Paneling and Built-Ins for Marin County Hillside Homes

The shingle-style houses of Ross and Kentfield are relaxed on the outside and often carefully finished within, and the paneling that belongs in them is frame-and-panel work with the proportions set to the room: wainscot at chair-rail height in halls and dining rooms, full-height paneling in a library or study, panel courses aligned to the door heads and window stools so the horizontal lines run around the room at consistent levels. The panels themselves are usually flat or beaded rather than heavily raised, because the style is not a formal one, and the cornice is a modest two- or three-piece stack rather than a deep classical one. Stile and rail widths scale with the ceiling height. All of this is drawn as elevations and checked against the actual walls before anything is cut.

Which parts are solid and which are veneered is decided on the drawings, and in Marin the climate decides it more than cost does. Mouldings, stiles, rails, shelf edges and anything with a milled profile are solid wood. Wide flat faces, the panel fields and the sides of tall cases, are veneered over a stable core, because a wide solid board will move across its width with every wet winter and dry summer and a veneered panel will not. Solid raised panels float in their grooves. Veneer also lets a library or study be sequence-matched from one flitch so the grain runs continuously around the room. Our main millwork page names oak, walnut, cherry and mahogany for stained work and pine and poplar for painted work; in a shingle-style house the trim is most often painted poplar with stained oak or walnut where the wood is meant to show.

Built-ins are where these houses come alive: bookcases flanking a fireplace, a window seat under a bay looking at Mount Tamalpais, a sideboard built into the dining-room wall, a library of full-height cases with a stacked cornice above. They are built as furniture-grade casework with proper joinery, shelf spans kept short enough for the species, solid lipping on every shelf front, and the room’s base and cornice carried across the cases so the built-in and the paneling read as one piece. Lighting, adjustable shelving and concealed storage are drawn in from the start, with blocking placed before the walls are closed.

A coffered ceiling is laid out from the room’s centerlines so the coffers are equal in both directions and the border coffers match, with beam depth set against the ceiling height. The beams are hollow boxes over a ladder of backing fastened to the joists, and the mouldings inside each coffer are stacked and coped at every inside corner. Where a room wants weight at the ceiling without a grid, we stack a cornice from several profiles on a backing strip. Stacked moulding and coffered ceilings are the detail work the founder of our shop trained in.

Finish is a system built in the shop: paint-grade work primed and sprayed, stained work color-sampled against the whole lot of veneer and solid stock, then sealed and topcoated under controlled humidity, and everything touched up after fitting. On site, everything is scribed. Older Marin houses lean, their floors slope and their corners are rarely square, and hillside houses have settled; the scribe allowance is built into every piece and the final joints are cut in the room. Our installation tolerances guide explains how fit is planned from the drawings forward.