Tutorials/Walls and buttresses

Parts of a wall
Note: These are first-pass definitions and require further fact-checking. I do not currently vouch for their accuracy!

Walls have parts?? Yes. In modern times most people know what these features are, but there is much less appreciation of what they were originally for. As modern houses have damp-proof courses and are made of very uniform, mass-produced materials, some of the old pragmatic reasons these features exist no longer apply. The main reason we still have them is becoming a matter of custom rather than actual need.


 * Baseboard, Skirting board – this is a broad, usually wooden board at about ankle height whose purpose is to cover the join between wall and floor. It covers the uneven edge of flooring next to the wall and helps protect the wall from kicks, abrasion, and furniture. It can also serve as a decorative molding.


 * Panelling, Wainscotting – the lower area of a wall between the skirting board (if present) and the chair rail, usually at about waist height. Wainscoting was usually a wooden covering, over the lower area of a wall up to about waist height. Panelling was developed in antiquity to make rooms in stone buildings more comfortable. [cn] The panels served to insulate the room from the cold stone.[reword]

They helped to insulate a room with cold stone conceal the water stains that tended to creep up old walls prior to the use of damp-proof courses.[cn]


 * Chair rail, Dado rail' – a thin rail at the top of the panelling, generally positioned at about chair height. It helped protect walls against scuffing or dents from the backs of chairs and other pieces of furniture.


 * Picture rail – a thin wooden rail at slightly above head height which provided a way to hang pictures on a plastered wall. You can't bang nails into old plaster itself because that is highly likely to break it. Hence a wooden picture rail was the only height at which you could hang paintings in a room with plastered walls. The picture rail often also gave the upper border for a room's wallpaper. Above the picture rail, wall and ceiling would usually be the same colour.


 * 'Molding, Coving – a decorative border between wall and ceiling. These were often made of plaster, and in large rooms with high ceilings coving could be very elaborate.

Would you have all of these different features on one wall? No. You would generally have dado + dado rail and otherwise plain or some or all of: skirting board, picture rail, coving. [reword][cn]

A plain wall of any material is boring. This is fine if you have detail in other parts of your construction, or if you want a modern or utilitarian feel, such as for a warehouse or a factory. Plain walls have the virtue that they won't distract from whatever else you have built, whereas a 'busy' wall might. However, if there are large areas in the building where can see nothing of interest but the wall, some simple decorative flourishes will help a lot.


 * Plain wall - avoid, unless other parts of your building are well-detailed
 * Two tone - Use one material for the top few blocks, another material for remainder. For reasons of balance the bottom section should usually be at least half the wall height, and the top portion should be at most equal in size and usually smaller.
 * Separator - Place a band of a different material at one height in an otherwise plain wall. You can place the band high, low, at head height, or roughly in the middle of the wall, and these choices will affect the appearance of the room to a surprising degree.
 * Flourish - Add a 'kink' in the borders between sections. One block up or down makes quite a big difference.
 * 3D texture - Using stairs, fences, fence gates, inset half-blocks or any other blocks you can think of can add a lot of texture to a bland wall.
 * Combinations - Starting to combine the above ideas adds even more flexibility, but don't try to do all of them on every wall, unless the rest of the building has been kept plain.