filling it with furniture, shelving or artwork.

Some places you may want to apply wall frame millwork throughout the home include:

• Dining rooms
• Living rooms
• Offices
• Master bedrooms
• Hallways and stairways

Depending on the wall’s dimensions, it may be better to position picture frame moldings vertically or horizontally. Vertically oriented wall frames draw the eye upward, creating the illusion of a taller space. Horizontally oriented wall frames help you open up a room and make it feel wider. Designers often position wall frames in a series across the wall rather than as a continuous, end-to-end frame. Wall frames can sit in the center of the wall or start from the floor and end midway up the wall.

As with crown molding, you can add several wall frame styles to a home. Wall frame millwork can range from flat trim to traditional crown molding. Customizing the size, shape and style of the picture frame molding to the space it’s in will enhance the room’s existing features.

3. Build in a Decorative Archway

Millwork upgrades are an ideal strategy for augmenting specific details of a home’s current layout. One way to do that is to add a decorative archway above an existing doorway. Typically, designers choose a frequently used central doorway, such as one leading into the kitchen, the living room or the master bedroom.

Decorative archways provide a way for a particular room or space to create a visual impact. By creating more geometry in an area that otherwise feels too one-dimensional, decorative archways break up any monotony.

Decorative archways present an opportunity to flex your creative muscles, with a wide range of styles to choose from. The trim style used to build a decorative archway can range from soft, elegant curves to Gothic-inspired arches with a pointed crown. In modern homes, a decorative archway can use flat trim, while traditional homes might look better with detailed moldings enhancing a doorway.

You might install moldings directly above a doorway, or they can surround an entire doorway, extending to the floor. Paneled archway trim can mimic window frames around the doorway. The shapes can range from a half-circle to an oval to a peak with sharp 90-degree angles.

4. Accent an Old Fireplace With a Wood Mantel

Finally, another way to enhance a home’s interior using millwork is to augment an existing fireplace with a wood mantel. Fireplace mantels help make the piece a polished focal point in the living room or master bedroom. Mantels also serve a functional purpose, with many homeowners enjoying having a shelf for showcasing decorative pieces, including family photos, keepsakes and other beloved items to put on display.

Adding a mantel to a fireplace can instantly bring an older home into a more modern style. Wood mantel styles can range from a simple horizontal shelf across the top of the fireplace to a full casing surrounding the fireplace from the floor. Wall-mounted fireplaces can also benefit from a wood mantel to help the fireplace become a more prominent feature in a larger room. Designers can also choose to match the wood mantel’s design to other millwork in the room, including crown moldings or baseboards.

Contact Compass Hardwoods for Millwork Projects

Interior molding upgrades are an outstanding way to enhance a home’s design. When used to strategically enhance a space and make it feel more inviting, custom crown moldings and interior trim add depth and dimension to homes. Custom millwork can range from sleek and simple baseboards or trim to ornate and detailed crown moldings.

For custom crown moldings, trim and more, choose Compass Hardwoods for beautiful craftsmanship on all your millwork designs. To learn more about these features for your clients’ homes, contact our millworking professionals today to get started. Fill out an online form or call us at 610-857-2600.