Dining Room: House Tour

The sequence matters: decide the footprint, then the finish, then the accessories. After a few years of living in the house, we decided to change around our first floor rooms to better fit our lifestyle. The living room was rarely being used, which was a shame since it's the largest room in our house. We also found that we had a need for a home office. The dining room was the most logical place to put it based on the size of the room and its location in the house but we didn't want to get rid of our dining room altogether. The solution was to turn our large, rarely used living room into a combination dining/living room. The room had pretty grim beginnings:

but it ended up turning into the preferred room in the house:

Every room needs a jumping-off point and in this case it was the dining room table. I bought it when the Henredon Furniture store in Cincinnati was going out of business and I had no plan whatsoever for the rest of the room. The room sat like you see it in the “before” picture for months with our new table and old dining room chairs that looked horrible together. After looking and looking for reasonably priced side chairs, HomeGoods came to the rescue: 

While A strong choice is the look of fully upholstered chairs, with young kids I figured that these would be much more practical. The chair seats are the type that you can unscrew from the bottom so if they ever get any major spills on them, I can change out the seat fabric myself. I went a completely different direction with the end chairs and bought large upholstered barrel back wing chairs when Thomasville was clearancing out their discontinued Darryl Carter line. They soften up the space and anchor the large table.  

On the table is a macrame fringe table runner that I made with Schumacher's linen Wesley Ticking Stripe fabric in Ebony {open this for the DIY fringe table runner tutorial}:

The centerpiece is a giant clamshell filled with greenery. I bought it from Restoration Hardware but there are many other stores that sell them too (for more clamshell sources, look at {this post} on decorating with clamshells). 

The dining table is quite long so I went with a pair of chandeliers rather than one large one – they are Pottery Barn's Celeste Chandeliers (affiliate link) (I only used about half of the crystals they came with):

The large black china chest is the focal point of the room. It's also from Thomasville's discontinued Darryl Carter's line:

On the other side of the dining room is a chest flanked by two armchairs (I would have liked to have hung some artwork on both sides of the mirror but never found what I was looking for):

The chest is one of my “forever” pieces of furniture – it's a really versatile piece that could be used in almost any room of the house. In the dining room it's great for storing table linens.

For dinner parties, the candlesticks can be moved to make room for glasses and create a small bar area.

The two arm chairs flanking the chest are used for extra seating in the living room area when needed: 

The draperies on all three windows in the room are made out of a Groundworks/Lee Jofa fabric – Pomegranate by David Hicks. It is a discontinued fabric that I purchased a few years ago from a seller on Etsy. 

The day that the drapes went up was the day that the room finally came together:

It's not always the best idea to buy furniture without a plan for the entire room but in this case, it worked out. The pieces in the room were collected one by one over time and I think that it's the collected feel that makes this room the preferred in the house. 

 Take the rest of the house tour {here}!