When I first saw this dining room, it was empty, except for a folding table and ready-made draperies.  The owners wanted an elegant, romantic dining room, but they really weren’t sure how to accomplish that, and they didn’t want to spend their weekends in stores.

The first thing I did was to create a floor plan, so I could determine appropriate sizes and shapes of furniture needed.  The room is essentially square, and therefore lent itself to a round table.  

Next I had to figure out how to make the eight-foot ceiling appear higher, so the room would feel more elegant.  The room had a chair rail, which visually lowers ceiling height, but I didn’t want to remove it because of the difficulty of making the wall smooth again.  So instead I used cream-on-cream striped wallpaper both above and below the chair rail, and chose a drapery fabric with a vertical pattern of striped foliage. 

The color scheme was also important because the only windows in the room face north.  Rooms with a northern exposure tend to look cold because they don’t get any direct sunlight.  Using warm colors, as I did here, makes them a lot more inviting.

The elegant, romantic dining room my clients wanted but didn’t know how to create is now theirs.