Decorating in Stages
When you're starting out, home decor doesn't have to be expensive or risky. Try these easy ideas to create ambience without committing to new furniture.
SCENARIO: You moved into a larger house with your first real dining room (bye-bye eat-in kitchen), but you don't have the bona fide furniture or the budget to fill it right away. Still, you want to entertain friends with a modicum of style while you settle into the house and think about what furnishings and feeling you'd like to have in the room.
TACTIC: Evoke a French bistro style. Utilize basic dinnerware from your bridal registry, pieces of furniture you already have, and a bevy of affordable accessories.
COMMITMENT: Low. You ve kept colours neutral, style simple, costs minimal.
Go Basic
Put what you already have into play, using whites and blacks for bistro style. Buy accessories you can layer or use in different ways when you settle on your style.
Places in Time
Compose compelling place settings so guests focus on food and conversation, not the empty room. Put your wedding registry dishes and basic stemware alongside Grandma's love-it-forever flatware. Classics commingle with margarita glass votive holders and curtain ring clips used as napkin/place card holders.
Blooming Bottles
Use a half dozen empty soda bottles to spread one bunch of blooms into a big arrangement for just a few rands.
Smart Art
Photography is affordable art, especially when outlined with wide white mats and black frames. Choose meaningful subjects to personalize the space travel photos, nature images, and still lifes. Later, you can move the art to a powder room or guest room.
Rack 'Em Up
Use that wooden wine rack you bought for your first apartment in the 1990s as a buffet or bar. Make it part of a wall composition with artwork, a platter on a stand, and an ice bucket for chilling wine.
Once you've found your perfect dining room table, start investing in a few good pieces for your decor. Wait to paint your walls until you're more settled though.
SCENARIO: You've settled into the house and desperately need to ditch the folding table and chairs. Budget-wise you're not ready for a total makeover, but you'd like to gradually purchase core furnishings and accessories that add substance, colour, and comfort to the room. Your final decorating style, however, is still undecided.
TACTIC: Evolve from French bistro to crisp botanical style. Buy furniture and build on the basic white and black accessories, adding colour, texture, and substance.
COMMITMENT LEVEL: Moderate. You're investing in furniture and nicer accents.
Green With Envy
If you're not yet ready to commit to a new colour scheme, pick up on the soft green walls with botanical motifs in special napkins and fresh-cut or potted plants and flowers.
Clear as Day
Keep the interior airy with clear glass vases, candle hurricanes, and water carafes. Strong curves add shape and interest to the table, yet the glass lets light shine through. Plus, glass pieces are ultimately versatile.
Store More
As you begin to invest in tableware and accessories, this cabinet stores your wares. It also serves as a bar and a buffet server. Tall vases, crystal barware, and the same framed photo keep this area a focal point until you invest in new art.
Table Grace
Set a more sophisticated table by layering new square plates on woven chargers atop linen runners. Grandma's silver flatware and your original glasses still work great. Potted-fern place cards are special and inexpensive.
Finally, you're ready to paint. Once you've found that piece you can't live without, in this case, the fabric for the draperies, you can build your room around it.
SCENARIO: After a few years you finally find it: a dreamy fabric for draperies that works perfectly with the transferware dishes you now collect. It sets the elegant tone you've come to admire as your tastes and budget have matured. It's time to go for it!
TACTIC: Finish out the room, taking colour and formality cues from the fabric for a brave new wall paint, a rug, dinnerware, and wall elements. Use pieces you've carefully gleaned along the way and enjoy with pride the look you've built comfortably over time.
COMMITMENT LEVEL: High. But you've taken your time and know it's you.
Arrive
With an exciting drapery fabric in hand, you have the road map to make the rest of your design decisions with confidence. Keep what you love, add what excites you.
Dinner For Eight
Leaves elongate the table to a formal scale. The addition of two slipcovered, upholstered chairs adds seating stature and the striped fabric reverses to solid brown for a change of look.
Take a Transfer
Melding a colour-themed collection into this decor jump started the final phase. Start with one serving piece, then ease into place settings as your collection grows. Amber glass chargers, bowls, wineglasses, and curtain rod finials tie to those tones in draperies, slipcovers, and rug. Grandma's silver? Still there, tied in a new faux-suede napkin.
Wall Plates
That mirror is still going strong, but now plates and platters join it. The beauty? The wall arrangement can expand and reconfigure as the collection grows. Atop the bar, a lamp adds height and ambient lighting to the composition.
Repeat, Reuse
The same linen runners from stage two grace the table and bar with the addition of matching square napkins as place mats. Decanters also remain.
Table Triage
Well, they're not pretty, but when a dining room is empty, a folding table and chairs are quick and cheap. When you buy real furniture, they can be used for parties on the deck and holiday gatherings, so money is not wasted.
Great Lengths
Square white tablecloths are inexpensive and versatile for the future, especially since you don't know the size of your dream table. Place a square at each end, then angle a third square in the middle to cover the gap and voila, bistro style in a bare room.
How You Grow
After a few months, basic becomes blah. It's time to buy a table and chairs, add to your accessories, and shift your look from cheap-chic bistro to verdant botanical.
Furniture Formula
The strong bones of this black furniture are classic yet crisply current. The pieces will look great if you elaborate on this clean green scheme or go formal in the future.
Curtain Call
This rich floral drapery fabric stands strong with the black table and introduces accent hues of amber, coral, and brown. With table and draperies in place, it's finally rug time. A subtle grid of sand, brown, and black ties into the room hues (and the nylon fibers are easy-care).
Paint Punch
Enough of safe colors, you're ready to take a leap! Plucked from the floral fabric, coral becomes banding on the curtains, the color on the wall, and fresh flowers for centerpieces.