What Is Cornicing?

There are some interior design and architectural terms that you can hear frequently without truly thinking about what they mean. We’re willing to bet that, for many people, cornicing is one of them.

So, we thought we’d explain what cornicing is, why it’s a great feature to restore if you have a period property, or why you might want to consider cornicing in London if it’s not an element that’s already part of your interior.

We’lll start with the basics. What is cornicing? According to Designing Buildings, it’s “an area or space that overhangs something else”. In interior design, a cornice is most commonly found running along the top of interior walls.

There can be a great deal of variation in interior cornices. They can be very plain and simple, or they can be incredibly intricate and ornate. Generally, people will call plain cornicing “coving”, which means the term cornicing is typically reserved for more ornate examples of decor.

Interestingly, cornicing was first used as far back as the time of Ancient Greece and Rome, when it was commonly used on many buildings.

You can also get exterior cornices, which can also be decorative but which serve a very practical purpose, namely to protect the walls of a building by directing rain water away from them.

When it comes to interior cornicing, you don’t have to simply paint it the same colour as your walls or ceiling. There are some ways of decorating to really bring this feature to the fore.

A post for Livingetc recently suggested that one option is to paint the cornicing in a shade that complements the rest of a room. This introduces “a modern twist to a traditional room”, the publication stated.