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Wsj Subscription Only So Put The Entire Article Here; See Tax Cuts Help - Latest Design Frontier Features
Gilded Domes, Gothic Arches;
Milky Way Tiles, $190 Each
By JUNE FLETCHER
Staff Reporter of THE WALL STREET JOURNAL
August 26, 2005; Page W10
As they planned their 14,000-square-foot custom home in Austin, Texas, recently, Patrick and Suzi Dailey pushed the ceiling -- literally. Their five-bedroom home has half-barrels, convex ovals and vaulted groins, which are the intersecting arches seen in medieval churches. Though the elaborate ceilings added at least $20,000 to the home's cost, Mr. Dailey, who runs a hedge fund, and his wife, a remodeler, say it was worth it. "It makes my home feel like the Taj Mahal," Mrs. Dailey says.
Ceiling fans: a vaulted beadboard ceiling in a house by Gibson Custom Homes.
There's a lot going on overhead in upscale homes these days. In San Diego, artist Vaughn Bresheare charges $1,600 to rub a 6-foot-wide foyer dome with crumpled gold leaf. In Fort Myers, Fla., Wayne Homes is putting coffered, tin and beadboard ceilings in its Old Florida-style homes (included in the $1.05 million price). And it's not just mansions that are getting the overhead treatment: In Fairfield, Iowa, Sky Factory is manufacturing translucent acrylic panels with images of sunny skies or the Milky Way that homeowners can buy for $190 and put into standard drop-ceiling grids. In a way, ceilings are just catching up with the rest of the house, which at the higher end has been trending since the late '90s toward marble floors, crystal chandeliers and ormolu furniture. Kent DeReus, a Lincolnshire, Ill., architect who designs custom homes that cost as much as $5 million, says his clients want their homes not just to be their castles, but to also look like them, with iron plates, worn wooden beams and heavy trusses. "They want their homes to look 300 years old," he says.
Adding to Overhead
Some homeowners are looking to famous buildings for inspiration. Jon Drettman, a Michigan vineyard owner, spent about $80,000 to put barrel vaults, wood beams and Gothic arches, modeled after the Breakers hotel, in his new $1.8 million home in Palm Beach Gardens, Fla. Mr. Drettman plans to spend more money having the ceilings painted with vines or decorated with basket-weave wallpaper to match a coffee table he intends to buy. "I want my guests to be so wowed when they look up, they bump into my furniture," he says. Of course, fancy ceilings are one of the options that let builders boost their final tabs. They're also a way for those who build higher-priced, semicustom homes to offer something that tract-home builders generally don't. In Naples, Fla., London Bay Homes is selling a $7.8 million home with a 26-foot-tall wood-paneled entry foyer rotunda, wallpapered coffers in the library, and a blue dome with hidden twinkling fiber-optic lights, like a miniplanetarium, hovering over the master bath. Nearby, Gulfshore Homes has a $7 million home with a barrel ceiling, oval picture-frame molding and a dome decorated with an eight-point star. Another Florida luxury builder, WCI Communities in Bonita Springs, offers houses with coffered great-room ceilings in a choice of nine different finishes and moldings.
RAISING THE ROOF If you can't actually raise your 8-foot ceilings, architects, designers and builders have a few tricks to improve the view overhead:
• Reflect light. Paint the ceiling with metallic paint (copper is currently popular) and hide uplights in a shallow enclosure rimming the room. The reflected light "visually raises the ceiling," says Port Ludlow, Wash., interior designer Peatt Raftis.
• Lower the wall trim. To fool the eye into thinking the ceiling is taller, don't install crown molding at the top of a wall. Instead, drop it down at least 6 inches, says Lincolnshire, Ill., architect Kent DeReus. Extend the color of the ceiling paint to the top of the molding; paint or paper the wall below a different color to provide visual contrast.
• Add ceiling trim. To jazz up plain ceilings, apply molding that's less than 2 inches deep in a diamond or honeycomb pattern to create shallow coffers, says Charlotte, N.C., builder Fred Bricketto.
• Build "light wells." A skylight or dormer creates a "light well" that breaks up a low, flat ceiling and fills the room with light, says Mr. DeReus.
• Use wall sconces and torchieres. Ceilings look higher when they're lit evenly from below, says New York architect and interior designer Evan Galen. Avoid recessed "can" lights, which he says send "puddles" of light toward the floor and make ceilings look lower.
Ornamental ceilings are finding their ways into unexpected places. In Louisville, Ky., custom-home builder Ron Gibson says he's adding beadboard paneling to basement ceilings, and faux poplar beams to pool houses, at a cost of up to $250 a square foot -- more than 10 times the cost of a plain, flat ceiling.
Unlike five years ago, when the vogue was for faux finishes or stenciled designs on flat surfaces, many homeowners are opting for three-dimensional effects. Mr. Bresheare, the San Diego artist, uses cracked walnut shells mixed into a lime slag to create a nubby Old World effect, or crumples holographic foil leaf onto plaster to simulate the iridescent inside of an abalone's shell. Charging $600 a day, he says he finishes between 12 and 15 homes a year. "It takes time to create all the cracks and defects that people want," he says.
Linda Cassels-Hofmann has been doing similar faux-finish work in Lakeland, Fla., for 15 years, but says business is up 30% during the past year because of the "tooth and nail" competition among her clients, who are primarily luxury-home builders. Ms. Cassels-Hoffman says she typically decorates five or six ceilings in each home where she works. Among her techniques: pressing lace into wet plaster and then removing it to add the illusion of depth, and creating a ceiling that looks like part of it fell in. (She achieves this "breakaway" effect by painting a sky scene or faux-brick background, then stuccoing plaster on top, with a jagged edge that looks partially ripped away.) She says the time-consuming work, for which she charges as much as $50 a square foot, makes her appreciate how Michelangelo must have felt decorating the Sistine Chapel. "It's a killer on your neck and back," she says.
Fixes for 8-Foot Ceilings
Even in lower-priced homes, builders are trying to make the space overhead a little taller and more interesting. The 8-foot ceilings that were standard height for much of the 20th century may be on the way out: According to the National Association of Home Builders, 40% of homes have 9-foot ceilings, up from about 30% in 1999.
Even in entry-level homes, these slightly taller ceilings are being spruced up with thick moldings in important rooms like the dining room or great room. According to Freedonia Group, a Cleveland market-research company, sales of interior moldings reached $3.85 billion in 2004, up 18% from 1999.
A decorated domed ceiling in a house by Gulfshore Homes.
Manufacturers have come up with some mass-market ways to imitate the work of faux finishers. Three years ago, Sky Factory started selling its acrylic panels printed with the sky and other celestial scenes to doctors and dentists whose patients spend a lot of time looking up; last year it entered the residential market for the first time and sold 20 installations (a 6-foot-by-8-foot installed ceiling with lights and dimmer switches costs about $5,200).
Gary Shapiro started American Tin Ceiling in Bradenton, Fla., two years ago after figuring out a way to make nonrusting tin-ceiling panels that snap together. The 2-foot-square panels cost as much as $20 apiece (about the same as the most expensive acoustic ceiling tiles) and come in 23 patterns and 35 colors. Rick Magee, who covered the ceiling of his Greensboro, N.C., basement with the tin tiles, says they reflected so much noise when he played his stereo that he had to take them down and back them with sound-damping acoustic tiles, doubling his cost to about $10,000. But he'd make the same choice today, he says. "Plain ceilings are so boring."
Write to June Fletcher at june.fletcher@wsj.com
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