From Door Moulding to Skirting Boards: How To Pick The Best Trim For Your Home

The aesthetic within a home is incredibly important. This is especially relevant if you’re someone who has invested a lot of time and money into finding the perfect abode for you and your family and finally want to take pride in showing off your new space. You may have picked out your colour palette, selected essential must-have items and are ready to start decorating, but have you thought about the best trims for your home?

Whether your property has come with trim already or you’re planning to add some features to promote an elegant and luxurious appearance, there’s no denying that a home without trim can feel a bit bare and bland. A well designed and thought out trim will often go unnoticed and the room will simply feel “just right” to those residing in it. However, a poorly selected trim could spell disaster.

For those who are unsure, trim is a word used to describe interior finishes within a property. From architraves and door casings to pilasters and wooden mouldings, interior house trims can upgrade and lift the design of a house and enhance a room’s architecture.

As experts in manufacturing house trims, let’s explore how trim can make or break a home and how to choose the best trim based on your preferences and household style.

Different types of trims for the home

Before we look into selecting trim to suit the style of your home, let’s explore the different types of trims commonly found on the market and used within many homes across the UK.

Door casings

Within a house, doors are a real focal point to any room, so why not highlight and improve upon this area with casings?

A trim that surrounds a door frame is called casing. Door casings are most commonly manufactured with wood and lend themselves to any home design, whether traditional or contemporary. For example, oak door casings can suit any home design whilst adding a touch of elegance.

Usually, these are the easiest type of trim or moulding to install because the joinery is simple. So, for a cost-effective and easy trim to lift a room in your home, consider door casings.

Pilasters

Think Roman or Greek architectural columns and merge this onto a wall inside the home - you’ve got a pilaster! A pilaster is a rectangular column that is basically attached to the wall and projects partially from it. It gives the illusion of supporting the building structure but they are only for decorative purposes.

Pilasters are gorgeous features and will truly stand out within a room. However, they are less popular in UK homes, are trickier to install/manufacture due to their intricate designs and don’t lend themselves to every property - you’ll need the touch of the regal about you for these!

Architraves

In architecture, an architrave is a lintel or beam that rests on the capitals of columns. However, when it comes to home interiors, architraves are the moulded frames around doors or windows. There are three popular types of architraves used in UK homes:

• Bullnose architraves

• Oak architraves

• Chamfered architraves

These trims suit all sorts of house style and are often considered a necessary feature to a door or window - without architraves, your entranceway would look bare and empty.

Skirting boards

An essential part to most walls - and you may not have even realised it - are skirting boards.

A skirting board is a wooden or vinyl board that runs along and covers the base of an interior wall. Its purpose is to cover the joint between the wall and the floor but, but more than this, a skirting board is there to protect the wall from any accidental knocks and general wear and tear from furniture, scuffing and use of mops and hoovers.

Overall though, skirting boards can be added to a room purely for decorative purposes. Because of these factors, skirting boards are incredibly popular in UK homes and almost all homes can’t live without them.

Various other wood mouldings

• Beadings - these are decorative or ornamental mouldings that resemble a string of beads or a semicircular cross-section.

• Door bars/thresholds - a door bar/threshold is usually a piece of wood, metal, or stone that forms the bottom of a door that you walk over as you enter a room or building. Useful for insulation and door protection purposes, these also finish off the look of a room or entranceway area.

• Stair nosings - a stair nosing is the horizontal, protruding edge of a single stair/step where most foot traffic occurs. Usually made from aluminium, vinyl or wood, these stairs can help stop trips and falls. For a quirky look, why not select a contrasting nosing colour to the rest of the stair tread?

Consider style

With multiple trims to choose from, you may be ready to get completely swept up in redesigning your home. Before you get carried away though, it’s important to consider what style your house already is or what style you’re planning to change to. Additionally, you’ll need to think about whether your chosen trim will suit your style.

Victorian

As a style that emerged from 1830 and 1910, primarily during the Victorian era and for a while afterwards, Victorian architecture was known to be very striking. A mixture of Gothic and Romanesque styles, homes built within this era usually featured high ceilings and large windows and featured details that reflected the wealth of the owner and the “new” money era of the industrial revolution.

If you’re considering a Victorian style for rooms in your home, there’s so much trim you could potentially include. As many Victorian homes feature fireplaces in most rooms, you could opt for stunning decorative fireplace trims around the edges.

You could also get away with decorative pilasters and cornices too, along with ornamental door casings. Darker hardwood materials could work here, complementing patterned wallpapers which are heavily popular in a Victorian style.

Georgian

Georgian houses were usually built to have three to four storeys and often have a peculiar characteristic in that some windows have been filled in with bricks. This is because, between 1696 and 1851, there was a window tax levied upon those living in Georgian homes during that time.

Architectural features of Georgian homes include sash windows with smaller panes, high ceilings (often grandiose) and panelled doorways. Because of these features, the world of house trimmings is your oyster; you could certainly add elegant trims in the form of well-decorated door casings, architraves, pilasters and beadings to emphasise these areas. Rooms were also very symmetrical too - so, if you put grand door casings on one side of the room or house, make sure it matches up to the opposite side.

Light woods would be better suited to emulate this style, and it was common that Georgian spaces and walls were painted in a single colour, usually white or cream. Accenting colours characterising the Georgian period included lavender, pink, pea green and light blue, so try and stick to lighter hardwoods and colours that complement your Georgian styled home.

Modern/Contemporary

Perhaps you have a more modern home or a new build that you wish to transform into a minimalist or contemporary haven. A modern design employs a sense of simplicity in every element and often sticks to only a few set colours - usually, whites, blacks and another accenting colour. This style is sleek and sophisticated with limited clutter, so you’ll need mouldings that reflect this.

Due to a modern style’s clear and crisp lines and colours, simple materials like metal and glass are used a lot. However, wood is often used too, especially when opting for a more fluid contemporary style or combining Bohemian or Scandinavian style elements.

If you opt for a modern interior style, stick to simple and linear styles when it comes to your trims. Door casings, skirting boards, stair nosings, architraves and door bars will all blend well into a modern style, as long as they are light oak wood and aren’t elaborate in their design. For extra effect, why not paint them white? If opting for a more fluid contemporary style, the same applies to having crisp and clean trims rather than anything too elaborate, but you could definitely keep the light oak wood effect instead of having to paint them, or opt for a complementing colour such a light blues and greens.

Pro-Fit Mouldings - providing you with the most beautiful oak mouldings and trims for your home today

At Pro-Fit Mouldings, we manufacture and supply stunning and timeless hardwood trims and mouldings for any home, no matter how big or small. Whether you opt for a traditional Victorian design or a classic modern look, we have the mouldings to suit you. As well as home trimmings, we also supply sturdy oak doors and oak flooring in Nottingham and beyond. Get in touch with our team of experts to find out more about our mouldings today on 01777 872085.