Small Dining Room Tips and Tricks

Maybe your home is old-school, pre-dating the open-floorplan craze, so you have a maze of small dedicated rooms as a parlor, dining room, den, etc. Or perhaps you’re making the most of apartment or duplex living. Anyway, the challenge this poses is: “How do I make a dining-room setting that’s truly expansive and inviting when I have limited square footage? I want more than a counter or dinette, and I’m out of ideas!” Fear not. We at Roberts have been helping Hampton Roads households like yours pick the perfect dining room furniture since 1960! That practical experience plus some ideas from the interior-design pros inform our blog topic today: to make your small dining room the ideal you’re aiming for.

Corners Are Your Friends

A novel way to carve out a unique dining room space is to take full advantage of a room’s corner. Place a dining bench along each wall, then add a round or square table. If you plan to seat still more people, a smartly designed dining chair or two, depending on your space and table size, will do the job. If you go with the square table, a smaller dining bench or stool that you can push completely under it is a wise option. Finish off your awesome new dining decor with some cool accent pieces, such as reminders of culinary inspirations France and Italy. There’s always the designer’s standby of a wall mirror, not for vanity’s sake but because mirrors both create the illusion of extra space and enhance your room’s light.

Tiny Space? Then Flip Out!

If your apartment is extremely small so you can’t have a dining table, but you want more than a counter ledge with bar stools, interior designers have this fresh take. Remember the Murphy bed or old-time built-in ironing boards? It’s kind of like that: install a table along one wall that flips up when not in use. That way you have all the table space you need plus elegant dining chairs on three sides. Ingenuity for the win!

How About a Booth?

If you have a small rectangular space off one room, that can be your dining room by turning it into a booth. A narrow dining table and two benches or banquettes are all you need, plus you can always augment this with a dining chair to use the end of the table facing out.

For your dining-room furniture needs stop by our Williamsburg, VA store or any of our other locations.