Hello Everyone,
I’m eating lunch at Fantasy of Flight. They have a restaurant called the Compass Rose. The theme of the place is early flight and it is decorated in an Art Deco style. I keep looking at the walls and a few of them have curves, I am guessing about a 60 degree radius. I’m just wondering how they get the drywall to follow the curve. My initial thought is they wet it like wood, but that wouldn’t work. I’m truly stumped.
Score the back, then fasten to a curved support wall made out of many studs that define the curve.
ETA: photo.
Slowly.
I built an arched entryway to a living room and had to drywall an arch 6 inches wide, 14 feet long and about 18 inches at the center. I just slowly pushed the board into place and secured it. On bigger, more deeply curved sections, you pre-bow the board, sometimes taking days to do it, and then cut and fit it into place.
I’m sure many of us have pre-bowed drywall by leaning it against a wall and leaving it there for a while. 
I’ve seen a “This Old House” type show do a curve with 1/4 inch drywall. Use two layers if the thickness needs to be 1/2 inch.
My in-laws own a drywall hanging and finishing company. They normally do it exactly as beowulff has described.
Another vote for scoring. That is the method I used to create archways from regular doorways in my home. Those are some pretty severe bends. Played with shaping the drywall, but 1/4" thick drywall scored about every half inch worked much better for my application. The more scores on the back, the fewer ridges on the front that you have to cover with mud.
Scoring the back side or bow it by wetting it and shaping it bit by bit.
Both take some time. If you’re bowing it by wetting (DAMP ONLY!) and flexing it, you have to do it several times before it gets to the right shape. If you score it, you will likely have some floating to do to smooth it out enough.
On commercial jobs I’ve been on, we score it, float it out enough for the specs, paint it. For most people, it looks like a true arc of a circle, even if it is, in reality, somewhat off.
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The actual ‘This Old House’ guys have demonstrated the scoring method. Same idea works for wood too.
A lot of commercial buildouts also use a material called Bendyboard, or a generic equivalent. This is Masonite or similar pressed-sawdust sheets with saw kerfs cut in the back every quarter-inch. Thus very tight radii can be created, particularly for soffits and reception desks and the like.
To build a curved wall in my apartment, I ordered two 4 x 8 sheets and had them shipped from LA to Chicago. The curves worked out fine, but the material, when standing eight feet high, was too flexible, even with three curved “ribs” behind it. You could push it with your hand and it would give. So I probably should have curved two sheets of quarter-inch drywall, but that wouldn’t have been easy in an apartment with only the most basic of tools.
Follow up question.
How do you fix major holes in curved drywall? ISTM that all these methods would be difficult to apply in such cases.
I would think it would be pretty hard even to spackle-repair a smaller hole repair, unless there are curved spacklers and sanders.
You can follow a convex curve with a flat trowel. You should be able to follow a concave curve using the side of a trowel, though I’ve never done that. You can get flexible sanding blocks for sanding a concave curve.
Yes, I have a (convex) curve by the entrance door, and I asked that. I was told they use 2 layers of very thin drywall (the 1/4" mentioned above, I assume). It is flexible enough to accommodate about a 4-foot radius.
(I haven’t needed to repair it yet…)
