I still remember the moment I brought home a vintage slatted frame from a flea market. It was gorgeous, solid beech wood, but it looked utterly lost in my 40-square-meter apartment. The walls were bare white boxes. The floor was grey laminate. The entire place had the personality of a waiting room. That is when I started thinking about decorative molding. Not as some grand architectural statement, but as a way to give my furniture and my small floor plan a sense of permanence. I had a pull-out sofa from a big box store that looked like a marshmallow on wheels. It needed context. It needed a backdrop that said this room was intentional. So I bought a few lengths of simple pine picture rail and some corner blocks, and I learned how to cut miters on the cheap. The difference was immediate. The walls stopped feeling like barriers and started feeling like frames for my life.

The real problem arrived with overnight guests.