Architectural Details - Foyer

After we finished up the mantle rehab in the dining room, we started seriously thinking about curtains for the space. I'll get more into the selection process of those later, but while considering options and talking through costs, we realized that because the dining room and foyer kind of bled into one another, the foyer windows would need to be treated too. But 5 single windows and a bay of windows was going to be a lot of fabric and the options we really loved were not inexpensive. THE STRUGGLE! So, then we started talking about treating the foyer as it's own space and doing something different on those windows. It could work as there was a slight floor height transition between the rooms plus two faux columns separating the spaces,  but neither of these elements felt visually strong enough to make this idea work. The concept felt forced and off.  

Here is an image standing in the dining room looking into the foyer. You can see the columns I'm talking about. 

What happened next I'm going to blame on our new found love with all things Fixer Upper.  Brent said, what if we mounted antique brackets to the columns to accentuate them more. Not only would this add another layer of interest to the space but it would be a great way to visually separate the rooms without building walls. I loved the idea!

Lucky for us Scotts Antique Market was the next weekend, so we loaded up The Croix and headed out to find our brackets. We perused several options, but ultimately ended up landing on these beauties pulled off a front porch in Ohio. $200 for the whole unit (which we broke into two separate corbels). Not cheap, but they were much larger than a lot of the options and we liked the details. Not too plain, but also not too gingerbread house.

We got them home and separated them..... 

Next we knocked all of the loose paint off. We didn't want to mess with them too much, but we also didn't want paint shards falling on the heads of our guests, so we got them cleaned up a bit... 

And then placed them on the columns:

Once we identified the exact placement, Brent mounted them to the column and ceiling. Meanwhile Croix focused on an intense activity of loading and unloading his box whilst overseeing the progress. #management

With only one of the brackets up, you could already feel how well this was going to work....

and Boom...it did work! Like a charm!

Visual interest, check. Defining room boundaries, check. Another layer of charm and interest, check. This whole concept worked so well that I may even go nuts and wallpaper the foyer!

All photos are my own.