In a period room, panelling is rarely a blank canvas. There is usually a cornice to respect, a skirting to meet, a chimney breast that isn't quite square, and a proportion the room was built to. Good panelling reads as though it was always there. Poor panelling looks applied — stuck to the wall rather than part of it.
Read the room before you draw it
We start every panelled room with a survey, not a catalogue. The dado height, the module of the panels, the depth of the mouldings and the line of the cornice are all set by the room itself. Get the proportion right and the eye accepts the panelling immediately; get it wrong and no amount of fine moulding will rescue it.
Scribe to the wall, don't fight it
The most common mistake is to fit panelling as if the wall were flat and true. It almost never is. Our joinery is made slightly generous and scribed to the wall on site, so the panelling follows the building rather than leaving a shadow gap where the two disagree. In an old house, that fitting is half the craft.
Match the mouldings
Where a room already has an ogee skirting or a particular cornice, we take the profile off the building and run new mouldings to match. New panelling then carries the same details as the original joinery, and the two read as one. This is the difference between conservation-grade work and a generic panelling kit.
Let solid timber breathe
Solid timber moves with the seasons, which is why real panelling is built as frames and floating panels rather than glued flat boards. It is a technique as old as the panelled rooms it imitates, and it is why properly made panelling is still tight and flat a century later.
Done properly, you should not be able to say where the original room stops and the new joinery begins. That is the whole ambition.