Architects and contractors in charge of restoration on historic buildings have to consider how to reproduce the historical properties in a way that won’t damage the existing structure, will look identical to the original designs, and will last long enough to not require a replacement for the near or distant future.
That can be especially difficult for items that were originally hand carved from stone or hand milled from wood. Especially those items created by individuals in the past whose specific skills are increasingly rare today. Even in the event they could be re-created by hand, the cost would be extreme and it would be especially difficult to install without causing further damage to the property. When one of those details deteriorates beyond repair, replicating it the traditional way often means finding one of a shrinking number of stone carvers or master woodworkers, then paying for months of custom, one-off fabrication.
Federal historic preservation standards focus primarily on how a replacement detail looks, matching composition, design, color, and texture, rather than requiring the exact original material in every case.
PW Profiles molds cement-coated architectural EPS profiles that replicate hand-carved detail closely enough to satisfy that standard, at a fraction of the cost and timeline custom stone carving requires. Call 604.285.6550 in Canada or 206.953.5209 in the United States to talk through a specific restoration project.
Why Custom Stone Carving Has Become So Difficult
Skilled stone carving and traditional woodworking are trades in genuine decline. Fewer people are training in these specific crafts than a generation ago, which means the pool of qualified artisans for a custom restoration project keeps shrinking while demand for their work, spread across historic buildings all over the country, stays constant.
That imbalance shows up directly in cost and timeline. A single custom-carved cornice section or column capital can take months to complete once a qualified carver is even found, and pricing reflects both the scarcity of the skill and the one-off nature of the work. For a restoration project with multiple damaged or missing details, or a building with dozens of matching decorative elements, that timeline and cost can make a project impractical before it even starts.
What Historic Preservation Standards Allow
The Secretary of the Interior’s Standards for Rehabilitation, the primary federal framework guiding historic preservation projects, calls for repairing a damaged historic feature before replacing it. When replacement genuinely is necessary, Standard 6 requires the new feature to match the old in composition, design, color, texture, and other visual properties, and, where possible, materials.
That last phrase, where possible, is doing real work. The National Park Service’s own guidance, Preservation Brief 16, addresses substitute materials directly, evaluating them on how closely they match appearance, how they perform in a specific location and climate, and how they hold up over time, rather than requiring an exact material match in every case. For Restoration treatments specifically, where the primary goal is replicating a building’s appearance at a particular point in time, a compatible substitute material is explicitly recognized as an acceptable approach.
That standard, replicate the appearance closely and account for how the material performs over time, is exactly what a molded EPS reproduction is built to satisfy.
How Molded Replication Works
Replicating a historic detail in EPS starts with either an intact matching piece elsewhere on the building or historic documentation, drawings, photographs, or a surviving fragment, that captures the original profile accurately. That detail gets used to create a mold, and every subsequent unit cast from that mold carries the same dimensions and detailing as the original.
That process solves the consistency problem custom carving runs into on larger projects. A building with a dozen matching brackets or a full run of matching cornice sections needs every unit to look identical, which is far more reliably achieved through molded casting than through a dozen separate hand-carved pieces, however skilled the carver. The finished profiles ship in standard sizes or custom dimensions built to match what a specific project requires.
A Real Restoration Project
PW Profiles’ own restoration work has included projects ranging from exclusive private estates to a palatial restoration project in Central Mongolia, showing the range of both scale and geography a molded architectural EPS approach can handle when a project calls for replicating historic detail rather than starting from a blank design.
Historic restoration projects working through damaged or missing architectural detail, cornices, column capitals, brackets, and similar features, can compare how molded EPS holds up against traditional materials or reach out directly to discuss a specific project. Learn more about the company behind the manufacturing process, or call 604.285.6550 in Canada or 206.953.5209 in the United States to talk through what a specific restoration requires.
