More lamps in my future ...!? Not such a good thing when I have two perfectly good matched sets in our office with no good place to go. One set is actually tall, antique alabaster (can you see them in the "before" pics?), probably worth a pretty penny, but they just aren't "us". I would love to see them in Magnaverde's home. Maybe I should sell them on e-Bay, but then I'd have to scam the buyer, right? That's what I hear people do these days. :-) (Stupid scammers. I hate meanies.) These are them (they?): The other set is nickel-tone, non-expensive lamps from LNT or BB&B or somewhere like that. Back before we found ourselves gravitating to iron, we thought we'd decorate a little more mod, with brushed nickel lamps and stuff. Didn't take but about a month to figure out that we'd made a mistake, but too late. So I have THOSE lamps to contend with. They're probably in an old picture of the living room. If I were made of money, I'd go straight to Hubbardton Forge for our bedside lamps. I can't get enough of their stuff. Must be because I went to college in Vermont. I was lucky enough to find a H.F. floor lamp on Craigslist a couple of years ago and snapped it up in the blink of an eye. I paid about 25% list price, such a deal. What's the right height for bedside lamps anyway?

We put crown in the living room. DH was concerned about being able to do a perfect job even w/ a miter saw so I suggested using decorative corner blocks. We love the look! At the corner where a wall turns for the staircase also got a corner block. It was a more substancial way to end the run of moulding w/out having to run it up the stairs, too. I decided I did not want crown in the DR as it is fairly small & already had a chair rail. I felt the crown would be too much. The DR and LR are seperated by a cased opening so it was easy to just do the one room. We just redid our MBR and I had thought about doing crown in there... but decided I prefered the cleaner look of none. None of the other bedrooms have it. It all boils down to what you want and would be comfortable w/. There are no "rules" that I know of. I do think it is a harder decision to make when there is an open floor plan. If the rooms are seperate it's easier to make one more formal w/ the crown.

All of these things originated as a way to cover the junction of dissimilar materials. The most pure of modern/minimal designs have No trim, including door frames, window frames or base. (There is usually a very narrow reveal at the floor often called a museum reveal. However, this type of modernism comes at a very high price, because the junctions and seams between things need to be perfect. The easiest one to leave out in a typical modern build was the crown, since it is generally a change of plane only, not materials.

I don't think it will make the room bigger, but it will make the red floor and lower walls appear to be a big shallow box, and that can feel confining. It will also emphasize the horizontal, and also the slant in the ceiling, and that often makes a ceiling look lower. Think about the look of bands of two different colors running around the room, and you'll see what I mean. I would also reconsider the chair rail, given that your trim is very slender and feels modern. What if you chose a warm creamy white for the walls, crown, and ceiling, to minimize the line of the slanted ceiling, and painted the trim red to match the floor? The red floor could make the existing wood tone seem quite orange. Then let your son pick a color for the door. In my house years ago, that would have meant metallic pewter, glossy black, or dark raisin purple!