Product Review

Since 1950, most American homes have been built with plain clamshell molding, narrow colonial molding, or no molding at all, leaving the interior architecture naked and uncelebrated. Trim Idea Book shows how to change all that and highlights a wide range of styles, from 21st-century designs, including craftsman, natural, and minimalist, to period and period-inspired motifs. The book showcases hundreds of ways homeowners can use trim to spotlight and define the interior architecture of their homes - and even to compensate for its shortcomings. Trim can help define spaces that in themselves feel too large and can add volume and dimension to rooms that are otherwise too small. Trim can frame doors and windows, enhancing their presence on walls that have daunting expanses, or hiding construction flaws. Molding and trim - of wood as well as man-made materials - are readily available at home centers as well as traditional lumberyards. Style options are endless. Ideas for walls, ceilings, doors, windows, stairways, and built-ins such as bookshelves, headboards, and fireplace surrounds are all shown.