Crown Molding Special Effects

Bring scale and proportion to a room without using armloads of trim stock

With high ceilings, crown molding can look cheap if it’s too small. But large crown molding can be costly.

To help make this high-ceilinged house both affordable proportional, I chose to do what Hollywood does—fake it.

I ran two pieces of inexpensive panel molding in parallel, one along the ceiling, the other along the wall, and then painted the whole strip—panel-mold-to-panel-mold — the same color and sheen as the trim throughout the house.

It worked: The special effect is almost as satisfying as the real thing—and it cost a fraction of what a real crown molding in the right proportion would have cost.

— Fernando Pagés Ruiz is ProTradeCraft's Latin America Editor. He is currently building a business in Ecuador and a house in Mexico. Formerly, he was a builder in the Great Plains and mountain states. He is author of Building an Affordable House and Affordable Remodel (Taunton Press).