Variety is the Spice of Decorating

Hi Christine,
I love the decorating advice that you give on your blog and am hoping that you can help me out with some ideas for redecorating/furnishing one of the rooms in our house. This room used to be our family room but after doing some remodeling we have changed around all of our first floor rooms and it will now be our dining room. It's a large room so we would also like to have a cozy conversation area at one side of the room. We only have one piece of furniture for the room at this point - our 42" x 108" dining table that we got a great deal on when a local Drexel Heritage store went out of business. How great to have such a large dining room. We are also considering buying two Kensington leather loveseats that are currently on sale at Restoration Hardware. I love that piece. I've come up with a tentative room layout that I attached to the e-mail. I also attached some pictures of the room but the dining table is the only thing that belongs in it (the other furniture is from other rooms of our house that we moved in for a recent party and the window treatments also go elsewhere). We are going for a bit of a Tuscan feel but not completely Old World traditional. I love earth tones but don't want the room to get too dark by bringing in too much dark furniture/dark colors. I was thinking about bringing in some pattern by having the two chairs in the seating area be upholstered chairs and also having upholstered end chairs at the dining table. We'd like to have leather side chairs for the table since we have young kids and actually use our dining room fairly often. I would put leather on the sitting side of the chairs and a pattern on the back side of the chairs. This is a large area of the room- and more pattern would add a lot. Here are some of the questions that I have:
Do you have any recommendations for a buffet/sideboard that would go with our dining room table?
Should we center the dining room table on the short wall (the one with the windows) or move it off-center to allow more space between the table and future buffet?
Do you have any recommendations for a chandelier?
Do you think we should use a rug under the dining room table and in the seating area or just one or the other?
Any recommendations for fabrics for the chairs or for window treatments?
Any ideas for paint color or wallpaper?
Beyond these specific questions, we would welcome any additional suggestions that you have for decorating the room.

Thanks so much!
Kris

Hi Kris,

I thought I would break up your questions over a couple of days and start just with the fabric today. Use different sized patterns as well as a variety of styles and of pattern. Notice the collection of fabrics I have for you include a small leaf pattern, a large floral crewel fabric, and a medium size paisley pattern. Notice too the variety of textures- the green is velvet, the floral is a crewel, the paisley is a cotton- and the cream is a leather.

So- for your checklist in fabric selecting for a single room:

Variety in:

1. pattern size
2. pattern motif
3. fabric texture

Uniformity in:

1. feel
2. color palletI am sure that I break these rules from time to time, but they are a good guildeline for the novice designer. And, since I made the rules, that gives me the option to break them- right? :)

Thanks,
Christine

The fabrics in today's post are from Lee Jofa.