How About Some Tips for Redecorating Our Dining Room?

Question

We can't stand our dining room. It's tired, outdated, and our family never uses it. Do you have any great advice for us as we think about bulldozing the entire room and starting over again?  (Michelle from Buford, SC)

Answer

Michelle, thank you for writing in to us. We went to Cheryll Gillespie and our friends at casaGURU to give you some great dining room tips. Good luck!

Did you know that the style, textures and colors that you choose to decorate your dining room might actually stimulate your appetite? Conversely, they may also act as an appetite suppressant. Serving up good dining décor in your home can actually make guests feel more at home, increase their appetites and help to stimulate conversation, so it's important to consider many factors when you remodel your dining room.

Today’s dining room may need to serve more than just dinner. A dining room often serves double or even triple duty as the home office, sewing or craft room, library and reading room. For most of us, the days of the formal dining room serving a single purpose are long gone. So what is the best recipe for a simply sensational dining room?

Visualize the Future

• Take a moment and envision the perfect dining room in your mind's eye.
• If you love to entertain, you may want to keep the dining space strictly as a formal dining room.
• If your family and lifestyle demands that the space also be used as homework central, a library, or craft room then plan the space accordingly.
• Don’t try to fool yourself. Be practical and realistic about the demands that your family and lifestyle will place on the room.

Flooring

• Always plan a room from the ground up.
• If you're thinking of replacing the existing flooring, you have many options to choose from. Again, think lifestyle and aesthetics.
• A floor that looks great but is not easily cleaned is not practical. Hardwoods, ceramic tile, cork, and slate are all excellent options.
• An area rug that is easy to remove for cleaning may be added to the room anytime and layed on top of almost any flooring material. The area carpet must be large enough so that dining chairs always have all four chair legs on the carpet, even when the chairs are pulled back from the table. Too often, I see area carpets in dining rooms that fit great until you actually sit at the table.
• In any dining room, we want to linger and spend several hours enjoying good food and good company. A space is more inviting and conducive to lingering when it's defined. Inlaid ceramic borders and borders created with contrasting hardwoods are a good idea to help define the space of a room. They will also add a creative touch to ordinary hardwood or ceramic flooring.

Furniture

• When it comes to selecting the furniture for your space think "comfort." Comfortable chairs and a large table are essential ingredients to serving up great décor in the dining area.
• Don’t be afraid to mix and match chairs. Not all chairs have to be the same. Perhaps you would like both fully-upholstered chairs and armchairs around the table. Reupholster chair seats and backs in seasonal fabrics to give your chairs a facelift. In cooler weather, try covering chair seats and backs in faux furs, lumber jacket plaids, or Christmas or wintery tapestries. In warmer weather, recover with denim, linen, vibrant silks, or tea toweling for cool cottage décor. Coverings can be reused repeatedly.
• For the table itself, make sure that the table size can expand to accommodate a large party or shrink to become an intimate table for two.
• A sideboard or serving buffet is also a luxurious addition. If space does not allow for a permanent side board, plan for a portable butler tray that can be set up to hold a bar during a cocktail party or used as a service tray or side board during a dinner party.

Lighting

• Lighting is another important dining décor element, and the one that is often overlooked.
• If your dining space must serve double duty as a home office, craft room, or homework area for the kids then you will need to plan for good work light that can also be dimmed to create an ambience for dining.
• Soft romantic light makes people feel more comfortable (and we all look better under soft lighting). Wall sconces are a good addition to your lighting plan and, of course, candlelight.

Window Coverings

• Most dining rooms will have a window; plan to dress yours with floor-length drapery panels. Panels work with all decorating styles.
• If the window is small, treat it with drapery that camouflages the size of the window: wall-to-wall drapery panels.
• The drapery frames your view to the world, and dining while overlooking a spectacular city skyline or a mountain view is better than any painting. If the view is not that spectacular, simply close the drapery and focus on the view across the table.

Five Walls

• There are five walls in your dining room. Treat them all with color and creativity.
• The four vertical walls in your dining room can host both color and pattern. Large-scale patterns or heavily textured wallpapers are a designer’s trick for many outstanding dining rooms, regardless of the room’s actual dimensions. Pattern, color, and texture add warmth, charm, and sophistication to walls in small and large dining rooms.
• The fifth wall, or ceiling, is another opportunity. Actually, it's the most often missed decorating opportunity in a room. Plan to paint the ceiling in a contrasting color, several tones lighter than the wall color, or have it faux-painted to look like a blue sky or perhaps a fresco painting.

Color

• In the dining room, color can actually help stimulate appetite and conversation.
• Reds, spicy oranges, and burgundies are excellent color choices. These colors are the most passionate and stimulating on our color wheel.
• When setting a table, remember that a darker color palette will make food appear more appealing. Tonight, serve up one dinner on a white plate and another on a black or red plate and see which shows off the food best.

Accessories

• Accessories in the dining room are like the garnishes on a plate of food at your favorite five-star restaurant.
• They increase the food's appeal and make a cohesive unit out of individual elements of food.
• Hang artwork that is appropriate for the dining space and style of décor. Art that depicts oversized wine bottles, a medieval feast, a collection of black and white photographs of famous restaurants around the world, or just great art that you find appealing is appropriate.
• On a sideboard, arrange a wine bottle with a collection of glasses and a bunch of oversized grape and grape vines.
• For an English country room, accessorize with English pottery - perhaps a collection of teapots and cups.

Dining is always enjoyable but it can be simply sensational when served with stunning décor. Stir up your appetite with a few creative ideas and some designer tricks.

How Can You Fix an Old TV Niche Above a Fireplace?

Q. My son is interested in buying a home. The home design is perfect for him except the cut-out space over the fireplace in the living room that was used for older model TVs is huge. The space does not really accommodate the new plasma models which are now flat and wide, not deep and tall. I'm sure this is a decorating mistake for a lot of home owners that bought homes that had this design in them. How do you fix or decorate to accommodate for the new plasma models in this space. (from Donna)

A. Donna, thank you for your question. If your son is spending good money to make the home purchase in the first place, this design glitch should not hold him back in any way. Don't throw the baby out with the bathwater, as it were.

We advise him to spend a bit more money to have a carpenter come in and add some sheetrock to the niche and make whatever sizing adjustment he needs to fit a new flatscreen.

There are certain types of televisions, like the LCD models for example, that feature speakers at the bottom of the TV rather than on either side. If your son goes with one of these sets, then it's not quite so horizontal a shape that you will need to fill in with your carpentry work. That tallness to the screen and speakers would help fill the existing niche space better. Just leave the back void and pack it forward with a piece of plywood and attach the TV to that.

Another good solution is to buy some broad casing material -- the wood molding that goes around a door -- and with some of this five- or six-inches-wide material, you can reshape that opening. It would cover the sheetrock on the left and right, but it would cover the void in the wall on the top and bottom of the new TV opening.

Then you would have your plasma or LCD screen showing within a picture frame.

One point to consider with plasma screens is that they usually don't have attached speakers. You will have other speakers in the room, and near the screen you will mount your Center Channel speaker. You can use a portion of the existing niche to mount the Center Channel speaker either above or below the plasma screen, filling in the rest of the niche/void as we've described above.

There are other creative options to using the existing niche to best advantage. Audio groups or sometimes millworkers can make the TV screen disappear behind a mechanized panel that slides along steel tracks and is operated by remote control. In a great article from This Old House, they describe a custom panel made for a homeowner with the monitor ventilated through a series of holes drilled into the wooden box that holds it, as well as through the door mechanism.

The FASTFRAME people have a nifty mechanical solution called VisionArt, and they are serious about hiding flatscreens. With their service, you can create a custom picture frame, select artwork (many are signed-by-the-artist limited editions), and use your TV remote control to turn your set on and off as you always do -- only your canvas-based artwork automatically rolls up and away for tube viewing and rolls back down to conceal your screen when you switch off.

In this photo, clever tri-fold shutters are used to close off and conceal the TV screen above a fireplace. This is a great non-mechanical stow-away solution.

Campbell & Strasser recently demonstrated to us a simple sliding mirrored panel that they created, easily slid up and down by hand, concealing a flatscreen over a fireplace. The mirror-encased-in-molding-and-mounted-on-a-vertical-sliding-panel solution was very clever, and their architectural woodworking is excellent.

Donna, many thanks for writing in to us at Design2Share. We hope your son proceeds with his home purchase -- and happy renovating!

  Watch our Design2Share Q&A video on the Value of a Fireplace to get more great ideas about decorating in and around your hearthside.

Photo Credits: ajc, eCoustics, This Old House