A Dining Room of One's Own

Embrace your dining space - highlight its positives, downplay its limitations and throw a dinner party to remember

By Chuck Ross
CTW Features

Make your dining room fit your needs with these helpful tips. Image courtesy iStock

Dining rooms don't get much respect. Once the hallmark of gracious living, the traditional dining room is now a clutter magnet, headquarters for homework, mail sorting and the towering pile of "must read" magazines.

Mathilda Cox, a Washington, D.C. interior designer, dispensed with hers entirely, converting her formal dining room into a library. There, a table will invite reading, socializing - and sometimes, a small dinner party. "A traditional dining room space can be too formal and foreboding," Cox explains.

We're all for Mathilda's plan - if only we had a dining room to convert. Most of us make do with scaled-down "dining nook" in our homes, a casual hybrid living and eating space placed close to the kitchen.

When plans for parties or family gatherings begin to percolate, however, the limits of our modest modern dining setups become all too clear. They're small. They're non-descript. They're so ... casual.

Dining rooms may have disappeared, but we still long for a formally recognized area for meals and celebrations. Creating a space that honors that role, without adding four walls and doorway, is a challenge.

Here are just a few simple strategies for carving out a special space in today's less-formal floor plans. Mix and match them as suits your home to create your own dining-room-without-walls. What to do with a dining area if you still want a sense of formality for family gatherings? First, turn a sharp eye to your home's architecture; then, call on color, fabric, wallpaper and lighting to help set the stage.

Start with taking a good look at the "bones" of your room, suggests interior designer Lori Lennon, interior designer in Lake Forest, Ill. Lennon says that prominent structural features can provide a necessary visual "anchor."

"We have to capture something architecturally," she says. "There are a variety of ways to do it. It depends on the room."

L-shaped spaces provide a natural border for a contrasting paint color, Lennon says. Additionally, windows can be highlighted with a treatment that differs from others in the shared room. In these cases, Lennon suggests not just a different fabric - which may be too jarring - but a different approach, altogether. Think plantation shutters vs. curtains, not stripes vs. plaids.

Soffits that camouflage ventilation equipment also can serve as a defining feature, Lennon says, perhaps with the addition of false wall "beams," built out with wood or drywall on either side. Such an approach would provide easy stopping and starting points for a highlighting color or chair rail and wainscoting.

If your space lacks this kind of structural definition, try creating it on your own. Lennon suggests using wallpaper borders at chair-rail height to create the look of chair rail, without hammers and nails. Sometimes even just a simple folding screen can create the feeling of seclusion.

Lennon suggests paying special attention to furniture selection for these typically small spaces, Lennon says. Because these spaces are more often used for family game nights than formal dinners, she suggests keeping the furniture simple and dressing it up with accessories for special occasions. Additionally, Lennon says it's very important to keep the scale of your furniture small enough to allow people to get in and out of the area comfortably.

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