5 IDEAS: 5 Fantastic Dining Rooms with Chandeliers

As many of you who read my blog regularly know, I am a sucker for a good Dining Room with chandeliers. Whether it is Traditional or Modern style, it presents an opportunity for luxury that can be hard to find in other spaces around the house that are more utility driven. It can sometimes be hard to work out what style statement you want to make, which is why I created the Dining Room Style Quiz, which you may find helpful. When I am designing a Dining Room with chandeliers there are a lot of decisions to make from the Dining Table, chairs and table setting, but my favorite thing of all is the Chandelier, it always seems like that final touch, like a beautiful piece of jewelry. 

Here are 5 of my favorite Dining Rooms with Chandeliers from Traditional to modern style and Crystal to Papier Mache.

1. Vintage Luxury

A modern style dining room with a vintage chandelier from Lobmeyr in Austria as a counterpoint.

When I am designing a modern style home, filling it with modern pieces isn’t always the best approach. So when we created this home in Northern California we decided that what the dining room needed was a counterpoint and a sense of a collection that has grown over time. In this case the vintage piece by Lobmeyr, the 200 year old crystal lighting company from Austria was the perfect piece to do that. Deliberately under scaled, it draws you closer to see all the fine detail and the way the light passes through the crystal, creates a dynamic light show that gives the room a sense of life and movement.

2. Rustic versus Contemporary

This dining room combines a very rustic and cool feel and is accented with a contemporary chandelier by Ochre. The contrast creates a beautiful visual tension.

When we designed this ranch in the Carmel Valley, I wanted to create a home that definitely had a level of rusticity to it, but still had moments of more contemporary pieces too, so in the Dining Room we created a floor using vintage leather cowboy belts that gave a very rustic and cool feel to the room and then accented it with this contemporary chandelier by Ochre. I think that the contrast between the two ideas creates a beautiful visual tension and a room that is appropriate for the ranch but still with an air of sophistication.

3. Telling a Story

This San Francisco dining room tells the story of the city with a custom designed steel and glass dining table based on the Golden Gate Bridge and a vintage Sciolari chandelier that references the lights of the city sparkling through the mist.

Not all of my Dining Room designs are about counterpoint and contrast. This home in San Francisco, was about telling a story of the city, within the design of the open plan Living and Dining Room. The custom designed steel and glass dining table was based on the idea of the Golden Gate Bridge, a local landmark, and the vintage Sciolari chandelier is a reference to the lights of the city sparkling through the mist. Once again, when using a vintage piece or something like this with a lot of intricate detail, using a smaller than usual scale can be a technique that draws you in, which is, I think, a good idea for a room like this.

4. Artisanal

This Modern French Farmhouse dining room features a paper mâché chandelier that hangs like a cloud of mist over the table.

While in many rooms the chandelier is the major source of light, that is not always the case. Sometimes you can rely on downlights or wall sconces to provide the lighting, allowing you to find a chandelier that is really more like an art piece than a functional object. This was the case in this Modern French Farmhouse we designed. While shopping in the south of France we came across this fantastic artist who made lighting using Papier Mache and string lights. Immediately we fell in love with it’s quirky nature and brought it home to be the centerpiece of this dramatic room. It hangs almost like a cloud of mist over the dining table and is an always reliable conversation starter. Who doesn’t love a story that starts with “Well, I was shopping in the south of France…”

5. Traditional

This traditional dining room features a silver chandelier that keeps with the traditional design of the room.

This last Dining Room is one of my favorites. It is a much more traditional style home and for this one we wanted to stay within that style. So I selected a silver chandelier that gave the room a bit of a lift, but still felt very natural and in keeping with the home.