By: Jacey Larsen

When it comes to buying a complete set of chairs and a table for your dining room or dining area, there are many routes one can take. In today’s design world, we see that the current trend is to mix and match chairs and tables, with the pre-packaged sets sold at furniture stores quickly losing popularity. These new sets handpicked and designed by homeowners have helped to push creativity in dining room design and generate more interest/style within these important pieces of furniture.

EXPERIMENT WITH NUMEROUS MATERIALS

Creating a dining room set that utilizes different materials will help to produce a composition that is unique to your home. This will help you to avoid a design that looks dull and stagnant. Even just reupholstering your chairs or adding seating pads is an easy way to bring in a mix of materials and break up your design.

SET YOUR COLOR PALETTE

 Knowing the colors you want to include in your dining table design is necessary prior to purchasing a set. The first thing you should match your chairs and table to is the flooring in your dining room or dining area. You want to make sure that they are not too similar in color, or too dark/light in comparison.

Mixing colors in your arrangement can be done in small pops of color or in large quantities. For example, a bright, colorful dining table, or minor color swatches in the pattern of the upholstery. For modern/abstract designs, the color differences can be drastic, but for simpler, more monochromatic designs, color changes can be slight (pairing beiges and browns, blacks and grays, etc.)

BREAK IT UP BY ADDING DIFFERENT STYLES OF CHAIRS

Most of the time, we see dining room tables with one style of chair. Although this is perfectly fine as it can still emanate visual interest in different areas, it is also ok to pull in a different style of seating. These separate chairs are there to elevate the design, often being simpler or more extravagant as to differentiate from the regular dining chairs. This tip should be used minimally though, with only one or two of these chairs being incorporated into the design.

TAKE MEASUREMENTS

The most crucial step when pairing dining chairs and tables is to know your measurements. The worst setback you can have while designing your dining room is purchasing chairs and/or a table that is either too big or too small. Your set may not be identical in color, texture, or style, but it should be in size. The backs of your chairs should not slide under the bottom of your table (unless you are using a bench or stools), and there should be at least 10 cm between each chair (using this information and the width of your table sides will help you to calculate how many chairs you will need in all).