Tips for Decorating Your Dining Room

If you are interested in enhancing the look of your dining room, here’s the best tip you can get. Start the process by defining how you would like to use your dining room. Note we did not say how you do use your dining room, but rather how you would like to use the room. Perhaps you don’t use your dining room for formal entertaining; but you now have more time available, or your children are a little older, or you have more disposable income. Whatever the reason, decorating your dining room should support the function of the room – how you would like to use it. This is a basic principle of modern architecture: form should follow function. In simple terms, this means the way you decorate the room should support the way you intend to use the room.

There’s one more design principle to keep in mind before we get into decorating tips. Expert interior designers tell us homes should make statements about the people who live within them. People with more conservative, traditional values generally should follow traditional decorating styles.

If you bought such a home but you are more of a modern, contemporary kind of person, don’t feel constrained to maintain a traditional style in your dining room. Instead, view it as the starting point in a gradual process of transforming your home to more accurately reflect your personality.

A truly outstanding formal dining room has a focal point. It’s the point which attracts the eye of everyone who approaches the room and it is most often the dining room table. A bare table is a poor focal point, so many consider adding a dramatic chandelier above the table.

Chandeliers are available to suit any decorating taste and to enhance their dramatic impact, consider adding wall sconces from the same lighting style family as the chandelier. This is not an inexpensive option as it involves electrical work, but few things are as dramatic as walking into a dining room softly lit by the wall sconces. Dimmer wall switches allow you to vary the lighting intensity of both the chandelier and the sconces.

But to fully maximize this focal point idea, the dining room table can be permanently set. Fabric table clothes, napkins, and floral centerpieces are great ways to add color to the room. Window treatments are another area where you have the opportunity to tell the world who you are with the colors and fabrics selected. Generally speaking, draperies and curtain combinations offer more possibilities than blinds. And while you may shudder at the notion of cleaning place settings that are always there, nothing says “formal” better than an elegantly set table that appears to be eternally ready for guests.

Formal entertaining is a gathering of friends or family in a communal event. In many dining rooms, the sense of sharing and community is inhibited by the separation between the dining room and the kitchen. In some homes the two rooms share a common wall, and if the construction permits, cutting a pass through between the kitchen and the dining room is a fabulous way to connect people as they await the gourmet delights you’re about to serve.