How to Stage Your Dining Room When Selling Your House

Inevitably, an empty room will have a dramatic difference when you add furniture! Here, below, the choices are particularly dramatic.



We needed to meld a traditional crystal chandelier with a room that was modern, and a target buyer who liked edgier, newer furnishings.

In this next one, the problem was simply one of space. The homeowner traveled extensively, and the large BEAUTIFUL country pine table seemed to accumulate everything under the sun.



In this South Orange home, it's quite obvious to see what was happening... but the homeowner was losing potential equity by not emphasizing the spectacular windows and interesting flexibility in that Mission furniture fitted great.



I'm staging Dining Rooms with less and less table settings. The simpler the presentation, the calmer I think the overall presenation is.

This point was especially apt in this remarkable build... interestingly I was able to use the furniture I bought from the house above, and immediately deploy it in the house below. That house sold in 53 days, which was considered a remarkable feat for that time in the season!

This room was enormous. The table was enormous. the walls were bare. What made sense to me was to add a beautiful, but unusual painting, and a large painting to fill in the wall, then a silver tray and just some simple, fresh white flowers. Elegant, and not trying too hard. Ideal for a house that sold well over $3 million!



Some chandelier, eh?

In the Middle Ages, upper class Britons and other European nobility in castles or large manor houses dined in the Great Hall. This was a large multi-function room capable of seating the bulk of the population of the house. The family would sit at the head table on a raised dais, with the rest of the population arrayed in order of diminishing rank away from them. Tables in the great hall would tend to be long trestle tables with benches. The Great Hall would have been extremely noisy, and likely would have been quite smoky and malodorous, making it an unpleasant place to hold any discussion.

In response to certain discomforts of dining in the Great Hall, the nobility began to construct parlours or drawing rooms off the Great Hall. These were far smaller rooms to which the nobility could withdraw to relax and talk in comparative quiet. Over time, the nobility took more of their meals in the parlour, and the parlour became, functionally, a dining room (or was split into two separate rooms).



It also migrated farther from the Great Hall, often accessed via grand ceremonial staircases from the dais in the Great Hall. Eventually dining in the Great Hall became something that was done primarily on special occasions.

Toward the beginning of the 18th Century, a pattern emerged where the ladies of the house would withdraw after dinner from the dining room to the drawing room, while the gentlemen would remain in the dining room having drinks. The dining room tended to take on a more masculine tenor as a result.

Yet, throughout the 19th and 20th century, the dining room has become the place to dispay wealth, collections, artwork. Below, in Leeds Castle, the china collection on the wall is quite remarkable.

"A typical North American dining room will contain a table with chairs arranged along the sides and ends of the table, as well as other pieces of furniture, (often used for storing formal china), as space permits.

In modern American homes, the dining room is increasingly used only for formal dining with guests or on special occasions. Informal daily meals are often taken in the kitchen, breakfast nook or family room. This was traditionally the case in England, where the dining room would for many families be used only on Sundays, other meals being eaten in the kitchen. Often tables in modern dining rooms will have a removable leaf to allow for the larger number of people present on those special occasions without taking up extra space when not in use.

In Australia, while the use of the dining room is still prevalent, family meals are also often eaten in front of the television in the living room.

Although the "typical" family dining experience is at a wooden table or some sort of kitchen area, some choose to make their dining rooms more comfortable by using couches or comfortable chairs."

This lovely mural must have given the lady who commissioned it lots and lots of pleasure. There's an awkward decision to make when you take your house to market - how many people will like my mural vs. how many people will want to paint over it?



In the case above, I decided most people would like it, and to stage the dining room so as to complement the mural, not compete with it. A simple mirror to reflect light seemed the most generic way to interpret the space.

I personally don't like murals because I own a lot of art. My dining room is one of the best places for me to display them. A mural would interfere dreadfully. However, I do have a mural in one of my daughters' bedrooms.