Combine Magic Corner & Fast Edge® for Top-Notch Tray Ceilings

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Nothing elevates a room like an eye-catching ceiling detail. The right touch in these areas, even if it’s not an extravagant one, will help a room feel upscale and, sometimes, even palatial. To accomplish an interesting detail here, you don’t have to break the bank on cathedral ceilings or massive domes. Take, for instance, a recent custom home build by Construxus, Inc., we visited in Burr Ridge, Ill. — the drywall crew here got creative by combining Trim-Tex’s Magic Corner and Fast Edge to create beautiful, geometric tray ceilings for bedrooms that will be sure to stun visitors, while still keeping things relatively simple.

Speaking of feeling “palatial,” this Burr Ridge estate, still under construction, certainly fits the bill.

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Clocking in at close to 30,000 square feet, the home’s main attraction is the grand foyer and entryway, which is capped off by a huge, domed ceiling straight out of a fairy tale. (The project is using Trim-Tex’s Magic Corner for all the house’s inside corners, in addition to a few more of our solutions here and there.)

But that’s not to say all the features found in this home are out of reach for all the other, less costly construction projects out there. We were especially taken with the geometric tray ceilings we are discussing in this story; these are details that will definitely take some extra planning and finesse, but still can be quite feasible for a pro finisher.

Since this isn’t a domed detail, you won’t need special arched beams to pull this off, just a few specially cut wood beams and sheets of drywall. If you’re unfamiliar with constructing a tray ceiling, you are basically just going to be creating a partial ceiling beneath your ceiling; check out this article from Bob Vila to learn more about the basics.

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For most tray ceilings, you’ll just be covering the distance between your ceiling and your step-down ceiling with drywall, usually just about a foot. In the case of our Burr Ridge home, however, the framers left angled gaps between the two sets of ceiling beams, with studs cut to fit that angle, to achieve the geometric look seen in these photos.

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Once the trapezoidal drywall sheets were hung by Construxus crews to cover our tray ceiling’s geometric shape, it was time for the finishers to get to work, and Trim-Tex was the only correct choice to accomplish the task of protecting these uniquely shaped corners. Since Trim-Tex’s corner beads are made of vinyl, there’s a certain degree of flexibility to our drywall finishing solutions that you can’t get from the other guys — and that’s especially true when we’re talking about the two solutions we’re talking about today, Magic Corner and Fast Edge.

Magic Corner is a wizard for inside corners, able to easily adjust for off-angles and unparalleled in its ability to prevent inside-corner cracking due to movement. This makes it the perfect choice for both vaulted ceilings and more ambitious ceiling designs, like the one here in Burr Ridge.

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Meanwhile, there’s a good reason why Fast Edge — Trim-Tex’s first laminated-paper-covered corner bead, featuring a vinyl core that’s been outfitted with our patented Mud Locks for the strongest-possible bond to the drywall — has become the fastest-selling bead in our 52-year history. It installs faster than any other corner bead on the market, while also using the least amount of mud, making this an incredibly efficient (and durable) outside-corner solution. And, importantly for this tray ceiling, Fast Edge’s sharp nose acts as a kind of hinge, allowing it to adjust for the odd angles we have on the outside corners of our geometric design.

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On each of the inside corners of the tray ceiling — both the edges of our inner ceiling and the angles bridging the gap between it and the step-down ceiling — Magic Corner was used, adjusted to match the obtuse angle needed. Then, on the outside corners surrounding our tray-ceiling design, Fast Edge was installed, again adjusted for the angle of the corner.

Combining these two drywall accessories didn’t just make for an eye-catching ceiling detail; they also enabled Construxus' finishing crew to accomplish this design pretty painlessly, allowing them move on to the next room within this elaborate 30,000-square-foot home build that much more quickly.

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Fast Edge and Magic Corner are both highly adaptably and highly efficient, so there’s practically no end to the designs you can dream up using these solutions. To learn more about these drywall accessories — as well as many more innovative corner beads and other useful additions to a pro finisher’s arsenal — hit the button below to download a copy of Trim-Tex’s latest catalog!

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