A great way to add to a new room that you are planning as part of an addition, new home or existing home, is through the use of tray ceilings. You can turn a plain boring ceiling into a majestic focal point of the room. The picture on the left (bedroom with an ornate tray ceiling) is a great example of doing a lot with only a little. Notice how adding some decorative moldings and complementary paint schemes to the tray ceiling absolutely makes this room pop! It looks great, and something like this is easy to do and doesn’t cost too much (even less if you do it yourself).

Let’s look at the next example (to the right). This is another bedroom with a tray ceiling. Not as much detail as the first bedroom, much more plain, but it still looks good. When laying out a room ask yourself what you want out of the room. What will it be used for? How will it be furnished? Try and visualize the new room before it is built or remodeled. If you have difficulty visualizing 2 dimensional plans, ask your builder or architect to show it to you in 3D. If they can’t, you may want to consider using someone else. This day in age quality contractors and architects should be able to show you your plans modeled in 3D. 3D modeling is an invaluable tool in assisting customers to make good decisions about their projects, such as a tray ceiling in a new master bedroom, that they will be happy with for years to come.

As the picture on the left demonstrates, it is also possible and sometimes aesthetically pleasing to have multiple levels, or tiers, built into a tray style ceiling. Obviously if you are considering this type of ceiling the room needs to have the ceiling height for it. It wouldn’t make sense, or look very good, to install this style tiered ceiling in a small room with only 7′6″ of original ceiling height. This is where the modeling can help. You need to be able visualize your project before the plan details are finalized, I can’t stress this enough.

I will add more articles soon that focus on particular aspects of construction and remodeling in addition to more posts of our completed jobs. They will be listed in the ‘articles’ category.

You can check out our complete gallery of tray ceilings here. More images will be added to the gallery as I come across them.