How to Design a Dining Room Your Guests Will Love!

Let’s talk dining rooms! You know that room that you go in once or twice a year for the big family holiday dinner?
How do you design a dining room that’s so welcoming that you want to have dinner there every night?
I have a few dining room design tricks that will make your dining room guest worthy! You can read more about what to do now to have a stress-free holiday season here!

Ideally, your dining room area rug should be large enough so that you can pull out your chair and still have the chair legs on the rug. You don’t want to be catching the chair legs on the edge of the rug every time you get up. That’s annoying! A great tip to figure that out is to pull your chairs out from the table, like you’re getting up, then measure a little bit past the back legs of your chair on one side to a little bit past the back legs of the chairs on the other side. Your area rug should be at least that wide. Then do the same for the length of the table. Nobody wants to be catching the back legs of the chair on the edge of the rug every single time they get up from the table.

As far as what shape your dining room rug should be, use your table shape as a guide. If you have an oval table, then you can get away with an oval rug or a rectangular rug. A rectangular rug works for most table shapes. Round rugs only work with round tables that do not turn into ovals with leaves. A great tip for picturing how large and what shape you should get is to use painter’s tape on the floor. Map it out and see if it looks right in your space. This is a great tip for furniture as well. I usually do this for clients that are having a hard time picturing how the new furniture will look and fit.

Click here for more area rug do’s and don’ts

Now this is probably a given, but you need to be sure everyone that’s coming will have a place to sit! You want to make sure that your table is large enough to hold the amount of people you’re having over. Put all the leaves in your table, and if you need more dining space, use your kitchen table with a matching or coordinating table cloth.

You also want to make sure you have enough comfortable seating in your dining room so that people will linger at the table. You know that’s when the best conversations happen, after a couple glasses of wine, when everyone is full and comfy. If you have wooden chairs, think about adding cushions to make people more comfortable. If your chairs are kind of deep, you can add some little lumbar pillows to make them more cozy. You also don’t want people to have to worry about spilling things on your chairs or kids sitting on the chairs. So the best way to get around that is to have chairs that are wood or metal, or use an upholstery fabric that is a performance fabric like we talked about in this recent blog post about designing for real life.

Hmmmm, maybe you have people who you don’t want to be sticking around….. 😉 In that case, go with the hard wood chairs. I’m kidding.

For even more table or serving space, you can add a sideboard or a buffet to your dining room! That way you’ll get some extra storage for all of those holiday dinner dishes and you can utilize the top of it! You can add a table runner to the top of your sideboard to protect it during meals and lay out some food there, or it could even act as your bar. It’s great for when everyone’s too full to go all the way into the other room to get the wine! It will help you have more room at your dining table as well.

When it comes to lighting, you want task, general and ambient lighting in every room, but especially in the dining room. Everyone knows that general lighting in the dining room is typically a chandelier. But how high should your chandelier be hung in your dining room? Here’s your tip: the bottom of your chandelier should be about thirty to thirty-four inches from the dining room table top. That is with an 8’ ceiling. If your ceilings are higher, you may want to raise it up a little bit, but you don’t want it so high that you can’t appreciate it. You want it low enough so that you have some ambience, but high enough so that the tallest person can see under it to the person across the table.

The other thing to think about when selecting a chandelier is the shape! If your dining room table is round or square, your chandelier should mimic that shape. If it’s rectangle, you want to use what they call a linear chandelier. It’s long and skinny and it will light up the majority of your table. If you have a long table and you hang a pendant light above it, it’s going to look off. If you want to go with a pendant and you have a long table, hang two of them.

It’s better to have layered lighting in a room, so you also want to add some ambient lighting. Try adding a floor lamp to a corner or add some lamps to your sideboard. You want to get tall, skinny lamps called buffet lamps. You could even think about adding some sconces to create more interest. The sconces should coordinate with your chandelier, not necessarily match it. Sconces will help free up space on your sideboard, which leaves you more room to lay out food or drinks. While you’re at it, if you’re hiring an electrician, have them add dimmers to your dining room lighting! It’s nice to be able to soften the lights when you don’t really need task lighting. It will make everyone feel more cozy and relaxed and they will stay longer! Want to make your guests feel even more welcomed? Check out this blog post about hosting a party your guests will remember!

The last tip is about your centerpiece. If you have a long table, don’t go with just one round centerpiece in the middle. Go with two or three pieces and line them up down the length of the table. You also have to think about the height of your centerpiece. You don’t want it too high that people have to look up and over it. You also have to be sure it doesn’t take up so much room that you have no place to put food! So think about size and think about height when you’re choosing a centerpiece.

So those are my tips for making your dining room guest-ready! I hope these get you excited about the holidays and more confident about entertaining! Let me know your holiday plans in the Comments below, or head over to our Facebook page and join the conversation!

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