Painting the Dining Room

Not every home today has a dining room proper. Often, the eating area is a nook in an open plan kitchen/great room or a bar in a kitchen.

If you have a dining room, take the opportunity to use a colour that you might not choose to look at day and night. Dining rooms can look warm and welcoming painted in bright or bold colours. Plum in a living room might feel overwhelming, but in a dining room, it can be very inviting.

Be sure to consider how your wall colours will work with furnishings and with your precious china or heirloom silver. In the dining room above, painted by Courtney & Wise in a Sydney suburb, yellow walls, white paint picking out the architectural details, and stained wood combine with the dark wood and rosy upholstery to make a pretty effect.

If your dining area is part of a larger room, or a casual space that lets onto a veranda, you might prefer a simpler colour scheme. The fresh white of walls and ceilings in this room never goes out of style, and it makes a good backdrop for art works.

Dining rooms often feature bay windows, French doors, and other interesting touches. If yours does, give some extra thought to trim. A contrasting colour for trim can be very fetching. Keeping the same colour family but using a different texture or finish is another idea: glossy trim against matte walls of the same colour is attractive yet understated.

Market research for restaurants has shown that warm colours like red, orange, and yellow increase appetites. Your dinner parties may be especially successful if you paint your dining room walls in these colours.