What Should Your Chair Rail Height Be?

Rachael Turner from Front Porch Properties shares her tips on where to place chair rails (also known as dado rails and belt rails) in a room. Does your standard height for a chair rail need to match from one room to the next? Where do you measure from? What do you do if you have multiple floor levels in the one room?

Rachael gives you the answer to these questions and more while installing an Intrim Mouldings chair rail in her recent project in Queensland.

What Height Should a Chair Rail Be?

Hey guys, Rachael Turner here from Front Porch Properties. I just wanted to show you our almost-completed movie or theatre room here.

This movie room is part of our new-build Cape Cod home on the Gold Coast, which we are just wrapping up now. I just wanted to show you all the details of the walls in here – how we’ve made it suitable for a theatre room, and how we’ve dressed it up with this beautiful wall trim.

Here’s the theatre room at frame stage and we’ve done two things to the walls to make the room really suitable for use as a theatre room. Number one, we’ve used acoustic insulation in all the walls and the ceiling, and number two, we’ve lined the walls with Superchek Gyprock by Gyprock Living, which really helps with the acoustics and helps to keep the sounds within the theatre room, and also helps to reduce noise travelling outside the theatre room as well.

How to Install Skirting Boards – Coping Mitre Technique

So the first thing you want to do is put in your skirting boards. We’ve begun to do that here, and we’re using the 185mm deep skirting boards from Intrim. We’re actually doing a coping mitre, where we’re scribing the skirting boards into one another rather than doing a traditional, normal mitre joint. We’ve made these little templates here to show you what I’m talking about. So this is the most common way to do it – just a normal mitre joint, like that.

Sometimes, especially if you’re renovating and your walls are out, they might gap a little bit, and also over time they could pull apart and gap. So we are doing this coping mitre, which is like this. One length is cut square, as you can see, and goes hard up against the wall. And then the joining piece we’ve scribed in around it, and it will butt in like that there. We do it this way to avoid any cracking down the track.

Standard Chair Rail Height – Where to Measure From and What to Do with Multiple Floor Levels

The next thing to do is to put in your belt rail. That is this piece of timber here which runs through the middle of your room. For this room, we’ve actually put this belt rail round at 1,150mm height from this lower floor here.

Just an FYI – this is a media room, hence why we put this little stage platform here for your couch to watch the projector. But we’ve set this at 1,150mm high, and in the adjoining room we’ve actually set it at about a metre high.

Does Your Chair Rail or Dado Rail Height Need to Match From Room to Room?

So the point I want to make here is it’s okay, in my opinion, to set the belt rail at a different height. The main determining factor should be the things that you’re working with within the room. So here, for example, we’ve got these windows which we have to work with. Had we put the belt rail at a metre high, it would have left an awkwardly large gap here between the belt rail and the bottom sill.

So we’ve set this at 1,150mm here. And then also, had we set it at the metre high here, by the time we come up to the higher platform it would have been really awkwardly low. So for us, we set it at 1,150mm, and for this room that is just the right height.

And further to reiterate my point, I just want to use this wall here as an example. In through there is the media room, where we were just doing the wainscoting, and the belt rail was set at 1,150mm. In here is the powder room, which was set at a metre high. The reason it was a metre high was to suit the mirror placement – where we wanted to put the mirror. But then looking at this corner here, it should act independently again, because if we set it at 1,150mm to suit the media room, the belt rail is too high for this wall. If we set it at a metre to suit the powder room, the belt rail is too low for this wall.

So we’ll be finding the sweet spot that suits both of these walls here and setting it at that height. And it doesn’t matter that it doesn’t match either of the other two adjoining rooms, because we’ve got a doorway and a door to separate the walls, and your eye won’t visually be bothered by that.

How to Install Chair Rail Infill Panels

And then the final component is just doing all the little Intrim infill squares. So we’re just using these timber mouldings – again these ones are from Intrim as well.

Basically, for this particular wall, the pattern we’re doing is two small squares, one up this end, one up the other end, and then the larger square in the middle. That’s what my client wanted. And then all you do is you attach these just using some liquid nails and a couple of nails, and you can nail into the studs on the horizontal pieces.

Basically, my general rule of thumb is to keep it at least 120mm away from the belt rail, 120mm away from each other, and 120mm away from the corners of the room as well. And it’s as easy as that.

Painting a Home Theatre Room

So a couple of weeks have passed now. All the trim on the walls has been finished and the painters have done the undercoat. Just a little bit more info about the paint and the finish in here. Because this is a theatre room, we’re doing all quite dark walls in here. And you can see the ceiling – we’ve already done the first coat there and it’s quite a dark charcoal. And you can see the dropped ceiling there will have LED lights around there kind of to mimic a cinema. The colours that we’re using – on the ceiling we’ve used this colour, it’s called Dark Grey, and it’s by tint. We’re going to use this colour on the ceiling, as you can see, and then down this one wall here. The reason I’m painting this wall really dark as well is because this is the wall where the projector will be, so to make that recede we’re painting the wall dark. And then the other three walls will be painted in this colour here, which is called Drop Bear, which is a really warm grey colour. So yeah, the painters are just about to paint this on. Just another thing with the tint paint – to help us choose the colour, we actually got these samples from tint. This is so helpful because we’re often going and buying paint samples and actually painting them on the wall to look at the colour, but with these little samples you can just peel them off and stick them straight to the wall. So that’s a total game changer for us. And I guess a true test of this paint would be the ceiling in here, because we’re doing the dark ceiling, and that is the most difficult thing to get right – because the dark ceiling shows up all the imperfections and things like that. So we’re going to do three coats on the ceiling, and that would be the true test to see how tint paint holds up. So there you have it – our theatre room is nearly complete. I hope the tips were useful. Bye for now, and thanks for watching. Profile used in this video: Intrim CR69 Chair Rail. Size 70x27mm, in primed FJ Pine, FSC.

Get the Right Chair Rail Moulding Height with Intrim

Explore our dado & chair rail mouldings – available in a wide range of profiles to suit any interior style, ceiling height, or room proportion. Whether you’re working to a standard dado rail height from the floor or finding the sweet spot for your specific room, Intrim has a product to suit.

Designed and manufactured in Australia, Intrim chair rail and dado rail timber mouldings are used by builders, designers, and renovators across the country.

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