Decorative Interior Columns and Column Wraps in Jacksonville, FL

Before anything gets built, we sort out which of two situations you have.

The first is a structural post carrying load from a beam down to a footing or slab. In a house where a wall came out for an open kitchen, that post cannot move, so we leave it alone and build finished millwork around it.

The second is purely decorative. Interior columns in this category define a dining area, frame an entry, or break up a long great room without closing it off, and with no load on them we have complete freedom on placement and size.

A quick test at home: if the post sits under a beam or a dropped soffit, assume it is structural. We confirm on site, and if there is any doubt we tell you to bring in an engineer rather than guessing.

Column wraps are our most common request here. We build a four-sided sleeve from finished material, slip it around the post, fasten it back with cleats, and trim the top and bottom.

We size the wrap so the finished dimension is what the room wants, not whatever the post happens to be. A 3-1/2-inch post looks spindly alone; wrapped out to 8 or 10 inches square, it reads as architecture. Corners get mitered and glued rather than butted, so no end grain seam shows.

The cap and base sell it. A plain box with no cap looks like a duct chase, so we build a plinth at the floor and a capital at the top that dies cleanly into the ceiling. If the room has crown molding, the capital gets a related profile.

Indoors we build a handful of shapes: square paneled wraps, square tapered columns, smooth or fluted round columns, and half columns or pilasters flat against a wall.

Tapered columns for interior spaces are worth calling out, because most people only associate taper with a front porch. Indoors, a tapered column on a short pedestal is the best way to divide a living room from a dining room without building a wall, and it echoes the front of the house if your porch already has taper.

As a rule of thumb, a column looks correct at roughly one tenth to one eighth as wide as it is tall, so keep it slim under 8-foot ceilings and go heavier in a 12-foot room. Pilasters usually run 5 to 8 inches wide and pair well with wide door and window casing.

Indoors, a wood column wrap in poplar is hard to beat. It takes paint flat and smooth and costs less than the synthetics. Oak is the pick for stained work, especially alongside decorative ceiling beams.

Outdoors in Jacksonville, wood is a losing bet. Sun and rain get into end grain at the base and the bottom six inches rot out, so we use PVC or fiberglass outside and set the base on standoffs so water drains.

Near the water in Atlantic Beach and Ponte Vedra, the metal matters as much as the column. Salt air eats ordinary fasteners, and a rusting screw head bleeds a brown stain down a white column within a year, so we specify 316 stainless fasteners and galvanized hardware close to the ocean.

Craftsman bungalows use a short, heavily tapered square column on a masonry pedestal, often two-thirds pedestal to one-third column. Get that proportion wrong and the porch looks off even if the column is perfect, so we measure the survivors on the same house or a neighbor of the same period.

Colonial Revival homes in Avondale and San Marco lean on round columns, smooth or fluted, with a proper cap and base. Those have a slight swell in the shaft that a plain straight tube does not, and a stock square wrap in front of one looks wrong immediately.

On a historic match we replicate the profile in a rot-proof material instead of the original wood, so you keep the look and stop the rot. In a local historic district, exterior changes may also need review.

If you live in Nocatee, Bartram Park, Julington Creek, Fleming Island or most planned communities in St. Johns County, changing an exterior column almost certainly needs architectural review board approval before work starts.

Boards usually want a description of the change, the material, the color, the dimensions and a photo of the finished appearance. Approval commonly takes two to six weeks depending on how often the committee meets, which is the part that surprises people.

We will give you dimensions, material and finish in writing so you have something to attach. Interior columns almost never require approval.

Our decorative column installation process is short, and most jobs are done in a day or two.

It starts with a site visit. We determine whether the column is structural, measure the height at several points, check whether the floor and ceiling are level, and look at your existing trim. Then you get a written quote, plus a 3D rendering if the design is unusual.

On install day we cut the components, test fit, and scribe the base to the floor if it slopes, which it does in most older homes. Pieces get glued and fastened to cleats on the post, then cap, base and panel detail go on, and every joint gets filled, sanded and caulked.

These are typical installed ranges, unpainted, and an exact number takes seeing the column and the ceiling height.

Height moves the price most, since anything over about 10 feet means staging. Detail level is next, because a flat wrap is fast and a fluted shaft with a built-up capital is a lot of small parts. Material is third, with PVC and fiberglass running above poplar.