Columbia, S.C. ? Columns aren’t just for the front porch anymore.

All sorts of columns are making their way into new homes, lending a bit of traditional style to today’s open floor plans.

“Most of new construction now is very open. Columns can designate the beginnings and endings of rooms,” said Bonnie Younginer of Cobb/Younginer Interiors in Columbia.

“They also lend a real classical appeal,” she said. “And, since we live in the South, tradition is usually the norm.”

Julia Haas, with Robert Haas Construction, agrees that columns add to the charm of a house.

“I think they’re very pretty, decorative pieces,” she said. “They add to that Southern or plantation feel.”

And they’re adding the feel to rooms all over the house.

In foyers and dining rooms. Between the kitchen and the family room. In the bathroom on the sides of a garden tub. Around the bar in the kitchen.

Builders and designers say columns work great to separate spaces without closing off a room.

Columns also are a good choice to separate two rooms with varying ceiling heights. For example, if you have a two-story great room, and the room leading to it has lower ceilings, columns can make a perfect break between the two.

Many grand old homes featured columns — often fluted wood ones made of cherry — or maple.

Today, those may be available, but they’d be out of reach to most homeowners. Instead, columns are made of polymer resin and can be painted or stained to give the effect of wood.

Many of them are functional as well as decorative. When walls are taken down to open up rooms in older houses, columns can go up in their place to add support.

As for how to fit them into a decorating scheme, the options vary.

Round columns are still the most popular, but the square versions are gaining steam, particularly in studies or libraries, where they offer a more masculine feel.

Some designers prefer the columns stay white, and work as part of the home’s trim.

Others like to paint them or faux-finish them to give the look of marble.

Diana Epps of Diana Interiors (who said her husband called her the “column queen”) said she liked them both ways.

“Sometimes stark white is good, sometimes it’s not,” she said. “Sometimes if the room is bland, I’ll faux-paint them to look like the real McCoy. I use them as accents to draw the eye and divide the room.”

She said she had painted some to look like marble, using black along with different colors from the room to blend in and give a marbleized look.

She also had one house where she painted the column in the formal foyer solid black.

“It was between the formal foyer and the dining room. We put huge columns there and painted them black. And they were gorgeous.”

“Columns are my thing,” Epps said. “I love them.”