For generations, families ate in their kitchens and only ventured into their dining rooms on special occasions. The dining room was a place for guests, where stiff-backed chairs and fragile china kept everyone on their best behaviour.
But as our lives have changed, so have our dining rooms.
Today’s dining rooms are used in more ways than ever before,they merge comfort and beauty to create a space where people want to linger.
Many home-owners now see the dining room as a flexible space where meals are not the only priority. In many homes, the dining room table is the go-to location for working on art projects, wrapping gifts and doing homework, so people are seeking durable tables that can withstand plenty of attention, rather than carefully polished ones that are easily scratched.
Dining room storage has also changed: The dining room may double as a home office, with a laptop and paperwork stashed in the sideboard during meals.
Many people have moved their formal dishes to kitchen cabinets, where expanded storage space allows the good china to be stored alongside the everyday dishes and displayed in glass-front kitchen cabinets.
Dining room storage may now be filled with anything from office supplies to children’s toys. The days of the perfectly matched suite of furniture — the “dining room set” — are over. In designer-decorated homes, you’re more likely to see deliberately mismatched chairs and a table that contrasts starkly with the room’s other furniture.
For generations, families ate in their kitchens and only ventured into their dining rooms on special occasions. The dining room was a place for guests, where stiff-backed chairs and fragile china kept everyone on their best behaviour.
But as our lives have changed, so have our dining rooms.
Today’s dining rooms are used in more ways than ever before they merge comfort and beauty to create a space where people want to linger.
Many home-owners now see the dining room as a flexible space where meals are not the only priority. In many homes, the dining room table is the go-to location for working on art projects, wrapping gifts and doing homework so people are seeking durable tables that can withstand plenty of attention, rather than carefully polished ones that are easily scratched.
Dining room storage has also changed: The dining room may double as a home office, with a laptop and paperwork stashed in the sideboard during meals.
Many people have moved their formal dishes to kitchen cabinets, where expanded storage space allows the good china to be stored alongside the everyday dishes and displayed in glass-front kitchen cabinets.
Dining room storage may now be filled with anything from office supplies to children’s toys.
Mixing instead of matching
The days of the perfectly matched suite of furniture — the “dining room set” — are over. In designer-decorated homes, you’re more likely to see deliberately mismatched chairs and a table that contrasts starkly with the room’s other furniture.
People are also mixing materials and textures with the dining table being some type of stone and the chairs some type of wood and the sideboard may be made with mirror or metal or clad with a decorative finish. Everything has its own evolved, separate look.
Using mismatched china is also big, including “mixing a few pieces of Grandma’s china” with sleek modern dishware.
Table linens can be a broad mix of casual cottons and formal linens layered together.
The dining room can be a perfect place to let your creativity run wild, if you don’t spend extended hours there during a given week, then bolder colours and patterns work well.
Dining without fear
We’ve moved away from the severity of antiques we’re afraid to touch and moved toward “the rustic elegance” of the big farmhouse tables you might find in Provence or Italy.
In the past cooking wasn’t something to be looked at when guests came over but now it’s become a performance so people are knocking down walls to give the dining table a better view of the kitchen.
The kitchen is now the stage, where everything happens, where everyone wants to be and the popularity of open-plan houses has meant that separate, formal dining rooms are less common.
Over the decades, one detail hasn’t changed: Warm, soft lighting in a dining room remains important. In addition to an overhead fixture, including a lamp or two to bring a gentle, flattering glow.
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