The best dining rooms are designed with the room’s layout in mind. But if this is your first home, or you have never furnished a dining room before, choosing the right layout for your dining room can feel overwhelming.
Here at Furnish, we want to help our customers on every step of their design journey. So we have put together this guide on how to layout your dining room.
When our customers ask us ‘how to layout your dining room?’ we always tell them that their comfort will be dependent on three things: product functionality, scaling, and balance.
Keep reading to learn how you can choose the optimal dining room layout for your space.
No matter how beautiful your dining room is, if it isn’t a functional space for your family to take their meals, you need to take a step back and reconsider what you need from the space and how you can achieve that without sacrificing on aesthetics. Three things to consider when assessing the functionality of your dining room are chair spacing, rug placement, and furniture spacing.
The number of chairs you need for your space will be dependent on the number of people in your household and the likelihood of you entertaining guests regularly. We advise that your dining room has chairs for every person that lives in your home and an additional two chairs for guests. Position these chairs at least 18 inches apart so your diners can eat without feeling cramped. This should provide enough space for most diners to feel comfortable and avoid knocking elbows with other guests.
You will need to ensure that your dining table can accommodate the number of diners you have on a daily basis. If you have a large family, we recommend choosing a round dining table since it creates a more intimate, relaxed atmosphere in the space by encouraging closeness and conversation. Moreover, thanks to the larger surface area of the tabletop, you can properly space your chairs to allow for practical seating space, meaning you will have enough legroom to sit comfortably for hours while you all enjoy a delicious meal.
Choosing the right rug for your dining room is probably the last thing on your mind when you are looking for advice on how to layout your dining room. But since you’ll need to be able to pull out a chair to sit down to eat at, the style and placement of your rug will be paramount to your comfort. You need to choose a rug that extends at least 18 inches beyond the back of the chairs placed around your dining table after the table has been centered on the rug. If you can move the chairs out from the table without the chair legs becoming caught on the rug, then you will be one step closer to creating a functional dining space.
Every dining room should include a dining table, chairs, and a sideboard at a minimum, but you may need to add a hutch, and bench for it to feel complete. No matter how many pieces of furniture you want to include in your dining room, you need to ensure you leave enough space in between pieces to comfortably walk around the dining room.
Our most valuable piece of advice when it comes to laying out your dining room is to scale your furniture properly. You must match the size and visual weight of design elements to the space you plan to put them in. Large pieces belong in large spaces and small pieces in smaller areas.
If you don’t have enough furniture to fill a large room, you can still fill the space by choosing large lighting fixtures or accessories to compensate for the lack of furniture. For example, a large chandelier will draw the eye upward and away from the empty walls.
If you have a small room with too much furniture, you should take advantage of corner space where possible. For example, a tall hutch will hide the wall’s corner and create the visual illusion that the space extends far beyond your limited square footage.
When we were putting together this guide on how to layout your dining room, we knew that we needed to explain how to bring balance to your space. This is not as difficult as it may seem. Balancing an interior means you need to equalize the visual weight of pieces on opposite sides of a space to achieve the desired look. To accomplish this, you need to keep two things in mind: the sizes of the items you have and the natural architectural details within the space you are furnishing.
If you place a large piece of furniture against one wall, then you must add a piece of a similar visual weight on the opposite wall to balance the space. For example, if you place a cabinet against one wall, you can balance the room by placing a bench topped by a mirror on the wall opposite.
If you are blessed with a gorgeous large window in your dining room, we suggest taking advantage of this. Place small light fixtures, like a sconce, on either side of the window to light the room on dark evenings and define the wall opposite with a significant design presence. A hutch would be ideal for this, but if you do not have enough space for this or feel that a hutch would overpower the presence of the windows, then choose a low cabinet. You can decorate its tabletop with décor and hang an art piece above it to mimic the beautiful scene just beyond the windowpane opposite.
We hope you found this guide on how to layout your dining room useful. If you follow these tips, you are sure to create a beautiful space perfect for both casual and formal dining.
If you are looking for dining room furniture in Raleigh, then visit our furniture store today. Serving the Apex, Raleigh, Chapel Hill, Wake Forest, Durham, and Cary areas.