Ideal for the new construction and professional remodelling applications.

EliteTrim cornice moulding offers the rich, carved detailing of expensive architectural wood mouldings or plaster, at a much more affordable price. What makes EliteTrim mouldings especially distinctive is the intricacy of the detailed patterns embossed on the face, replicating the opulent carvings of high-end architectural mouldings.

EliteTrim’s white pre-finish primer allows the product to be installed faster while natural wood mouldings are typically unfinished adding time and cost to the job. EliteTrim is made from MDF, which is superior to most solid, paint or stain-grade woods in that it will have no knots, voids, or cracks.

Bed-mould, in architecture, the congeries of mouldings which is under the projecting part of almost every cornice, of which, indeed, it is a part.

A large family of mouldings which are designed to gracefully flare out to a finished top edge; generally used for capping walls, pilasters, cabinets; used extensively in the creation of interior and exterior cornice assemblies and door and window hoods. In recent times, crown mouldings have generally made their appearance as mostly decorated plaster or wooden trim where walls meet ceilings.

A Window Cornice is an ornamental framework of wood or composition to which window curtains are attached by rods with rings or hooks. Cornices are often gilded and of elaborate design, but they are less fashionable today than before it had been discovered that elaborate draperies harbour dust and microbes.

Like other pieces of furniture, they have reflected taste as it passed, and many of the carefully constructed examples of the latter part of the 18th century are still in use in the rooms for whih they were made. Chippendale provided a famous series still in situ for the gallery at Harewood House, the valances of which are, like the cornices themselves, of carved and painted wood.

A pediment is a classical architectural element consisting of a triangular section or gable found above the horizontal superstructure (entablature) which lies immediately upon the columns.

It is found throughout Classical and NeoClassical Architecture, most notably in the Greek temple form (the most prominent example being the Parthenon), where it was a palette for beautiful, intricate sculptural detail.

The Corinthian order is one of the Classical orders of Greek and Roman architecture, although it was seldom used in Greek architecture. The other two orders were the Doric and the Ionic. (When classical architecture was revived, two more orders were added to the canon, the Tuscan order and the Composite order.)

The Corinthian order was said to have been invented by an architect, Callimachus, who was inspired by the sight of a votive basket that had been left on the grave of a young girl. A few of her toys were in it, and a square tile had been placed over the basket, to protect them from the weather. An acanthus plant had grown through the woven basket, mixing its spiny, deeply cut leaves with the weave of the basket. Or so Vitruvius said. Claude Perrault incorporated a vignette of the tale in his illustration of the Corinthian order for his translation of Vitruvius, published in Paris, 1684. Perrault demonstrates in his engraving how the proportions of the carved capital could be adjusted according to demands of the design, without offending. The texture and outline of Perrault’s leaves is dry and tight compared to their 19th-century naturalism at the U.S. Capitol.

A Corinthian capital may be seen as an enriched development of the Ionic capital, though one may have to look closely at a Corinthian capital (illustration, right) to see the Ionic volutes at the corners, perhaps reduced in size and importance, scrolling out above the two ranks of leaves, and the smaller volutes scrolling inwards to meet each other on each side. The leaves may be quite stiff, schematic and dry, or they may be extravagantly undercut, naturalistic and spiky. In Late Antique and Byzantine practice, the leaves may be blown sideways, as if by the wind of Faith. Unlike the Doric and Ionic column capitals, a Corinthian capital has no neck beneath it, just a ring-like astragal molding or a banding that forms the base of the capital, recalling the base of the legendary basket.

The Ionic order forms one of the three orders or organizational systems of classical architecture, the other two canonic orders being the Doric and the Corinthian. (There are two lesser orders, the stocky Tuscan order and the rich variant of Corinthian, the Composite order, added by 16th century Italian architectural theory and practice.)

The Ionic order originated in the mid-6th century BC in Ionia, the southwestern coastland and islands of Asia Minor settled by Ionian Greeks, where an Ionian dialect was spoken. The Ionic order was being practised in mainland Greece in the 5th century BC. The first of the great Ionic temples, though it stood for only a decade before an earthquake levelled it, was the Temple of Hera on Samos, built about 570 BC - 560 BC by the architect Rhoikos. It was in the great sanctuary of the goddess: it could scarcely have been in a more prominent location for its brief lifetime. A longer-lasting 6th century Ionic temple was the Temple of Artemis at Ephesus, one of the Seven Wonders of the World.

Unlike the Greek Doric order, Ionic columns normally stand on a base (but see illustration, left) which separates the shaft of the column from the stylobate or platform. The capital of the Ionic column has characteristic paired scrolling volutes that are laid on the molded cap (”echinus”) of the column, or spring from within it. The cap is usually enriched with egg-and-dart.

Originally the volutes lay in a single plane (illustration at right); then it was seen that they could be angled out on the corners. This feature of the Ionic order made it more pliant and satisfactory than the Doric to critical eyes in the 4th century BC: angling the volutes on the corner columns, ensured that they “read” equally when seen from either front or side facade. The 16th-century Renaissance architect and theorist Vincenzo Scamozzi designed a version of such a perfectly four-sided Ionic capital, which became so much the standard, that when a Greek Ionic order was eventually reintroduced, in the later 18th century Greek Revival, it conveyed an air of archaic freshness and primitive, perhaps even republican, vitality.

The Doric order was one of the three orders or organizational systems of Ancient Greek or classical architecture; the other two orders were the Ionic and the Corinthian. The Greek Doric order was the earliest of these, known from the 7th century BC and reaching its mature form in the 5th century BC.

In their original Greek version, Doric columns stood directly on the flat pavement (the stylobate) of a temple without a base; their vertical shafts were fluted with parallel concave grooves; and they were topped by a smooth capital that flared from the column to meet a square abacus at the intersection with the horizontal beam (”entablature”) that they carried.

A pronounced feature of both Greek and Roman versions of the Doric order are the triglyphs and metopes. The triglyphs are decoratively grooved and represent the original wooden end-beams, which rest on the plain frieze that occupies the lower half of the entablature. Under each triglyph are peglike guttae that appear as if they were hammered in from below to stabilize the post-and-beam (”trabeated”) construction.

A triglyph is centered above every column, with another (or sometimes two) between columns, though the Greeks felt that the corner triglyph should form the corner of the entablature, creating an inharmonious mismatch with the supporting column. The spaces between the triglyphs are the metopes. They may be left plain, or they may be carved in low relief. Because the metopes are somewhat flexible in their proportions, the modular space between columns (”intercolumniation”) can be adjusted by the architect. Often the last two columns were set slightly closer together, to give a subtle visual strengthening to the corners. (more…)

A gutter is a long, thin trough, usually one that runs straight.

A gutter (sometimes referred to as a ditch) runs along a street or road (if there is a sidewalk, the gutter is often between the road and the sidewalk) and carries water away from the thoroughfare into a sewer.

The popular image of a drunk or bum lying in such a trench gave rise to the adjective “gutter”, meaning vulgar. Related to this popular usage are the idioms “to be in the gutter”, meaning “to be down on one’s luck” and “having one’s mind in the gutter”, meaning “having vulgar thoughts”.

A gutter (sometimes referred to as an eavestrough or rain gutter), is a narrow channel which runs along the eaves of a building and serves to collect rain water and direct it down away from the roof to prevent drips off the roof edges.
In bowling, the gutters are long grooves on either side of a lane which are slightly wider than a bowling ball, and into which a ball can easily roll. If it does, the ball cannot strike any pins, and the player receives no points for that throw.

In typography a gutter is the space between columns of printed text. This has been adapted into comics jargon to describe the narrow spaces between panels.

In comics, the gutter is the space between the panels, and, according to Scott McCloud, is where all of the real action happens in a comic.

In forums, the gutter is a specialized forum where few to none of the forum’s general rules apply, allowing approved Gutter members to post questionable content that would normally merit deletion in the general forum.

An eave is the edge of a roof. Eaves usually project beyond the side of the building. Some buildings, such as craftsman bungalows, have very wide eaves with decorative brackets.

The word eave can also refer to the part of a sloping roof that overhangs the wall, the part of a roof which projects out from the side wall, or the lower edge of the part of a roof that overhangs a wall.