Art Deco Dining Room Ideas

The chair in this look is not a dining chair. It is a black boucle barrel, parked beside a sixty-nine inch black sideboard with a small marble table at its elbow, and nobody eats from it. Deco in a dining room rarely lives at the table. It lives at the edges: the long cabinet, the light, the one chair that sits out of the meal. For a room furnished from scratch, the art deco dining room furniture is easier to choose in that order.

Art deco dining room photos taken from the doorway

Most saved photographs are shot from the head of the table, looking down the runner. Stand in the doorway instead. From there the table is a low flat shape and the eye lands on the wall behind it, where the period spent its money: lacquer, veneer, geometry. There is only one look in the art deco dining room gallery so far, and it was shot for exactly that view, the same view I use for every room in the Dark Luxury Lookbook.

The sideboard as a plinth

A sideboard in a deco room behaves like the base of a column. Long, low and heavy, it makes everything above it read as standing on it. Black works because it gives the wall a floor of shadow to rest on. Look through the dining room credenzas with that in mind and choose the longest one the wall allows, leaving at least a foot of bare wall at each end so it never looks wedged in.

Light it like a hotel lobby

Searches for deco dining chandeliers more than doubled last quarter. The style's best rooms treat the fixture as architecture: tiers, fans, frosted glass, a stepped canopy. Hang it low enough to belong to the room, roughly thirty to thirty-four inches above the tabletop, and put it on a dimmer. At full brightness a black room goes flat and gray. Dialed down to a warm glow, the lacquer starts holding tiny reflections of each bulb, and only then does the room look like the period. The broader art deco interior design ideas carry the same rule into the living room and the bath.

Art deco dining room pictures with a chair in the corner

A deco dining room needs one soft, round thing to argue with all the hard edges, and a curved chair in the corner does it better than a rug or a cushion. Boucle suits the job because its loops catch light from the side, so the chair keeps its outline even when its color sinks into the wall. Pick it from the accent chairs rather than buying a ninth dining chair.

The table can stay quiet

The table is the most searched piece in this whole category by a wide margin, and yet it is the piece that can afford to be plainest. The art deco dining tables that shout loudest, with mirrored aprons and heavy gilt, tend to fight the sideboard and the light for the same attention, and in a room this dark there is only space for one lead.

Art deco dining room inspiration from the chair backs

If the table stays quiet, let the chairs carry the curve. A rounded or shell back, a channel-tufted seat, a tapered leg with a metal cap at the floor: six of them in a row repeat like a frieze. Velvet in deep green or oxblood suits art deco dining chairs better than leather does, because velvet darkens as it turns away from the light, and the row of backs reads in two tones instead of one.

Waterfall edges and pedestal bases

If you do want the table to speak, choose one gesture and stop. A waterfall edge, where the top folds down into the leg in one continuous plane, is the most deco shape a table can take. A fluted or stepped pedestal is the other. Either one sits comfortably among the rest of the luxury dining room furniture, as long as nothing else in the room is also auditioning as the sculpture.

Skip the matched set

Searches for complete deco dining sets have fallen by almost half in a year, and rightly. A table, eight chairs and a sideboard in one finish look like a banquet hall. Most of the art deco dining room ideas I come across get the order backwards, starting at the table and ending at the wall. Buy the cabinet first, the light second, the table third and the chairs last, and let each arrive in a slightly different black. A room assembled that way looks inherited, which is the only kind of deco room I have ever wanted to linger in after dark.