Rules · Walls · Ornament · Materials
In the panelled room, divide the wainscot as the order divides the wall: low panels below the dado rail, tall panels above it to the cornice, set out evenly between the doors, windows and chimneypiece; in the late seventeenth century frame them with bold bolection mouldings, in the early eighteenth make them raised and fielded.
Until the 1730s the best English rooms were lined with timber wainscot from floor to cornice, of oak in the grandest and of painted deal elsewhere, the paint a drab, olive or stone colour. The panels were proportioned to the parts of the order: short below the dado rail, tall above it, often with a row of frieze panels under the cornice.
From the 1730s plastered walls above a panelled dado took over in England, but in America the fireplace wall went on being panelled to the ceiling while the other walls were plastered, well into the second half of the century.
Front a basilican church with two storeys of the order: the lower as wide as nave and chapels, the upper as wide as the nave alone, joined by scrolls and crowned by a pediment.
Il Gesù (reconstructed): lower ≈ 34 m wide, upper ≈ 20 m; scrolls fill the difference
Mark the main door by setting a segmental pediment inside a larger triangular one, or by breaking the pediment open to hold a cartouche or statue.
Divide the inside of a dome into coffers that shrink in step with the meridians as they rise, so that their perspective deepens the dome and draws the eye to the light of the lantern.
Let the wall of a façade curve in plan (concave, convex, concave) so that the front answers the street, the light and the space within, and the order bends with it.
Make the architrave round a door or window as wide as a sixth part of the opening’s breadth, and dress the openings of the principal floor more richly than those of the storeys above and below, with a frieze and cornice, and on the grandest a pediment.
architrave = ⅙ × width of the light
Break the architrave of a door or window with blocks of plain stone laid across it, alternately larger and smaller, and set a keystone in the middle of the head.
Cite this page Chris Paton, “Rooms panelled from floor to cornice”, The Textbook of Architecture, https://textbookofarchitecture.com/rule/full-height-panelling. Text, drawings and models licensed under CC BY-NC 4.0.