Architectural & DIsplay

Home Decor - Decorative Home Accents

Architectural Home Accents

There are dozens of ways to add architectural elements to your home projects by combining and adapting the pieces. Their addition will prove to be both a visual enhancement and to add a rustic charm to your decor. Decorative architectural pieces such as ladders, shutters, corbels & doors can brings a new element of structural surprise to an otherwise mundane setting.

Ladder Decor
Ok, it's not the most romantic nor regaled item on your wish list, but let's not overlook a good ladder's merits. For example, some genius added sizable wire baskets to the rungs and instantly created space-saving storage. Another creative inventor substituted shelves for treads and produced a leggy, lean-to bookcase or plant stand. Brilliant!

Still prominent today? The library or loft ladder. And the somewhat primitive and shapely wooden display ladder often used to cradle old quilts or blankets. That metal climber you bought at a big box store will never be a future design find, but the one the kids built to access the tree fort very well might.

Shutters & Doors
Clearly both items are used to close off an opening. Doors, while always considered functional and necessary, were generally plain and relatively undervalued. Shutters had a grander purpose in that they could be used to direct light and airflow, and protect windows. Today, the line is a bit more blurred. The farmstead sliding barn door now has a place of honor between many bed and bathroom spaces and shutters have become marquee room accessories.

Reclaimed wood and vintage panels rose from flea market to shabby chic once their decorative capabilities were uncovered. From headboards to high end interior wall hangings, shutters and doors have found a new home in our quest for design difference-makers.

Wooden Corbels
The obvious appeal of these decor pieces is that they look as though they came from a century old Victorian home or church nave. They could have been fancy trim or mill work, held up some sweet sales shelf heaped with fabric or propped up the overhang on a hotel check-in counter. They might have graced a farmhouse porch or cottage walls. Back in the day.

And now? We have an on-going romance with their chipped paint, carved embellishments and creative uses. Under counters, flanking windows and doors, as decorative accessories that bring a bit of the past into the present. Now, we create the backstory and keep passing it along.