In your custom home when you are looking for something unique and different instead of just another paint colour try stoning one of the interior walls.
Most people are used to seeing stone on the outside of the house, but a growing trend in custom homes is stone feature walls instead of a painted feature wall.
New manufactured stones look remarkably like real stone and now with sheared natural stone you don’t have to worry about the overall weight of the stone like you do with full bed stone that is installed outside. This means that you can use manufactured stone or natural stone for your feature wall.
In the area that you are going to install the stone you need to make sure that the walls are primed and painted before you start installing stone. This will help keep the stone clean and clear of any paint splatter as the painters are finishing the inside of your new home.
If you decide that you want to use the full bed stone then you are going to have to reinforce the floor for the extra weight of the stone. Full bed stone is extremely heavy; if you’re building it on top of a wood floor instead of a concrete one then you will need to have the bearing engineered into the floor system. This needs to be done at the time when the rest of the floor is being engineered and decided on before it is installed or you could be creating a real headache for your contractor.
Other things that you can do in a feature wall are as follows;
• Lighting-wall sconces, pot lights, LED strip lighting, ect.
• Art cubby-a wood box set into the wall, stone boxes or slabs that make a place for art to sit.
• Wood mantles-you don’t need a fireplace below to have a wood mantle.
• Fish tanks built into the wall and surrounded by stone.
• Mirrors, this helps give more length to a space when the stone can have a tendency to darken the area or make it feel smaller then it is.
Remember that it’s a feature wall so be creative, the only limits to it are the limits of your imagination.
Placing your feature wall at the end of a hallway or in a plain room will help make the space more interesting and inviting. Putting it at the end of a long hallway makes the hallway feel shorter and also helps give purpose to the area as not just a walkway to another part of the home but also as an attractive feature inside the home.
Rob Abbott
Village Builders Inc.
I was particularly interested in the information about wood mantles. I've been planning those for awhile now but did very much think that they only exist to house fireplaces. Now that I know they're fine as a decorative piece themselves, I look forward to seeing what I can do to put one in my own home. There's so much room for creativity there and they're great storage, too, for miscellaneous items.
ReplyDeleteLisa Brady @ R and K Custom Homes