A Brief History of Crown Molding

At San Diego Paint Pros, we paint a variety of surfaces to freshen up your space including baseboards, walls, fences, ceilings and more. Today we’ll take a look at a brief history of crown molding, one of the surfaces our commercial painting company can fix up for you!

What is crown molding?

In architecture, crown molding is a type of cornice—which is decorative molding placed on top of a door, window, cabinet or shelf. Crown molding can be traced all the way back to the Ancient Egyptians and Greeks when they would decorate their buildings’ exteriors and columns. In addition to ornamentation, molding was a way to visually distinguish spaces. Back then, the molding would be made out of wood or plaster and carved manually. In the 14th Century, the French began what’s called “boiserie,” which are decorative wooden panels and they became a predecessor to modern crown molding with its ornate and detailed carvings.

 By the time the 1850’s rolled around, machines were created to automate the molding production. This made crown moldings more affordable and widely available in a variety of materials including polyurethane. However, designers in the 1950s and 1960s didn’t incorporate moldings as much and this carried over into the 1990s when minimalism was the design trend. Regardless, crown molding remains a great way to divide rooms, add dimension and depth, and have it be key to your interior decoration. For property owners whose homes were built in a certain era (a Victorian home for instance), upgrading your crown molding can be a part of your home improvement project to restore and maintain its ornate charm.

 What are some types of crown molding?

There many kinds of crown molding available depending on your budget and what you intend to use the molding for. These types include composite crown molding, wood, vinyl, medium-density fiberboard (MDF), polyurethane, and more. Style-wise, there are one, two, and three piece crown molding and craftsman moldings. You can also shop for moldings depending on where you install them, whether it’s on the wall, the ceiling, on a shelf, or on top of a cabinet.

Our Painting Process for Crown Molding

When it comes to repainting, many people debate whether the color of the crown molding should match the wall, the ceiling, or whether it should be painted at all. Whether you treat your crown molding as an accent piece rather than a structural transition, painting it to match the other molding and trim in the room helps bring the room together. Giving your molding a fresh coat of paint is a simple and effective way to elevate the entire room.

At San Diego Paint Pros, we offer crown molding painting services as part of larger interior painting services, but we also offer this as a separate service if you’re not planning a full-scale interior painting project. If your crown molding needs extensive repairs or replacing, we can consult our team of contractors to take care of it for you.

Our team will clean the crown molding thoroughly, and then sand it smooth to provide an optimal foundation for the paint. We generally recommend light, neutral colors for crown molding, but we can work with you to achieve your desired results. We only use high quality paints and aim for 100% satisfaction or we’ll make it right. Contact San Diego Paint Pros for a consultation today!