What is a great space? How do you know? What are the clues.

[Music] my name is Brent Hall I have a company in Fort Worth Texas uh called whole homes whole Millwork we build houses and we do architectural Millwork we you know run moldings we build windows and doors we just come out with a hundred year window uh which I was talking to Clayton about when I was out here [Music] hey there good to see you uh uh 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 the cards 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 in 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 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 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 there is you guys are uniquely positioned to make things beautiful and you do with color and fabrics and furniture and art and all the different things that you do that you put into in 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 ideas for instance the the moldings around these doors right that is a very classical way of treating a door okay you've got cross-headed 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 pulmonated freeze why did they cut those angles here right there's historic precedent to all of this that 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 or you know drinking water from a fire hose which is why we're recording this so you can watch it again but there 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 and we'll talk about stuff but that's kind of what we're going to try to do today so all right so uh we're going to 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 gray spaces like what what makes them awesome okay is it you know 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 Millwork 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 going to 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 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 make 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 your chair rail it's the size of your crown it's all those moldings working together um 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 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 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 continued to collect rims there's 175 historic rooms a winter tour from all over the country from New Hampshire down to you know Georgia everything in between all this this incredible cross-section of American Architectural Interiors uh from 1640 to 1860. uh 175 rooms so it's an amazing 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 say 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 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 toss is 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 window sills together and then love how they you know did that little curved corner on the wainscot is 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 um and and when I place 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 heard of 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 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 pilisters 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'd been studying buildings in in Rome and the studying the outside of the buildings and they based their moldings on the outsides of buildings that's why George and moldings are heavy and thick okay when they discovered Pompeii everybody know about Pompeii Okay so good 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 style 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 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 but why is this bad okay um 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 of the time inappropriate you know we the the scale around the the the the the fireplace hearth we get told that code is 12 inches and we have to spread it out wrong okay you gotta fight that 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 in 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

Channel: Brent Hull

Views: 4,465

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, interior design, interior design ideas, interior design styles, interior design course

Id: s_-teRe8Pzo

Length: 14min 10sec (850 seconds)

Published: Mon Oct 03 2022