Dining Room Inspiration: Linens and Upholstery

Dining Room Inspiration: Linens and Upholstery

Could there be a more heart-warming place in the home than the room devoted to family gatherings, pivotal celebrations, Christmas dinners, birthday candles, Sunday afternoon games of Risk and Canasta, homework sessions, painting sessions, party planning, and countless quiet evening meals together as a family?

The dining room is so much more than a space for the table and chairs. Long seen as a tricky room to ‘make interesting’, it’s actually the ideal place for exercising your creativity, and putting together a space as inviting as the living room, and as conducive to a good meal as the breakfast table.

True, these spaces tend to be centred around their own purpose, but that’s no reason not to invest the same time and attention into choosing your linens and upholstery fabrics as you would in any other part of the home.

Here are our tips.

Embrace the ‘seasonal tablecloth’

We’ve written before about seasonal curtains – to be changed once every one or two seasons, as a way of embracing the changing weather – so, if you consider yourself to be ‘on board’ with that, there’s no reason why you can’t feel the same way about your tablecloth.

The tablecloth doesn’t necessarily come out for every meal. Weekday dinners are, not for want of trying, hard to make celebratory every day of the year, which means most of us forgo wafting out the tablecloth and laying out the candle, but that’s no reason not to make it special – particularly when there are so many fabrics to choose from.

Or draw inspiration from your favoured cuisines

If you enjoy a well-stocked linens cupboard, then consider keeping a few special tablecloths back for different cuisines. We often talk about how different textiles can transport us to different parts of the world – a lot like food – and combining the two is a true winner, particularly if you’re a fan of hosting.

Our fabric is perfectly suited to a dinner of a steaming bowl of Jollof rice or a syrupy malva pudding – or, if you’re taking the simpler route, any summer table, indoors or out.

Consider a hard-wearing weave for upholstering your dining chairs

Anyone who has ever suffered through a meal – however delicious – on an uncomfortable chair will have no doubt vowed to themselves not to put their guests through the same trouble, but the dining room is a slightly higher risk area for spills and stains – particularly if you’ve got children passing through on a daily basis.

Our weaves, which are well-balanced blends of cotton fibres, flax, and viscose, are even more durable than pure linen or pure cotton, but still characterised by the key traits we love about natural fibres: comfort, breathability, and a beautiful drape.

This added strength is invaluable for high traffic areas of the home – and few areas are quite as high traffic as the family dining room.

For the spills, consider talking to your upholsterer about creating easily removeable slipcovers for the chairs. That way, they can simply be removed and taken by the dry cleaner whenever your other soft furnishings are due a trip.

Layer your table dressings

While we love the pared-back, rustic look of an undressed dining table, there is something about sitting down to a meal at a beautifully arranged table. With a mix of patterns and colours, you can easily create a highly bohemian look that suits any serve-yourself style buffet, while a more streamlined collection of fabrics offers a very elegant, decadent feel.

Consider using one cloth to cover the table and represent your statement pattern, then add a table runner or smaller, square shaped cloth on top of that, and don’t forget the napkins…

Create contrast with your napkins and mats

If there is one thing we love about textile, it’s the ability to experiment with contrast and pattern mixing – and the dining table is certainly no exception. Using contrasting mats for your diners’ place settings, for the glassware, and for any larger dishes intended to sit in the middle of the table, is a great way to break up the pattern and create a flow from one head of the table to the other.

Take advantage of linen

A lot of tablecloths are designed to be water repellent, with plastic coatings and a synthetic feel. While they work perfectly well, the natural durability, washability, and water resistant qualities of linen make it the ideal choice for the dining room table – and a much more environmentally friendly option, too.

Being a natural textile, linen has that soft and sumptuous feel to it. Those distinctive shapes it drapes into create an attractive, relaxed atmosphere that will welcome guests, but live up to the occasion at hand.