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  • MAKEOVER STYLE TIP SERIES

    THE BEAM

    Dilemma: A huge beam jutting almost 2 feet from the ceiling and cutting across the entire 16 foot 10 inch width of the living room. This beam was a visual stop sign, the first thing you noticed when you walked in the front door, and a structural element that could not be removed.

    Before After
    Beam During

    Solution: Try to make it disappear, or turn it into a feature. Sometimes with smaller beams or other prominent ceiling features, a few coats of paint of the same color as the ceiling will lessen the visual impact. But this beam was massive, so we opted to turn it into a feature.

    First, to lessen the visual impact, we mirrored it down its entire length. Since there is no mirror that’s 16 feet 10 inches long, we used two lengths of mirror that met at a seam in the middle.

    Then we stained a shelf the same dark brown as the other floating shelves in the room and attached it to the Vases on Beambottom of the beam, creating a place to put accent pieces. Because we really wanted the room to flow without a strong visual divider, we made the shelf on the grownup side only protrude 6 inches, and on the kids’ side, only 2 inches.

    The mirror’s center seam was hidden by a few carefully placed silver vases. With the mirror reflecting the sloping white ceiling, the effect when you walked into the room was an optical illusion: Your eye perceived a floating shelf under what looked an open space straight through to the other side.

    Problem solved, and design feature added!

    Who Did What

    Waialae Plumbing and Construction drywalled the beam and custom-built the floating shelf. The Dudes Hawaii mirrored the beam and stained the shelf.