Crown & Cornice Moulding
Single-piece crown and multi-piece built-up cornice, scaled to the ceiling and cut with a tight, stable joint at every inside corner.
Crown is the most visible trim in a room and the easiest to get wrong. At nine feet and above, a stock three-inch profile reads as an afterthought — the corner needs real projection to hold it.
Precision fit, not just mitered
This is the detail we are least willing to compromise on.
A mitered inside corner butts two end-grain faces together. It looks perfect the day it is caulked and painted, and it opens into a visible V the first time the house moves — which in North Texas is every season, as interior trim takes on and gives off moisture through humid springs and dry summers.
We cut every inside corner as a tight, stable joint instead: the profile of one piece is nested against the face of the other, so the two overlap instead of butting. When the wood shrinks, the joint closes on itself rather than pulling open. It takes ten or fifteen minutes a corner instead of two, and it is the reason the work still looks right in five years. Production crews skip it and fill the gap with caulk.
Scarf joints over framing
A run longer than a single stick needs a joint somewhere. We land it as a scarf — two overlapping bevels rather than butted square ends — and we put it over framing, so the joint is backed by something solid and cannot move independently. A butt joint in the middle of a bay will telegraph.
Built-up cornice
Where the room warrants more presence, cornice is assembled from separate components: a backer block to carry the projection, a frieze board to add height, and a crown profile on top. That gets the scale up to where a tall room needs it without relying on one enormous piece of moulding.
Larger built-up layouts get scheduled with crew support so the run goes up in one continuous pass, which is how the spring angle stays consistent corner to corner.
Spring angle
Crown does not sit flat against either surface — it bridges wall and ceiling at a fixed angle. Hold that angle even slightly inconsistently and the profile appears to grow and shrink along the wall. Every piece gets cut and set to the same spring angle, checked as the run goes up rather than at the end.