The best interior renovations capture your attention the instant you enter the room—and continue to each time you pass them. It's easy to make a big impact if money isn't an issue. Move a few walls, raise the roof, install larger windows and buy all new furniture. Unfortunately, that's not a very practical solution for most of us. Painting the walls and installing new window treatments are realistic options, but for more dramatic impact, try adding some architectural interest to a room.
In this "Weekend Project," we'll show you how to transform an ordinary rectangular cased opening into a beautiful elliptical archway that features fluted columns and an arched header with keystone accents (see the finished project on the facing page). Architectural woodwork like this involves a high degree of skill, well beyond the capabilities of most homeowners. It's even difficult to find a carpenter who can do this kind of work reasonably. So we cheated by ordering a prefabricated archway kit from Raleigh, North Carolina—based CurveMakers. We were able to complete the installation in only two days.
The archway, milled from paint-grade poplar, consists of only three preassembled parts: two columns and one archway header. Each column is made up of a pair of fluted casings attached to a flat side jamb. A decorative capital molding is attached to the top of each column, and plinth blocks are fastened to their bottoms.
The archway header comes with the curved casings attached to the curved head jamb. There's even a decorative keystone affixed to the center of each head casing. The three preassembled parts are ready to be installed right out of the box; they don't even require sanding.
CurveMakers offers four different models of poplar archway, which range in width from 2 feet ($517) to 8 feet ($1,260) in elliptical and half-round shapes. At an additional cost, you can special-order an archway made out of oak, cherry, mahogany and many other species.
For help on ordering a kit for your room, go to www.curvemakers.com. Click on the "Order" button for complete instructions on how to correctly measure an existing passageway opening. The site also includes color stepgraphs of all the standard kits.
For our room renovation, we chose a 4-foot Model B poplar elliptical-archway kit ($643). The first day we prepared the existing opening; on the second we installed and painted the archway.
As an economical alternative to its standard kits, CurveMakers recently introduced the E-Z Arch kit, which contains only the prefab elliptical header; there are no columns, casings or jambs. Made of medium-density fiberboard, it's also available in widths ranging from 2 feet ($182) to 8 feet ($309).
