Hang a cheerful contemporary mosaic instead of a family portrait in the dining room.
Dining room pictures can create a warm, appetizing atmosphere that makes your guests want to linger over good food and conversation long into the night. Be creative with your dining room picture choices to enhance the personalized mood of your home and emphasize elements of eclectic, elegant, country or contemporary design.
Eclectic
An eclectic dining room offers plenty of opportunity for experimentation and integrating old treasures with new finds. Try a large electric waterfall picture, such as the kind you find in some Chinese restaurants, on one wall, with a mosaic of your own landscape shots on the opposite wall, illuminated from above by track lighting. If you have a favorite ingredient, devote your dining room pictures to it: apples in every incarnation, from strange, thrift-store folk art, to a needlepoint your grandmother made, to a Lite-Brite apple image make the room feel happy and alive.
Elegant
An elegant dining room may be austere, employing tones of white, brown, black and gray to achieve a calm, restrained look suitable for showcasing gourmet food and allowing guests to bask in style. Pictures can be ultra-modern, such as prints made by contemporary abstract artists who limit themselves to a narrow color range, or antique-oriented, with portraits handed down for generations.
Country
Country dining rooms feel inviting when they are filled with paintings or prints of scenes from rural life. Choose botanical images in a garden-oriented home; go with oil paintings of large landscapes to feel as if you are living in a picturesque escape at every meal. Drawings or photographs of animals can be playful and festive or hunter-like and masculine, depending on the style of the pictures; choose rustic, natural-finished wooden frames to enhance the frontier feeling or wood painted in red, white or green for a country-modern look.
Contemporary
For a contemporary look, enlarge portraits of family members with a computer scanner. Make them all the same size, cropping them into a square shape. Then change the colors so that each photograph contains only two colors. Green and white looks fresh; red and blue feels stimulating; black and white suits a multitude of decors. Try this with non-family images, or text, to create a cool, artistic-feeling dining room.
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