Creating a Cosy Dining Room

Render your dining room comfortably liveable with the careful consideration of colour scheme, materials, and architectural planning.

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Celebrated paintings are known more for the sum of their parts than for their individual details, but an attractive visual composition is notoriously difficult to achieve — even master painters have painted over completed works while searching for that elusive sense of visual cohesion and comfort. Just as the frustrated maestros of the past, you may have put considerable effort and resources into selecting your architectural finishes, curating your furnishings, and appointing the dining space with lighting fixtures of your choice, but an uninformed arrangement and a lack of visual cohesion could result in a cold and aloof space. In this guide, we take a look at a selection of dining spaces to distil the factors that make for cosy spaces.

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Perfect Match

Just as the details of a mess have unintentional effects on a décor, disparate decorative elements can affect the ambiance in detrimental ways by pulling the message of the space in divergent directions. With furniture and material choices in tune with each other, Nu Infinity renders the pictured space cohesive with a colour scheme of black and pale wood tones against a white background. While the resulting décor is unified to make its appreciation easier for the naïve observer, the space is additionally drenched in warm lighting to produce a soothing ambiance.

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Calm & Carefree

The neutral palette, the prevailing colour scheme of modern homes, is known to lend itself well in combination with a wide range of decorative styles—the inherent lack of bold shades in the neutral palette renders an ambiance calming, and the subdued colours are ideal for use in creating cohesive presentations of disparate textures.

As demonstrated by GI Design with the pictured dining room, the pale background ties together the decorative elements and unobtrusively diverts the wandering gaze across an array of textures: whitewashed bricks on the wall, the lightly treated woodwork of the furniture, andthe sleek black frames.

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Woody Warmth

There is something primal about the effect of wood floors—perhaps due to our arboreal ancestry, or because wood has always been an easily workable and highly available building material making up the majority of homes past. Either explanation would go toward explaining why a wood floor invites one to saunter around the space with bare feet. Decorated by Beverly Home, the pictured space is made inviting by way of its floors composed entirely from wood, resulting in a warm expanse that ripples invitingly with a variety of shades and grains that could only be achieved with natural wood cuts.

Tip: Working with natural wood entails a willingness to incorporate a variety of uncontrolled shades and grains – the result of which is a space painted with unique and irreproducible brushstrokes.

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Breezy Charm

While womb-like warmth in close-quarters may be the definition of cosiness in the primitive sense, modern sensibilities require an abundance of space filled with natural sunlight and adequate air ventilation for comfort.

Decorated by Nu Infinity, the pictured dining space is strategically placed opposite a length of sliding patio doors and gifted with sunlight filtered through lightweight sheer curtains.

Ventilation is provided by the thoughtfully placed ceiling fans, and an uplifting sense of volume is created in the delectably lit ceiling tray, emblazoned with intriguing decorative details for the eye to linger upon.

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Clear Space

Nothing detracts from the cosiness of a space more than an uncontained mess. While a measure of detail makes a space appear lived-in, an overabundance of clutter burdens the mind and tires the naïve eye with unnecessary details.

In the pictured home decorated by Gusto Design, the potential clutter of the dining space is contained within neat lines of open shelving on the walls. In the adjacent kitchen, the practical consideration of shelves being closed with cabinet doors further decreases the amount of details appearing in the space and affecting the décor in unintentional ways.

Tip: Design the visual experience of a space by applying the same principles used in tactical camouflage – draw attention to a feature of your choosing by clearing out any unnecessary details from its surroundings, and obscure the presence of an element with an array of intersecting details.