DECORATIVE STENCIL - NOT THE OLD-FASHIONED WAY

Sometimes houses have unfortunate circumstances that you cannot reasonably fix.  This house had one such circumstances in a strange molding border circling the stair hall & small den.  One wall was formerly the outside of the house (pre-add-on) and upon further inspection this strange molding border hid a few unsightly wires and cords with something slightly less unsightly in the molding border.  Are you with me? So, we're stuck with the molding border.  Or flat board border.  Here is what that border looked like, these before photos were taken on move-in day before we painted everything, including the ceiling.  It's not hard to see the border cutting through the center of the space, full circle around the room.

So we painted it to match the walls and I suppose we could have left it there, but instead decided to draw attention to it.

Usually when I say, decorative painting to a client, they look at me like I have bugs crawling out of my eyes and ears.

I found a local decorative painter that could do this work and through about a half-dozen tries we finally settled on the pattern & color below.

But this took a lot of fine tuning in the color, in the technique, in the scale, even the pattern.

You can see that the border adds a little visual interest without being overpowering and provides a little more meaning to our strange molding border.

So how do you feel about decorative painting?