How to Style a Dining Room Table
Styling your dining room table is a great way to create a focal point and bring the entire dining room together. There are a number of different ways that you can style your dining room table to suit the table itself, as well as your home as a whole. When styling a client’s home, we like to have fun with the tablescape and use a number of different types of greenery, vases, objects and bowls to style the dining table. We tend to style rectangular dining room tables with groups of objects but keep it more simple when styling a round table. Take inspiration from our styling tips below and have fun styling your dining room table to suit your home!
Reach New Heights
When styling a dining room table, a great way to add a lot of drama is to add a vase with tall branches. This type of styling works really well when adding lush grasses to a tall vase and setting it on a round table. The fullness of the grass mimics the round shape of the table and creates a very calming look, as seen in the photo on the left. The grasses also complement the colours in the painting and the warm gold tones of the light fixture. In the photo on the right, more streamlined branches are used to draw the eye up towards the stunning light fixture. These branches are much sleeker, which works well with the very modern and clean design of this dining room. In both rooms, it’s important to note that you want to make sure that your branches or grasses aren’t so high that they interfere with the light fixture.
Better Together
Another beautiful way to style a dining room table is to display a group of objects in the centre of the table. This is a great way to display a mix of items that you’ve collected from travels, or items that are personally meaningful to you. When choosing items to display on your dining room table, we like to make sure that we choose items that have varying textures, heights, colours and sometimes patterns. In the photo on the left, we chose a more monotone colour scheme of greys and blacks but played with different textures and heights to create visual interest. When choosing how to display the objects, we always recommend placing them in a similar shape as the table that they’re on. Here, we placed the objects along the table to mimic the rectangular shape. In the photo on the right, these objects are all of a similar shape but play with different heights and colours to create a beautiful focal point. For this dining room table, the objects are displayed in more of a circular shape to complement the shape of this table. This is also a smaller table, so we wanted to make sure that we chose objects that were the right scale for the table and are much smaller than the objects on the left.
Go Green
Greenery is an excellent way to breathe some fresh air and vibrancy into your dining room. It adds an element of nature as well as a pop of colour to draw the eye to the dining table. Similar to the styling above, we chose a longer rectangular plant box for the rectangular table. The choice of ferns in the box helps to create movement and draws the eye to the artwork behind the table. In the photo on the right, we chose to place green branches in a statement vessel. The cooler tones of the branches and the vase work with the calming feeling of the room. We like choosing branches of varying heights and arranging them asymmetrically to create some push and pull within a room.
Lovely Linens
Another one of our favourite ways to style a dining room table is to include a table runner or placements. Adding fabric to a table brings in a lot of great texture and the soft, pliable feel of the fabric is a great contrast to the sharper lines and sleek feel of the table. We would only recommend using a table runner on a rectangular table (running lengthwise), but placemats could be used on either a round or a rectangular table. As seen in the photo on the left, we used a linen table runner to add some softness to the space. The blue stripe down the middle complements the stripes in the vases atop the runner. In the photo on the right, we styled the table with some blue placemats to go with the deep blue of the dining chairs. When using placemats to style a table, we’d always recommend setting the table on top of the placemats so that the table looks finished and ready for company!
Photo Credit: Shellard Photography
