Thoughts regarding Dado rail in new house

Hi, we are in the process of starting the internal plastering in our house, and I've thoughts of putting up a dado rail. Our house is an Irish country / farm house style in the countryside. The reason for my planning along the lines of a Dado rail is that I find that in some new houses, even though some may have lots / or not that much furnishing, there is sometimes a look of bareness on painted internal concrete walls, so i want to add some type of simple feature - nothing too fussy - I think pannelling would be too fussy for our shape of rooms.

The areas I am looking at putting a rail up is the hall (it's not huge), would you also have to continue with it up the stairs and around the upstairs hallway and landing?

The kitchen / dining room. Now this is a fairly big room - would we have to put the rail up in the kitchen if it is up in the dining room, or would that look bad?

Thanks for all your help
The hallway's a

The dado rail was initially designed a feature in large georgian houses from the mid 1800's.... it was designed to protect the walls from furniture etc, but also had the added feature of creating a horizontal aspect to what were generally very high rooms.... and along with coving helped to 'bring down' the ceiling heights...

personally i wouldnt recommend them if the floor to ceiling height is less than 9'... because of the aesthetics, especially if top and bottom are painted different colours....

Great name, Sydthebeat The ground floor's to ceiling height is 10ft, and the 1st storey is 9ft. Is there anything else you've seen in passing in other people's houses?

im a real believer in function before fashion, so im always slow to imitate something ive seen before unless it serves the function its designed for....

if you want to keep with the traditional farmhouse feel you might think about vertical pannelled timber doors... and the obligatory rear half-door...

Or what about a picture rail rather than a dado rail?

would not recommend erecting dado rails, in case you'd change mind, as we had done a few years ago - resulting with lumps of plaster taken off, exposing brickwork, when removing dado rail.
allendog

Thanks for your thoughts guys - even though I'm still keen, I'm going to follow some of your good advice and not go for it. One question though - what's a picture rail? Thanks again.

A picture rail is a narrow moulding high up on a wall from which you can hang pictures (rather than banging nails into the wall).

There's an example of what it looks like here: [broken link removed]