^The ones with the high point in the center of the room are more commonly called cathedral ceilings.
^^^Thanks. I know very little about architecture, clearly.
True, technically a vault is curved. You don’t see those in too many houses.
Another dissenter. I’m just not a fan of them. Don’t like how they look. I made a deliberate choice not to put one in my family room addition. We are in the NE and heat with oil. I also didn’t want to heat/cool all that extra space.
I put floor to ceiling windows in and also have sliding doors onto the deck. Plenty of natural light comes in.
We have a Timberpeg post and beam house with cathedral (edited after seeing vaulted means curved) ceilings in the family room and the upstairs bedrooms, and skylights across the southern exposure back. Love it. We have a wood stove insert in the family room and we have two ceiling fans. In the winter when we have a fire burning, we reverse the fans so that hot air that is rising is pushed back down.
@Nrdsb4 Thank you for all the examples. I can clearly see how it makes rooms feel bigger. If I can’t have a high ceiling because of the height restrictions, I should go with vaulted ceiling. If I can have a higher ceiling, I still like flat ceiling. To me, vaulted ceiling makes house look grandeur than I would like.
As said before, that’s what we have in our house, and it’s very nice and allows for tall windows that look to the golf course and babbling brook beyond. I would go with vaulted next time, though not too cavernous, simply because it would be something new that we’ve never had before. I like the way the windows were done in that one example above.
This article is a bit old.
I thought curved was called a barrel ceiling?
To me “vaulted” means straight lines but raised on one end or in the middle. Cathedral to me means raised in the middle only. Is the true “architectural definition” of vaulted both raised and curved, like a combination vault and barrel by my (possibly incorrect) layman’s understanding?
We have a small 1250 square foot 3 bed, 2 bath house with standard ceilings. As someone with allergies and who has raised kids with allergies, cleaning a place that has towering ceilings can be very difficult.
Our friends built a 6000 square foot place it 10 foot ceilings and even higher ceilings in some areas of the elegant home. The father says he no longer does upstairs in the home and just lives on the bottom floor with the wife. Their son has the top story all to himself. When we visited the home, our D had a severe allergy attack, even though the friends keeps their house very clean. It’s just too hard to dust the 10’ and higher ceilings. It’s something to consider if anyone has known or potential allergies.
I have a vaulted ceiling in the living room and dining room. There are lots of dust bunnies and spider webs in the corners, but otherwise I love it. This ceiling and the layout of the house makes a mid-size (1900 square feet) house feel really big. (But the difficulty of cleaning the ceiling does bother me!)
Do you clean ceilings? I didn’t know that’s something you do. I get them painted once in a while.
Those telescoping poles come in handy for cleaning cobwebs and such as well as changing lightbulbs. 
I love the ten foot ceiling we have on our first floor. It makes the room so airy. Curtains can be a bit of a challenge but then they always are for me. I don’t clean my ceilings either. I am lucky if the floor is vacuumed!
If you have ten foot ceilings how do kitchen cabinets look? The upper cabinets must look hanging in the middle of the wall.
You can build cabinets as tall as you want. If you look at Victorian houses, which often include high ceilings, or many old homes for that matter, cabinets went right up to the ceiling. Granted, the top isn’t easy to reach but good place to store stuff you don’t need everyday. ex: http://espan.us/floor-to-ceiling-kitchen-cabinets/floor-to-ceiling-kitchen-cabinets-splendid-fresh/
When I referred to cleaning the ceiling, I meant getting the bugs and spider webs and dust off the surfaces, nothing else. But I’m a smidge over five feet tall and at its highest, the ceiling is probably 15 feet. One column of book shelves goes all the way to the top.
Edited to add: it is a cathedral ceiling, not a vaulted ceiling.
@doschicos My kitchen cabinets go up to the ceiling. I like it that way but my ceiling is not 10’. I do think the cabinets will too long if it went all the way to 10’. In your link, I see that they put glass on the top portion to break the line.
My cabinets are tall, but not all the way to the ceiling and they look perfectly fine, certainly not as you are describing.
Perhaps you should visit some open houses or new construction model homes in your area to get an idea of how modern kitchens and homes are being built now. Seeing this stuff in person always helped me when we were designing a home to build.
In both House1 and House2 the cabinets are about 10 inches or a foot below ceiling. They look just fine. I have seen a lot of new construction with cabinets all the way up to the ceiling, and they were fine, too.