Is it possible to make indoor arches that do NOT divide a space into separate rooms? For example, if you have a kitchen with a coffee maker, and an adjoining dining room with chairs, separated by an arch, the silly sims will drink their coffee standing up in the kitchen rather than go sit down in the living room. If you take out the arch and the walls the arch was in, the sims think its all one room and will go sit down to drink their coffee. But I want to have an arch, its prettier. I just don't want it to make "separate rooms".

Maxis did something similar with carpet borders. They are like fences, in terms of building, but they don't act like fences, they don't separate the space. So I would like to know if that can be done with arches, and if so, how. Thanks for any help.

It could. You'd need to make an object that looked like the wall above an arched entrance and you would need to map it so that it took recolours made from the wallpaper textures and lined them up with the walls properly. It would be similar to the principle of how I did my brick arches. Oddly enough I was just thinking I needed something like this myself - in my case not arches, but straight top of wall so it would look like it was supported on a lintel to make a through lounge.

One trick that you can use is fences and half walls ...

A fence or half wall is not recognized as a 'closing' wall. For a lot of kitchen/dining areas using the half wall with the spindles on top for some portion of the common wall can look very nice -- try flanking the full wall (that has the arch in it) with these half walls.

There are also a lot of situations where you can simply leave out the wall at a corner where the furnishings distract the eye from noticing that the wall is not complete.

Full length windows placed with the move_objects on cheat can look very charming and stylish -- put them where the wall would be if you had a wall. The little space at bottom can be disguised with a low fence. The space at the top is barely noticeable.

For the nice big, full size custom archways, put them down with the move_objects cheat without the wall.

At the opposite end of spectrum -- when you want the sims to treat a space as a separate room but don't want the look of a wall -- use the totally transparent recolor of Numenor's wall windows.

Thanks folks for all the good ideas, I'll see what I can do, may take me a bit...

Guessed the "carpet borders" are the budding fences with a parameter set for sims-passage.

May try any of the followings:

1. place the object-door-based arch with the cheat "moveobjects on"
2. make a sims-passable object shaped in the arch(es) of your like(s).
3. use custom fences shaped in the arch(es) of your like(s).
4. use fence-arch(es) of your like(s).
5. use column-arches. at least an EP is required? or simple column shaped in the arch(es) of your like(s).
6. un-close the wall-based arch(es) and fill the gap with, island counters, decorations like plants, dividers or etc, nothing as a special design.
7.check for more suggestions by any further respondent.

niol, thanks for all your suggestions

There are also custom deco arches that divide the space visually. I think there's one in the Tuscan Kitchen set here? I have had several big arches like this, designed to be placed above a bar or island bench. I don't use them, so they aren't in my folders anymore. But they do exist!

You might be able to put them above two lengths of half-wall that would make a walk-through under the archway.

Or, if someone makes a lintel as Inge suggested, that would be great. Arched and straight would be very useful.