Friezes help us dress the walls of our house, hiding the damages that these can have. But beyond its decorative function, the frieze can offer us multiple practical advantages, including thermal and acoustic insulation.
Advantages of installing a frieze
The friezes transform the rooms, improving their aesthetics. However, beyond the aesthetic advantages, the practical advantagess of the friezes are also numerous. Do you want to know what practical advantages placing friezes in your home can provide you?
- Hide flaws. The friezes hide possible wall imperfections and dampness.
- Protect the wall. In passageways such as corridors or in spaces with a lot of wear such as children's rooms, they are a great tool to protect the wall.
- They insulate the walls. The frieze is an acoustic and thermal insulator. This type of coating helps us to insulate the walls that face the street, both thermally and acoustically. The noise will be less, and the cold in winter less.
- Low maintenance. Painted walls need to be repainted on a regular basis. The durability of the frieze, however, is much greater with minimal maintenance. We will only have to clean it from time to time with a vacuum cleaner or a slightly damp cloth to keep it clean.
Frieze Materials
When choosing a frieze for your wall, you will find numerous options. The most popular ones are wood, MDF and HDF friezes, but there are others made of PVC and even leather that may also be interesting. Each one will bring different characteristics to the room.
Wooden frieze
Wood gives warmth to the spaces and connects them with the outside. Natural, untreated wood is still the favorite to provide a rustic touch to spaces, but there are other finishes that can help us in the same way to achieve spaces with a classic, ethnic or modern character.
You can find them varnished with a smooth texture, stained to imitate other types of wood or painted in different colors. Both will generally consist of tongue and groove slats with different widths and shapes, which will fit into each other on battens.
If you want to bet on natural woods, consider the size and the characteristics of the room to choose its tonality. Light woods are the most appropriate for decorating Scandinavian-style homes, small rooms or rooms with little natural light. If you are looking to recreate the rustic atmosphere of a mountain house or the elegance of a large classic country house, dark woods become, however, the best ally.
Use a varnished frieze to achieve spaces with an ethnic character and color alternatives to gain luminosity, create modern or fun spaces for the little ones. You will find numerous options that will help you achieve the desired style in each room.
MDF frieze
The MDF frieze composes its slats from boards of chipboard with wood fibers and synthetic resins. It is a cheaper alternative to traditional wood with a similar aesthetic and interesting properties such as: greater resistance to fading by sunlight and hypoallergenic properties, as it does not accumulate mites.
MDF friezes are available in finishes of imitation of wood, as well as in a wide range of colors. Depending on our choice, we will give our home a warm, cheerful, sober, elegant touch ... As the wooden ones have tongue and groove slats and are placed with battens, offering us the possibility of placing an acoustic thermal insulator between the wall and the cladding.
PVC frieze
PVC friezes have certain advantages over the previous ones: they are designed to withstand humidity of rooms such as the bathroom or the kitchen. Some are even suitable for dressing shower stalls. They also generally have good fire resistance, are hardly flammable and self-extinguishing.
PVC friezes are clean and easy to install: just have a cutter, a meter and a level. Most are self-adhesive and compatible with almost any type of support. They imitate all kinds of surfaces; you'll be able to renovate the tiles in your bathroom, without the hassle of significant renovation work.
Frieze installation
Half height or full height? A mid-height frieze in a low-ceilinged room can make it appear even lower. Assess both the height and layout of the room and play with the frieze to gain depth or visually make the room appear taller or longer.
What accessories do you need?
The tracked friezes, in addition to the tongue and groove slats of which we have already spoken, will require other accessories to complete your installation as skirting boards, which is the piece of wood that is installed in the lowest part of the wall, and finishes to protect the upper part of a frieze at half or full height. We can also incorporate cornices, corner or trim, among other accessories into the design.
In addition and for our benefit, when we install a traced wall covering such as the frieze in our home it is interesting to place, under it, the thermal and acoustic insulator more appropriate. A product that will protect our wall from the appearance of mold or humidity, in addition to making the room protected from excessive cold or external sounds that can harm our well-being.