A Playful Dining Room Fit for Toddlers and Grown-Ups
Midcentury modern, traditional and contemporary pieces mix to create a lively, personalized space
Dining table: Based on their ideabooks, Manlove found several new tables for them to check out and also suggested local haunts that had good midcentury modern inventories. The couple set off on their own and found this vintage midcentury modern round dining table.
Built-ins: The built-ins were existing but in rough shape. Manlove cleaned them up and gave them a more polished look by replacing the doors and adorning them with new hardware. She also closed off open shelves underneath the windows with doors. They are great for storing linens and serving pieces, while the open shelves on top provide display space for some favorite things. For the back of the shelves, she chose a blue paint that’s a deeper hue than the shade on the ceiling. The built-ins are also a handy place to set up for serving food and drinks.
Millwork: The traditional recessed panel wainscoting was existing. Its gridded look also suits a more modern design.
Paint on back of built-ins: Thunderbird 675, Benjamin Moore
Built-ins: The built-ins were existing but in rough shape. Manlove cleaned them up and gave them a more polished look by replacing the doors and adorning them with new hardware. She also closed off open shelves underneath the windows with doors. They are great for storing linens and serving pieces, while the open shelves on top provide display space for some favorite things. For the back of the shelves, she chose a blue paint that’s a deeper hue than the shade on the ceiling. The built-ins are also a handy place to set up for serving food and drinks.
Millwork: The traditional recessed panel wainscoting was existing. Its gridded look also suits a more modern design.
Paint on back of built-ins: Thunderbird 675, Benjamin Moore
Dining chairs: The family loves these iconic midcentury modern Eames shell chairs with metal Eiffel bases in peacock blue. They not only bring in classic midcentury style and color but are totally kid-friendly. It’s easy to wipe up inevitable spills.
Rug: Likewise, the custom-cut woven carpet is made of stain-proof polypropylene, and literally it can be hosed down in the driveway.
“Polypropylene rugs are very appealing to me with my own family,” Manlove says. “There are nice, high-quality polypropylene rugs on the market now that really can have a high-end look.” In here it adds texture and a geometric pattern to the floor.
Ceiling: After this room was finished, Manlove returned to help them choose paint for other rooms. But she looked up and realized the white ceiling in the dining room was just not right. “It needed that finishing touch to make it feel completely like a jewel box. It needed to be capped off,” she says. So she used the same paint she used on the built-ins with 50 percent white mixed in.
Rug: Likewise, the custom-cut woven carpet is made of stain-proof polypropylene, and literally it can be hosed down in the driveway.
“Polypropylene rugs are very appealing to me with my own family,” Manlove says. “There are nice, high-quality polypropylene rugs on the market now that really can have a high-end look.” In here it adds texture and a geometric pattern to the floor.
Ceiling: After this room was finished, Manlove returned to help them choose paint for other rooms. But she looked up and realized the white ceiling in the dining room was just not right. “It needed that finishing touch to make it feel completely like a jewel box. It needed to be capped off,” she says. So she used the same paint she used on the built-ins with 50 percent white mixed in.
More storage: The dark color of this contemporary cabinet picks up on the branches in the wallpaper and anchors this side of the room with a little weight. Its style is more contemporary than that of other pieces in the room, keeping it from feeling simply midcentury. Manlove has helped the young family find their own playful style that incorporates the past and the future.
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Dining Room at a Glance
Who lives here: A young family
Location: Arlington, Virginia
Size: 120 square feet (11 square meters); 10 feet by 12 feet
Designer: Suzanne Manlove of Arlington Home Interiors
The backstory: This family wanted a big impact in their relatively small dining room. “They wanted to make the space truly their own,” says interior designer Suzanne Manlove. And because this is the only place where they have a table and chairs in their cozy Cape Cod-style home, it needed to be highly functional for three square meals a day. “They wanted a kid-friendly space that reflected their eclectic and midcentury modern taste leanings and their love of color,” she says.
Style: The room is colorful, young, cheery and modern.
Where it began: The clients had a lot of traditional furniture they’d inherited that just was not “them.” But they hadn’t had a real chance to find what was them — their style as a family. “He firmly loved midcentury modern, while she was more into eclectic and colorful,” Manlove says. She had the couple create ideabooks on Houzz to get a feel for the styles, color palettes and furniture they like.
Lighting: “This room is small but has great high ceilings, so I wanted to draw the eye up,” Manlove says. She began by sourcing this oversize, geometric, eye-catching light fixture.
Wallcovering: “This wallpaper really resonated with him because it reminded him of the work of one of his favorite illustrators, Leo Lionni,” Manlove says. It also brought in color and pattern and, again, drew the eye up. Note the way the structure of the light fixture and the pattern in the wallpaper play off each other.
Wallcovering: Romo; light fixture: Currey & Co.; see more cage-style pendant lights