Making an Impression : Wood and Plaster Moldings Add Affordable Dimension to Otherwise Dull Homes

Bored to tears by that soaring expanse of stark-white living room wall in your cathedral-ceilinged abode?

Despairing of ever making your home look different from the other 35 cookie-cutter models in your tract?

You’re not alone.

Take a tour of almost any new housing development these days and you’ll see that builders--responding to a growing demand for adornment even as buyers have rebelled against soaring prices--are using moldings to dress up their models while keeping a lid on costs.

Molding has been a source of architectural embellishment for almost as long as people have lived in houses. From the ornate patterns in the palaces of Europe to the natural oak trim in the American Craftsman home, moldings have played a major role in defining the interior character of our residences.

But in the mid-1900s, preferences turned to the contemporary look and the popularity of molding declined.

Soaring labor costs also hurt, turning the hand-carved and hand-cast stone, wood and plaster moldings that once were commonplace into a luxury most homeowners could no longer afford. Those moldings that remained in use became smaller and simpler.

Today, however, new materials and mass-production techniques are making even the largest, most ornate moldings affordable again.

The most common type of moldings are the baseboards that run along the bottom of walls and the casings that frame windows and doors.

But several other types of molding are gaining popularity, including--from the floor up:

* Wainscot: While not a type of molding, wainscoting these days is usually made by using several different molding pieces, mitered and fitted together, to frame paint, wallpaper or wooden panels. Traditionally, a wainscot is the paneling used to cover the bottom portion of a wall. Panel moldings--thin, flat-backed pieces of molding sold with separate radius pieces to make curving corners--often are applied to a plain wall to create a wainscot effect.

* Chair rails: These can be plain or intricately carved lengths, are generally of wood, come in varying thicknesses and are fastened to the walls of a room about 29 inches above the floor. The practical application is to keep chairs from damaging plaster or wallboard.

They also provide visual stimulation when painted or stained in colors that contrast with the walls. Chair rails frequently are used to separate two complementary wallpaper patterns or to trim the top edge of a wainscotting.

* Picture rails: These wooden, foam or plaster moldings, applied around a room at the level of the top of the doors, usually have a purely ornamental function these days. But originally, pictures were hung from them, typically on ornamental braided cords. This enabled a family to display and rearrange its art and photographs without pounding holes in the plaster.

* Crown molding: Typically the most ornate of the moldings, these are complex pieces placed up against the ceiling where it meets the wall. Crown moldings give a room a covered-ceiling effect, emphasize the proportions of a large room and help make small rooms appear bigger. As with any molding, they can be painted or stained to contrast with a room’s color scheme or painted the same color as the walls or ceiling.

A tour of Jean and Anthony Palombo’s Huntington Beach home illustrates the extensive uses to which moldings and other architectural trim can be put. The couple has spent the past seven years transforming a standard 1960s stucco tract house into a Victorian-style showplace.

The home, now completely covered in wood siding and ornamental shingles, boasts bay windows, cupolas, an octagonal window and room-separating leaded glass panels.

The exterior is trimmed with a generous slathering of fancy cut “gingerbread” molding while the interior is adorned with intricate fretwork--those lacy patterns of turned and carved wooden spindles that no Victorian-era carpenter could resist.

Various rooms in the Palombo home feature oak crown moldings, wainscoting, fancy carved baseboards and door and window casements, chair rails and picture rails. Large pieces of machine-carved crown moldings were carefully fitted together to create a massive oak fireplace and mantle.

Palombo, a general contractor and master carpenter, said that he has been doing the work both as a labor of love and because it lets him practice painstakingly learned but labor-intensive carpentry skills that few of today’s homeowners can afford to pay for.

Palombo, for example, doesn’t use a miter box to cut simple 45-degree angles when two pieces of molding meet in a corner. Instead, he uses a thin-bladed coping saw to carefully cut the contours of one piece of molding into the edge of the other so the two fit together like pieces of a jigsaw puzzle. It makes for a tighter corner joint, but can easily turn a 15-minute job into an hour’s worth of work.

That doesn’t mean only the wealthy or the highly skilled can have a home that makes good use of molding. Judicious use of the less complex and complicated styles can satisfy many homeowners’ hankerings for creative decorator touches that set their homes apart from the crowd.

“Molding is like a purely decorative piece of clothing,” Palombo says. “There is often no real need for it, but it creates a theme.”

Because it’s decorative in most applications, Palombo says there is no reason a homeowner should have to pay for more than is needed to set the scene. “If the cost of solid wood paneling would be prohibitive, you can create the same effect with thin laminated panels and molding. You can use molding to give a slab door a raised panel look. There is really no end to what you can do with what is available out there today.”

Reproductions of classic molding styles now are offered in plaster, lightweight polyurethane and glazed ceramic. Some have a marbleized finish.

Machine-cut wood moldings have replaced more expensive hand-carved designs.

A Belgian firm, NMC, sells a line of fancy polyurethane and polystyrene moldings, distributed to area retailers by Classic Ceilings in Fullerton, that would give a master craftsman in Victorian England or Bourbon France fits of jealousy.

Dave Morgan, whose family owns Classic Ceilings, said that demand for moldings has taken off in the past few years. The company started as the Southland retailer of pressed tin ceilings and moved into ceiling and crown moldings when clients kept asking for more ways to adorn their interiors.

Underscoring the popularity of moldings these days is the success of one Santa Ana firm.

World of Moulding exists for only one reason and supplies contractors and homeowners from San Diego to Santa Barbara from a stock of 350 styles of molding and trim.

Manager Doug Mitchell said he carries most stock in any of seven types of wood--pine, fir, oak, mahogany, walnut, birch and ash--and can have any molding reproduced in just about any wood a customer desires. (Several large lumber yards in Orange County also will mill custom moldings and carry fairly large stocks of pine and hardwood molding.)

The basic charge for a custom job at World of Molding runs from $165 to $225 to have the cutting tool made, plus the cost of the wood to be used. Mitchell said it takes a run of about 400 linear feet for the cost of custom molding to become competitive with standard styles.

“But I’ve had people doing an old home restoration willingly pay the bill to have just five feet of an old molding matched.”

In addition to wood products, the store also carries moldings and architectural trim made of injected foam and molded plaster and gypsum.

Mitchell says his shop also carries a line of flexible resin moldings, which can be painted or stained to look like wood. The moldings, manufactured in Costa Mesa, take the hassle out of framing curved windows or wrapping around the rounded “bull nose” corners builders are incorporating into many new homes today.

With the materials available to handyman homeowners or professional contractors, the only limits are the bounds of your imagination and budget. If that plain wall has got you down, live a little and treat it--and yourself--to a chair rail, wainscoting or picture rail. Rip out those skinny painted door and window casings and replace them with opulent fluted oak or magnificently milled mahogany.