Explaining and understanding Interior Moldings. How to!

[Music] so designers architects you can't be both you either one or the other um and then uh contractors any contractors here great all right so yeah my name is brent hull i have a company in fort worth texas uh called whole homes whole millwork um we build houses and we do architectural mill work we you know run moldings we build windows and doors we just come out with a 100 year window which i was talking to clayton about when i was out here hey there good to see you thanks for coming so um anyway what i want um so we're a millwork company and that you know so there's there's cars on the table i we we do do mill work and we would love to do your mill work yeah but what i really wanted today uh was to talk about interiors okay and great spaces i believe i believe um that interior designers are kind of in a unique space okay um architects and architecture school in general is no longer teaching classical design and you know maybe even not even promoting beauty like they used to and uh i believe over the last 50 60 years this is the brent hall theory um that over the last i don't know since edith wharton wrote her book what was that early 1900s probably by maybe after world war ii the rise of the interior designer as a major influencer on jobs has taken place and i'm always surprised on the projects that we work on all over the country how the main uh uh leader of design is oftentimes not the architect but the interior designer yet interior designers are not uh interior designers are not necessarily trained in interiors and so um there is you guys are uniquely positioned to make things beautiful and you do uh with color and fabrics and furniture and art and all the different things that you do that you put into the space that make it amazing um but i i see and the point of this kind of talk is to you know share some highlights and some uh ideas for instance the the moldings around these doors right that is a very classical way of treating the door okay you've got cross-edited corners you have a freeze you have a cornice all happening right there that is a beautiful way to highlight a door now there's there's subtleties there right where does the dental go the pulvenated freeze why did they cut those angles there right there's historic precedent to all of this that um we learn we appreciate we recognize and then when it's not done well we're like what i'm not sure really what's going on and so today some of you may feel like you're you know drinking water from a fire hose which is why we're recording this so you can watch it again but they're i'm trying to make this really practical okay i'm going to share a bunch of information a bunch of history and then try to get into some actual nuts and bolts of you know how do you put moldings in a room and what size they should be and so if you want to understand other things just raise your hand um and we'll talk about stuff but that's kind of what we're trying to try to do today so all right so uh we're gonna be learning from the past too that's that's really kind of a big piece uh thomas jane you guys know thomas jane um he was associated with the winter tour he wrote this book uh the finest rooms right we've got uh mount vernon right there um and you know what's going on there uh sleepers houses this is a uh new york apartment like why are these great spaces like what what makes them awesome okay is it you know the is it the furniture is it the antiques is it you know the scale you know what's what's going on why do we love these spaces why in his book he's got the plaster ceiling falling down why is that a great space right and so as we look at these spaces you know we also sometimes and oftentimes see in historical spaces uh architectural mill work like that uh cornice there in that in the room on the right or that pretty arch with the greek key on the left right so there's things that are happening there's architectural influence which is mainly what we're gonna be talking about today that i want you guys to understand and be able to be uh skilled at reproducing for your clients this is the miles brewton house this is in south carolina in charleston it's an amazing house okay it's probably i think one of the finest houses built in america in the 1760s uh the level of craftsmanship is just you know off the church and uh it's just it's just an amazing space so there are you know four or five six things that i think you know makes something really incredible there's an architectural composition that uh that defines the space that frames it that that gives it that sense of scale and proportion that you stand in there you go i don't know why i like this but i really like this space right uh it's the height that you put the chair rail it's the size of your crown it's all those moldings working together i think there's a clear story or an internet and a narrative we will oftentimes with our clients say okay when we're building a house we'll say okay what are we building uh we're doing a ranch house right now and it was like well when was the ranch built you know who built it uh what kind of skill did they have you know what did they know were they masons or were they working in wood and so we are dialing down to when did they build it did they build it in 1870 or 1910 right and so all those things will determine hardware they'll determine moldings to determine all these different things so creating a narrative is very important uh there's an understanding of the classical language and i'm going to talk about terms and phrases today but my journey on understanding classicism you know took 10 years and when i wrote the book i think there's some here traditional american rooms on the rooms at winter tour anybody been to winter tour oh my gosh no one here has been to winter tour so winter tour is the dupont family home okay in 1920 he started collecting american antiques um he began collecting rooms okay so he would he'd find a you know philadelphia high boy he'd find out about a parlor from philadelphia that was being torn down he uh he would buy the parlor and then he installed it in his house okay and his house kept growing and growing and growing as he as he did continue to collect rooms there's 175 historic rooms at winter tour from all over the country from new hampshire down to you know georgia and everything in between all this this incredible cross-section of american architectural interiors from 1640 to 1860. uh 175 rooms so it's an amazing spa place and i can't believe no one's been here i'm so discouraged um no the uh and so when i wrote that book on on those rooms i walked into those rooms and said what is going on here why are these moldings this way and then they go to this room and they're so different here what's going on and so it began a process i think that book was like 2010 or something um and so it took me it takes a long time so again that drinking water from the fire hose here i understand that some of this will be what so but we'll have fun uh and then scale and proportion of details we'll talk about that too okay architectural composition okay this is that miles brewton room um do you recognize and see how there is a clear you know this architectural order the pedestal the column and the entablature right is clearly seen in this room okay so if you look at period rooms almost all of them french english everything there is an architectural composition that is based on the five orders of architecture and all those moldings and details which we'll talk about but just don't look at that go oh that's so pretty or oh that's so the tall seals it is right but i want you to be able to recognize um you know why they set the chair rail at this height okay how it unifies the space by tying all the windowsills together and then love how they you know did that little curved corner on the wainscot as it wrapped into the window well um that's that you know this this gravy because it's just so beauty beautiful on top of the fact that it's composed really wonderfully now this is the corinthian order okay and and when i placed the doric order on here which is a more masculine heavy order it didn't match up as well okay and so there are everybody here to the five orders of architecture okay so basically the greeks and romans had three orders they had doric ionic and corinthian okay there's three orders in the renaissance they kind of developed into five orders okay um and so i went through those orders and you'll see the scale here a little bit but there is an architectural composition in these rooms which for you guys means that the chair rail based on the height of the room actually goes at certain heights right and if you take anything away from this talk it is never three feet okay always lower than that okay this room's probably 12 or 15 feet tall that's about 28 inches okay so realize it's never three feet write that down um the clear narrative in the story right this is the mount vernon dining room uh george washington's homes what was he doing why are these pilesters this way why is that green color in there what is those drippy things that the with the decoration there that all comes from robert adam who is this is a mantle from robert adam he was an english architect he's the one that discovered pompeii but he didn't discover it he traveled to pompeii and the neoclassicism which starts in the 1780s ish happens because we've been studying buildings in in rome and they're studying the outside of the buildings and they base their moldings on the outsides of buildings that's why georgian moldings are heavy and thick okay when they discovered pompeii everybody know about pompeii okay so good uh when he went into those interiors in pompeii all he saw were these incredible brilliant colors reds and pinks and greens and the decoration there was no crazy moldings it was decorations like this with swags and urns and wreaths and and so those details come from that period and that's why that room looks like that what that means is if you have a client who wants a federal room you're going to be inching towards this kind of styling you'll be learning about that kind of styling another note okay except for us don't trust any manufacturer when they say something is georgian or federal or victorian okay i'm telling you 99 times out of 100 it's wrong okay and i can't tell you especially when we get into decoration and moldings and classical things like that don't trust them do your own research become the expert and then we've got this lost art of classicism we've forgotten how to build things classically this all happens after world war ii it happens with the rise of modernism uh there is a rejection of the classical rules and i'm not going to get into ones better than the other i'm just saying that the greeks and romans when they put together this classical thing which we'll talk about there is a proportion and scale there's a human scale that was relevant in all of the all of their designs and today right we have this okay that's bad okay this is good this is bad um but why is this bad okay the the carpenter today thinks that if they build a panel they're doing something classical okay they're doing something unique they buy off the shelf brackets carved brackets which are most the time inappropriate you know we the the scale around the the the the fireplace hearth we get told that code is 12 inches we have to spread it out wrong okay you got to fight that you got to fight for beauty in this thing and so we'll get into all this but bad good and then the power of moldings okay that this is a house this is a 1970s you know bad house right ugly house um and all we did was we changed the moldings because so we went from probably uh you know we didn't do we took out the you know two and a half three and a half inch casing the you know four inch base and we did you know six or eight inch base we punctuated the openings which is a term you'll understand here soon frame the opening put a little header over top and all of a sudden and a chair rail and it transforms that space right and so when you learn how to use moldings well you can do powerful things which is fun essentially what i'm talking about is i'm talking about what the greeks developed the romans you know stole and and kind of made their own right and that whole classical period from you know pre-bc to 300 a.d when the roman air power was really growing right there was a guy named vitruvius the only book that we have from classical the classical world aren't architecture is a guy named vitruvius who wrote a book called the ten books of architecture you don't have to read it um because there's a lot of different stuff in there but there's a number of ideas that came out of that book that they discovered in the renaissance so now 1400 13 1400 they rediscover all these great classical works that's when plato and cicero and all these great writers are rediscovered and so it's a rebirth right it's called the renaissance starts in italy it kind of moves out into france later as the architects and designers started getting hired by the french courts enago jones in england is the first guy to take classicism back to england in 1573. but realize i'm showing you how slow that path is it takes 120 years for it to even get to england but these are ideas and and uh things that come to us later right so as america is starting to develop in the 1720s and 1730s are some other things you know that that's where that tradition comes from here's the five orders of architecture i was talking about uh tuscan doric ionic corinthian composite and so this is what was developed in the renaissance and what you'll notice is is that this order the tuscan order is very different from the composite order okay it's more ornamented right there's there's more there's more detail this is a thicker heavier thing this is a thinner lighter deal and so you know very few decorations and details there you know a lot of you know dentals and shapes there they're they're they all have a personality they all have a difference and that the idea was that you know if you were going to build a you know uh an armory right you would do it out of a very masculine strong order if you're going to build a theater or a palace you might do it out of a very elevated high order right so um there is it's not just oh look at the different orders there are actually purpose and meaning behind each one um vitruvius spoke about the gender of those things and he said that tuscan order is a masculine order okay what does that mean in the ionic order was a feminine order um there is uh the tuscan order has a relationship of one to seven okay what does that mean well what they're talking about is the diameter at the base of the column okay and then how many tall that is so if say this is 12 then seven of those things tall would be the diameter and you'll see that if you look at you can't see it but this is in your packet you'll see it says base one half d okay d is the diameter at the base of the column and so all of these sizes for everything in that order is based off the d the diameter now where's that come from so if i measured my foot it's 11 inches long i am 76 inches tall okay i'm one inch from being like perfect so i'm not quite one to seven but it was based on an ideal proportion in the human body so my hands my head my ears my legs everything is proportional right and there is a system for you know sizing it up drawing the human figure the same thing was true in architecture right and so go home tonight measure your foot see how tall you are see how close you can get to being perfect but the uh the feminine order or the ionic order is like a one to eight okay or one to nine and you'll see these things vary a little bit and so um there is a proportional relationship and that's why when this order is broken out okay and all these different parts are sized it's sized off of d which the diameter so there's a unifying hole right so uh everything's proportionate there's a system there and even better there's a human scale to it and so that's why we walk into some of these spaces and go i really like it here but i don't know why okay so those details are done explained earlier all of the moldings that we use in our houses today are based off this classical system so the height of our chair rail okay is based on the top the top of the pedestal the the picture rail right the picture rail you'll see in rooms like that that's the top of the uh tania the top of the architrave and so i want you guys to get good at understanding terms like in tablature freeze bed mold dental where all those things go because most people don't get it most people screw it up and so once you understand those things you begin to build beautiful things back to this door header right here's our freeze i mean here's our architrave okay architrave is just door casing okay here's our freeze this is called a pulvinated freeze because it moves out and then you've got a bed mold and in between the bed mold is a dental you got a corona and then a cymation okay so that's exactly what we've got here the other thing you need to remember as you design moldings okay is this is your pallet sheet okay these are the shapes you use you don't need any other shapes okay and if you've set there and go wonder what i should do it kind of just wanders off right there's actually purpose and meaning behind these moldings and so we've got plain surfaces concave convex and compound okay so we'll talk more about this but there is a rationale right with how this all comes together and the thing that makes it wonderful is that you can be in a 50 foot tall space or a 15-foot tall space and you still feel comfortable in that space you don't feel overwhelmed because there's a human scale because it's all based on these proportions right um there is you know hierarchy okay now hierarchy is means that if you're doing a house every room doesn't get every molding right you've got bathrooms and closets that shouldn't be as elevated as the main formal hall okay if you're doing a classical space and that's what this is showing from robert adams book this is the exact same space okay door two windows doors two windows door two windows but we've elevated it by adding more moldings and more details in this one you just have a base and a crown and this one they've added a chair rail they've elevated the door and they've added a little bit more cornice and then they put the pilesters in there right so there's a hierarchy to this and how they put this together there's also an idea called punctuation which is probably the most important thing for you to remember when you're thinking about door casings window cases okay it is never a little two-inch molding okay um it is almost always something bigger so what you have in this classical system is you'll notice that there is a visual phenomenon okay a geometric symbol that you'll see on here and then an arithmetic ratio okay everybody heard the golden ratio okay so that's that five to three right and you'll see as this space is laid out and and if you can guys can get good at laying out your spaces like this magic okay now why okay well the the idea of punctuation okay means that for every the size the width of an opening should get framed or punctuated with a certain size and so in the georgian areas about one to five and and the federal area is about one to seven okay so that means is uh you have a you know 30 inch opening you have a 5 inch casing right so right there's a arithmetic ratio there that and again this is in the classical system so you'll you'll do the mat we'll do the math later but sometimes these casings can end up being eight inches wide and you're like i'm never gonna put an eight inch wide casing in the house okay well you don't have to but you but the re but the realization that it's not a two inch casing that you're trying to find that balance here and most people that the study and look at this classical stuff don't want you to do the math okay in other words i mathematically figured out every single that's not really the magic that happens but there is a um a realization hopefully on your part that it is bigger than most people are putting in the differentiation right see what they've done here is that the height of this door okay is that that differentiated that three to five ratio right and that um even the relationship of this to the crown there's another one and they break it out and they'll show that even uh even in the dental and stuff like that they have this differentiation but you have punctuation over the whole room in the chair rail and then from the chair rail to the entablature right so realize that all these parts and pieces are coming together right and they're all speaking to whether none of them are working and then just the sad part of it is that these were things that were understood pre-1940. if you ever wonder why pre-1940 houses look better than post-1940 houses it's because after world war ii you have production building you have cheap and fast building and we kind of forgot these rules and this is in a 1926 builders catalog it's a audell's carpentry manual built for carpenters right that even carpenters at that time understood um the greek versus the roman orders the the differentiation and sizing so a lost art that hopefully will start getting back now i think the best uh example of this i hesitate to ask this question who's been in the new york public library okay there we go much better beautiful beautiful beautiful place right and so caring hastings they were the architects 1895. but if you've walked through this space and seen what they've done look at the order the composition the beauty here we've got double pilasters here you've got an entablature that wraps this space this beautiful vaulted arch we're talking about writing and reading starting with the ten commandments you know over here with the monks and i don't know whether that's gutenberg or not but but you know uh celebrating right the the the the book and writing and then and in the course the reading room is just one of the more magnificent spaces in america and so uh but realize too that there's a composition here that there's a order there's a reason why we're like feel so fall in love with that space notice on the outside where my thing is that there is a main pier column here that supports this upper end tablature and then there's an inner column supporting this arch and that marches around that room and that space and there's there's there's repetition there's pattern there's rhythm there's harmony there's almost musical lyrical kind of beauty in this space that we love and so you know then you break down the the smaller elements right there's the there's the the framing and the order that's taking place there and then when you have just openings like this with the arch and the there's tons of ornamentation in here but it doesn't feel too ornamented right there is why is that why can't we do good ornament like this anymore um and they understood uh this balance of you know this is a cathedral for learning right and so it is rightly so celebrated the ornamentation is appropriate and we feel wonderful in that space as opposed to this today we run into spaces that are weird okay and um you know this is like the the the open warehouse in a mcmansion right you have the bedroom right off the bathroom um you know what are we celebrating here yeah what do we highlight what's the hierarchy in this space right uh there is no crown molding right we've got we're we're elevating the tub and um and the bed frame right and so that i hope we all recognize that this is terrible right and so um but it's hard and i've gotten calls from people say they'll watch my videos on uh on youtube and they'll they'll go i want the classical moldings because when you understand the classifiers they just make so much sense they'll go i want it in my house i go send me a picture and it'll be a room like this and it is very difficult to introduce order to introduce you know rationality okay in a space like this um because it's irrational and so they're they're they're hard okay it was actually fun trying to pick all these pictures out but the the corinthian column okay is the classic if if you've maybe we've all done it if you put a corinthian column in your house then that's kind of like oh i wish i hadn't done that because the corinthian column tends to be the sticker okay that we put on a thing if they someone wants something very elaborate or ornamented okay and yet this corinthian column okay one is a bad corinthian column um notice that it's a straight shot it's a tube okay columns have emphasis they have they have movement in them they're bigger at the base than they are at the neck and then that little molding at the bottom you know there should be a double attic base and everything else it's just an uh ignorance to the classical orders it's an ignorance to that thing and we and manufacturers give us these things and we end up using them like stickers on these jobs so that we can elevate a space when we don't really know how to elevate a space so we're going to learn from the past a lot of sheetrock arches in in mansions right why do they do that well they're trying to create interest they don't know how to use moldings they don't know how to create to elevate a space and you walk into these spaces then you're like where do i go what am i supposed to do whereas you walk into a traditional space and you're like it's very clear you know this this element is more important than this element i should go here because there's hierarchy there or whatever the thing is right and so these spaces become very confusing by the way just quick quiz this uh is advertised as a uh what style house that's right we don't know it's mediterranean and you're like really no um so again confusion lack of a story lack of a narrative right that they don't carry without the house and then people hear the terms and this other thing we do i'll have people say you know i have an uh uh a stained grade library okay or i'll have a cherry library as if those words will elevate it and make you think more about this stuff because there aren't many name brand things that you can they can brag about with their friends at the at the cocktail party i got a subzero wolf maybe um but i got stingray library okay maybe no wrong um here's stingray trim right that just looks silly just like you think brown stripes around your house i'm not holding back anyway okay so now let's get practical four rules for today as far as unifying a room narrative all that different stuff we're going to dig into it now who knows about the icaa everybody um institute of classical architecture and art there's a chapter here in utah when when i was on the texas board and we went to the university of texas and said you know we'd like to have a class for your students a weekend class and they're like you're not having a classical class here right what they're like no we're not you're not bringing that information into our students we're like that is really hostile right about that and um you know it's not that bad and so uh the um to answer your question i think the beauty of classical designs and understanding these rules is you can apply them to modern spaces you don't have to use crowns and moldings and things like that but you can still establish order proportions scale so you can fall into those spaces and love them i would also say that the reason modern styles and simplification are works so well with clients is because classicism is so poorly done like some of those things i just showed you um that people don't want that right when i tell some clients hey we'd like to do a real classical thing really are you sure you know they don't because they're done so poorly so often so once you understand these rules you can apply them to these modern things i'm not even talking about with moldings but still understand the proportion unifying space and things like that that can make a big difference so um there's two moldings that i think help unify space better than anything else one is the chair rail okay which i pointed out earlier this is the this is the room at winter tour it's a frock tour room it's a room from pennsylvania kind of rustic it's not real high style classicism but there are classical elements but notice in here where's my little pointer um the the chair rail that wraps around the room okay it ties the windows together it ties together a corner hutch it's something that unifies and so a very real simple thing to do is have moldings that grab architectural elements and kind of pull them together so that your eye can make sense of that space here's another room winter tour 1760s this is from this is a more high style room this is kind of a federal room but notice too we have this black chair rail that runs around the room we have a pedestal there's an architectural order here there's a cornice at the top and so there is that composition there is a molding that unifies and ties the space together uh and then this is when i just shot a video on the other day and this is a great example of a crown pulling and tying a room together okay you have a number of things happening in this space one is you have a hierarchy okay you have the door here the door there that are about two inches lower than this center door okay the center door is wrapped by pylasters with an entablisher and as what happens this cornice runs all the way around the room tying the room together you'll see if i go to another side kind of there's that wall we're just looking at here's this other wall so it's a very formal entry right but the crown ties this and pulls the rooms and the elements together it's really simple okay in my mind like if this composition wasn't there but they wanted to elevate this door it's really easy in my mind to build a a freeze a decorated freeze that would run right across this door and tie into this entablature and so or into that cornice and so realize the opportunity as we look at the past and see ideas like this that unifying a space can be as simple as pulling the molding together and you'll see on a case study we've got coming up where we just introduced a chair rail and it ran through the formal spaces and really helped tie the house together realize what's happened to code screws things up okay and you guys have to fight code yeah i'm saying that on camera you got a fico i'm being recorded so i gotta be careful um but uh realize that historically handrails and if you've ever seen a porch rail in an historic house it might be this high on the porch right why is that well it's because it's the pedestal height that runs around because your column is your porch column same thing happens with chair rail or hand rails on a stair historically those things were down here and low okay but code says and i've had people code says right now 34 and a half to 42 inches okay and so people end up put him at 36 38 inches which is too high well if you're doing a classical stair often times you'll have a wainscot on the other side and they're trying to tie it together to that handrail so it ends up getting really too tall well what else happens with stairs is you run up as the ceiling comes down and so you end up having almost in that space that chair rail almost halfway and it should be down at about if it's going to be punctuated down at you know 24 25 28 inches we go well that's kind of small not visually it's not okay and so this is a challenge for everybody okay but i'm encouraging you to fight for a lower chair rail and there are tricks everybody uh read uh marion casado's book get your house right great book she talks about how to disguise low porch rails with a thin rail on the top to meet code um and so you are fighting for that beauty okay and that design but it's because code has risen it up so high that they get too tall that i always drop them down and i'm also looking at historic precedent there's some great books they're called colonial interiors and it's all like most books deal with the exteriors of buildings these are three historic books there was a three-part series colonial interiors they did colonial georgian georgian federal federal and greek revival and they have pages of stairs just stairs stairs stairs to a lot of great ideas a lot of things to look at as far as understanding historic precedent for that okay the clear narrative um each style did it differently okay but they all follow that same classical model these are two french rooms okay but notice that we've still got a pedestal a column right and then our new tablets are up here okay now the french did things completely weird and different than anybody else it was always harder always more different always crazy but the same compositions here right there's your pedestal there's your column they've got they've got a weird a weird and tablature it's not that typical you know italian you know architrave freeze it's it's just scoop right that just represents that space but that goes to the point on the modern thing is that you don't even have to use moldings you could use colors you could use fabrics you could use metal okay but i would still encourage you to look at your space as this in this way because you're introducing the human scale but you don't have to do a formal cornice like that you can do a big cove and you know define it some way if you want so there are this the french are a good example of you know hopefully cutting you loose letting you know that there's design freedom here to within the system that can help you uh you know design and have fun and yet still introduce scale and proportion right um the english okay these are these are armed rooms at the philadelphia museum anybody in the philadelphia museum it's it's an incredible museum okay 1924 fist kimball they have probably 30 or 40 period rooms um the one of the french rooms was in there they've got a ton of english rooms but the english were because the english weren't following the french right they were following palladio and plaudio's book was very famous in england where you have the english country houses which is a palladian villa and so they were much more italian much more canonical okay they were looking at palladio's books and going okay we do this and then we do this and then we do this whereas the french were like no we're gonna do this and so notice with that the english right we've got a much more formal pedestal much more you know typical canonical entablature and then they oftentimes will have full columns in their rooms and their decoration is wonderful and elegant and these are both english spaces um but they did it differently and then robert adam okay or talked about discoveries from pompeii and what he was doing right compare that georgian yeah that georgian room there with the federal room okay so with color with very little ornamentation but but you know painted gold right and so um these are uh i mean that's an incredible space not sure anybody wants to copy that necessarily but he did some fun things with colors and brilliant styles that was a complete departure from that georgian stuff right so uh our federal stuff think about that washington interior we're looking at earlier um you know this is where we got our ideas we didn't copy them exactly but that is where that came from and then understanding moldings uh and the purpose of moldings i talked about this the power of moldings right so uh when we look at a cornice like this okay realize that moldings had purpose okay when they were being designed there is supporting moldings that are moldings that lift up that that hold okay so you know if i'm gonna lift up something i'm gonna put my arm up under it right i'm gonna i'm gonna support it okay the terminating molding is the tada right that's the finish right there's no support here it's the finish so supporting moldings terminating moldings right and so when you have a molding like this it ends up in the bed mold okay it ends up supporting all of this other stuff notice you got two supporting moldings here and then you've got a terminating molding up here right so as you're designing moldings as you're putting these things together uh they belong in certain places they'll make more sense visually if we use them the proper way um there is a language of moldings okay georgian federal french look what the french did what in the world right how did they come up with that um there's some gothic stuff in there there's just french okay and so but there is a clear language okay if you're and if you want to do a georgian molding okay you're going to be you have a very heavy molding okay whenever you get this thing projects out it's going to be you know forward when you get into federal things things are cut away okay so when you cut away you lighten it okay so um right so these things make sense but you oftentimes you don't think about them until you think about them um so there's a clear language and and when you create a french space why not put french moldings in there right because you're trying to do french let's do french so anyway the other thing is is that the kind of the language of moldings molding should communicate now what how do they communicate um well we should be able to read them okay now you can see this molding here because it's right there but if i covered that up and you tried to see what that is right we don't know what that is because it looks like just a bunch of lines do you see that and it's only because they've exposed this corner edge that we can see what's going on there now in this case this is a winter tour um we have a very clear definition of spaces okay and so it is not this straight rocket shop you know just bumps and bruises that's what that is that's bumps and bruises you know falling out of the ugly tree okay this is clear communication and clear definition of moldings right we've got a bed mold and then we've got the corona okay which is a pause okay and then we've got our cymation and that pause is maybe the most important trick that you guys should take away notice that that pulvenated freeze there there's no ornamentation on it it's a pause and so it helps you see what you're looking at and and capture those spaces if all those things were squished together you couldn't see that as well so this is that you should when you put moldings up you should be able to read them and when i when i showed you that that the picture of the all that your palette moldings those are very clear moldings okay and when you get into things where you have that many kind of lines going on that you can't read the difference between what's going on if there is a pause in here if this was a pause and then it went out there you could probably read that better but that pause is really important as we talk about the language of moldings and then the scale of moldings right georgian federal 50s clam shell right and and and if you try to punctuate an opening with this okay there you can't right why okay well there's no definition you can't read that by design okay that was a modern molding built designed in the modern period by modern architects there is no lines on there for differentiation and so color maybe you could see that that mold what that shape of that molding is but you know that is not a clear communicator right you can't punctuate an opening is but because of you know these stops and these breaks and realize that there is even a proportional relationship between this space and this space that pause that happens even in that architrave that helps communicate um but the scale of moldings today have shrunk shrink trunks and really if you look the average size molding in 1920 was probably four and a half inches five inches the average size molding today is probably two and a half three inches okay we need to break the habit of sometimes we'll put you know five inch molding in the room we're like oh it's going to be so big but if it's scaled right scaled property it won't look that big and and you can reassure yourself by going to winter tour and going to historic places and actually taking a tape measure and going oh yeah that's pretty big so uh you'll see that not only scale and size but scale of parts to one another okay in this case i don't want you designing moldings that have a huge molding okay separated by the very small moldings so this is a crown this is from a builder and the the parts and pieces should relate to one another if you look back at this molding right the scale of these different things and we'll see this in a second are all relational okay if you go to here right we've got teeny dental wrong place huge crown and then and and and uh panel mold up here now notice what's happening too if you looked at a 1920s catalog you had crowns going from an inch and three-quarter all the way up to you know four and a quarter and there might be eight crowns okay today in most molding catalogs you might have two or three and most of them are not small and so the again this is where you fight for beauty and fight for design but you know one reason you call us to get custom sized molding so that they look right they're scaled right and you don't take in a panel mold okay doesn't belong in a cornice with a crown molding and then another panel mold down here um what they've done in this then they've looked at the whole rack of lumber yard supplied things and go well i guess i could build it up and they're not even using crown moldings to do it so anyway it's kind of a mess i did a video on a historic room we did uh we redid and the difference between the how they did the crown and and it it had been taken out of a house in england brought to america and then revamped but it was very clear where the you know the 50s redo had happened versus the historic stuff and it was most relevant in the crown and so what you had was this is the historic crown you have a bed mold corona cymation okay that's made up of four moldings one two three and then four okay and then in the 50s they did this one crown okay same amount and look at the size of these things compared to this is a really big crown and so these moldings are fairly small which they need to be but you end up with kind of funky looking things like this versus the scale and the readability that happens there so again i i'm afraid i'm causing you to drink from firehose down brass tacks okay how do you do this okay how do you put this into a room how do you make this happen um one of the the the things you have in your printout is this okay this is from william ware he was a uh architecture professor at columbia university in 1900 okay he wrote a book called the american vignola okay which is basically the american design catalog for classicalism okay and so back in here this is how you're going to help size moldings in a room okay so what he's done here is he's taken the dork the tuscan dork ionic the corinthian composite and see this one seven eight nine ten okay that's that one to ten one to nine one to eight that's the relationship of your diameter to your height okay so these are very masculine they're heavy these are very light so you got one to nine one to ten um is a very thin tall thing right are you with me do we need to stand up we need everybody going um so then what he's done is he's breaking out there there is uh this up here is the size of urine tablature okay and then these things are architrave freeze cornice right arbitrary freeze cornice so and then this is your base right nearest hip you have a pedestal so i know that doesn't make a lot of sense if you're just doing this for the first time but trust me we'll walk through this okay so we're gonna take the doric order okay which if you if the thing you've got in there here's how the doric order breaks out okay so you've got five parts okay and one part is you're in tablature okay um the uh what that means is if we have a ten foot tall room each part is two foot okay so this entablature full establisher is two feet tall okay ten foot tall room the crown if we did the full and tablature most people don't just do the cornice but if you did the full in temperatures two foot around the room um the entablature is broken into as you can see uh into eight parts see that there you're breaking the entirety of eight parts and so each part is three inches okay so eight divided by 24 inches three inches right maths there um and then there's a two three three relationship between the architrave freeze and cornice so the architrave is two inches tall the freeze is three inches tall and then the uh cornice is three and three inches are three parts so be nine inches tall right so it's six nine and nine everybody follow everybody with me okay now we're gonna take this these eight parts and we're gonna divide them and we're gonna talk about the size of the of these individual moldings so that dork cornice is nine inches tall we just discovered that on that last page right that means and and then we see here that those that that nine inches is divided into four parts so we've got uh you've got two parts in the cornice one part in the see that one part in the uh no one part in the climation one in the cornice and two in the bed mold so there's what those parts are each part is two and a quarter of inches that means your crown is two and a quarter inches so in a ten foot tall room you have a two and a quarter inch crown if you're only going to run a crown around that room right it's not a three and a half it's not a four and a half it's not a five and a half because if you're in a ten foot tall room you go gosh i need a lot of moldings up there because it's a really tall room it's a big room i'm gonna need more than just a two and a quarter crown around there right so what do you do well you might end up taking these proportions of these different pieces and you might let's say the client doesn't have a lot of money so you're gonna take that full nine inches right and you're gonna do maybe one or two parts of this you might do uh you're going to fakery a little bit right you're going to put a small molding as a bed mold you'll have a little bit of a a corona then you do a crown of the top now visually you should be able to see that because there's only three moldings there but you are uh communicating the size and the scale right another thing you could do is you could go back if we went back one and remember the the picture rail if you remember that thing is the top of the architrave it's called the tania that's the picture rail and room and sometimes you go into victorian rooms and they have the picture rail two feet down on the wall and it's not up close tied but it's down they've done that because you are introducing an architectural proportion in there so you could take just that crown and just your picture mail and now you've visually given this line around this room which kind of defined it in tablature around the room you see that that makes sense so how do you know which which order to use and which stop um when you get uh familiar with this there'll be an easier question okay but it's hard right like well how do i where i even start arts and crafts style houses often use the tuscan order okay thick strong fat you know like this okay the columns on those houses are often big and thick right those big porch columns down to arts and crafts house so there's your eye starting to realize that okay arts and crafts is kind of tuscan okay the the french rooms we saw those are corinthian you know composite orders they're very high style tall ceilings all that stuff it's going to be a combination of um what then what it's going to start influenced in his size of casings right and so most of our clients don't like georgian moldings because they're too heavy and too strong now that's i'm sure a pattern or a fad that's going to change but right now they like federal okay now federal is a much taller and daintier style so i'm going to be leaning towards the ionic and the you know compositor corinthian just because i want the scale of my moldings and stuff to be thin and light okay so you are uh and then there's the the ornamentation thing and i've got a sliding share basically be really careful about ornamenting and because um it's just really hard with the materials on the shelf today that are ornamented but that ornamentation inca ball cream ball carvings they're terrible they're they're terrible and so don't use them you're gonna you're gonna show off the fact that you don't understand ornamentation okay so again i would i would encourage you to look at historic precedent and what i learned when i wrote that book traditional american rooms and you actually the sizes of the moldings are actually scaled in that book and you'll see that georgian moldings sometimes will project off the wall three inches okay post 19 1900 most moldings because of standardization of milling machines and things like that go down to about three quarters of an inch they're working with one inch boards they which come from the mill it was all about about standardization and about you know speed and everything else and so they shrinked about three quarters which isn't terrible but if you look back the historic precedent those moldings i showed you the french georgian and the clam shell that that georgian molding stuck off the wall three inches point being thicker is better okay so i would have no moling uh under three under three quarters of an inch nothing under three quarters of an inch and if i had a 10 foot tall room my base would be inch and a quarter inch and a half even because i don't unless i'm doing something federal which needed to be tall and thin i want to i want my base to communicate strength and i want it to you know hold up that wall and so right and so basically nothing under three quarters of an inch is better and it will punctuate openings better all right one more and this is the uh the tuscan order right and in this case this is divided the wall is divided out into 19 parts and then you'll see that the pedestal gives you the size of your pedestal and then the size of the entablature up here okay 19 parts 10 foot tall room the tablets are made up of three parts is one foot seven i think each part is what is that 19 inches six inches each part six inches uh if you break it out that way um the establisher is broken up into seven parts right uh there's seven parts there one two three four five six seven and then each of the architrave freezing cornice is uh eight and a quarter five and a half five and a half now architrave pre-1900 all door casings and window cases were called architraves now they're called door casings but it was always an architrave why because the architrave supports that opening right the architrave is king beam and so it's the one that the columns to hold up and it was the supporting piece that always spanned an opening so any kind you have something that spans that opening like that it's an architrave and so this case in this room with 10 foot ceilings that means our door and window cases are five and a half inches wide right so okay now you're getting a sense of the scale of the the dorm window cases in this room in this style and you can start kind of building these moldings in your head and then you know it breaks out the parts um and then each part you know is two and a sixteenth there's one simulation one corona one bed mold you can see this breakout here and you start again to get the size and the scale these moldings notice in both cases this the crown individual piece is small and so i encourage almost all of my clients to do this kind of crown okay it's but basically four parts okay um and again this is where you're going to educate your client because the client might push back why do i need that no one does that well that's because no one knows okay and i want you to have a beautiful space and if i just put up a single crown in there it's going to look silly we need a a full cornice like this okay and so you are encouraging them that this is the way we used to build and this is the way we need to build again but i almost always am putting in a crown like this not just a single thing around the room unless it's an upstairs bedroom a kid's room or something like that where you know that's it's not really that kind of an elevated space um and then the last thing was just ornamentation that you know this is a an english room and there's a ton of ornamentation here right but we don't really i don't think you look at that and go oh that's gaudy right why why do we why do they fill this thing up with ornamentation and yet it still looks good and it's because this understanding one of my notes was you know be wary about ornamentation but uh you know the bracket is carved appropriately it's sized appropriately and this is why that comment about inca bald and white river is that they they're clunky and fat and they're short and they and the leaves are just you know this goopy ugly leaf so uh but there is there there is a way of doing this and this is when you become a student of the past and start looking at this stuff you can uh um get better at it get more skilled at ornamentation this is right there okay you don't even really notice that but look how much beautiful detail is in there and this could be done on a cnc right this could be manufactured cheaply that's what i meant by cnc yet it's if it's done the proper way it adds to things that makes things beautiful and worthwhile um okay this is a house we did uh 1930s uh nice cloney revival house and then on the back side they've added this modern edition okay and it was not pretty and so you see you know this is the back of the old house and then here's terrazzo floors and you know full full-size windows and then just kind of an ugly living room um we used the uh chesterton kind of chair rail and and mantle right in the main living room and then this chair rail runs around through it throughout the whole space and so we took a living room like that on the left that had no walls no returns right and made it more traditional right we brought the walls in we brought this chair rail in here it runs around the whole room we introduced a chair rail we established these very small simple pilosters that that support this this arch and then now we've got a centering here because one of the other things you want to do is you're wanting to create accesses you're wanting things to make rational sense so that when you walk in you go okay i know i'm supposed to go down this aisle right and so you know notice here you know this thing's almost in the middle so we rebuilt all these windows on the outside to line up with you know rooms that they made rational sense and they worked this was that back hall right where we rebuilt this we centered this door on that room you just looked at but again we've got that chair rail running through here they still love the light they so they said we love all the light that's coming in on this backside we don't want to lose that so we just put glass in these things instead of wood panels but we you know have now framed the opening and you know still provided the natural light but remember this is a 1930s colonial house and so when you walk in it's it's a traditional house and so when you walk into the back you're like where am i so we had to tie those two together but then just you know building this kind of architectural composure and structure around this you know modern window really i think helped capture both and you can see on the back side kind of how it got brought together okay my time is up

Channel: Brent Hull

Views: 22,539

Keywords: home improvement, crown molding, renovation ideas, how to build, how to install, diy ideas, how to fix, crown molding installation, crown moulding installation, crown moulding, door casing replacement, door casing, window casing, classical architecture, classical architecture proportion, classical molding, classical design house, wood moldings, good moldings, good detials

Id: UeyDht5PvKA

Length: 63min 32sec (3812 seconds)

Published: Sat Sep 17 2022