You woke up in an apartment high-rise building. You don't remember anything, even your name. You have deep cuts all over your body... you are bleeding heavily. On the floor and walls is lot of blood, obviously, not only yours. You need to find something to sew up the wounds, and then try to understand why this nightmare is going on...
You can make a smooth pillar by making a block the size of the pillar you want, then make two copies and stack them horizontally. After that make the sides into a displacement (not top and bottom, unless they are visible to the player), then subdivide all 3 sets of displacements. The top and bottom pillars will be deformed, but the middle one will be perfectly smooth.
So you won't have to work with those having to align all those vertexes to the grid to keep brushes from colliding.
Or... you can just make an ordinary pillar with say, 12 faces and apply the inbuilt smoothinggroups(can be reached from any viewport) to all visible faces so Vrad will treat them as rounded objects when applying shades.
S-ak.buzzfed.com
Im not understanding your loft's ceiling.
Better to stuff bodies into.
The lighting is great in these ones.