Room by Room: Dining Room
Oh, the everyday, ordinary magic we can behold and harness in the dining room. Gathering. The word for the dining room is gathering. The whole point of this room is simply that: to gather. Feeding for the feeders, conversing for the conversationalist, and tending for those who need attention. All this and more happens in the dining room.
Most homes come with a formal dining room, though I grew up with homes that had a kitchen table basically in the extended kitchen and no dining room. Some houses have a formal dining room in a whole other space away from the kitchen along with an informal kitchen eating space. For the sake of this conversation, let’s agree that by dining room we mean the place our biggest tables sit and around which we eat the majority of our meals.
Function: The Dining Room is the home of the table and chairs which facilitates the feeding of people.
· The Table: Have you ever considered that this entire space is dedicated to housing one piece of furniture? That’s should make us sit up and take notice. Why? What is the significance of this one furnishing? This is where we eat. This is where our people, both family and friends, gather to share a meal, and we’ve talked enough about meals to know the power of eating and the power of feeding. If the kitchen is prized for what it produces, the table should be equally prized for what it upholds: feeding and eating.
· Generational: Does any object in the home hold such generational memories as the table? Our family table is a massive oak table made to hold 12-plus people. It lives at my sister’s house where it has lived for about 20 years now and barely holds all of us grownups when we gather, but we squeeze in somehow. It has borne the teeth marks of our beloved family dog, Hobbes, nail polish, accidental off-paper marks, dribbled wax, and more. It tells the family story. It still tells the family story for a new generation. Another famous table in our family is the one on which my great-grandmother performed an emergency appendectomy on the man who would become my great-grandfather. How’s that for history? The kitchen/dining room table is one of the most important pieces of furniture in our homes.
· Eating: The main point of the room and this piece of furniture is eating. Our tables aren’t doing their jobs if no one can eat on them. Unlike the living room (a more casual place), eating at the table is more formal, or more purposed. We’re not behaving formally or eating formally, but the food and the talking belong here. (It’s like the difference between formal and informal education.) This is the time and place for eating, drinking, and sharing. It is generally a scheduled intentional gathering. For most families, this formal togetherness happens at dinnertime, but that’s not a necessity. For years, I tried to have a family dinner at the table every night and it was always awful. I was always brain-fogged and fatigued and only eager for the day to be over already. Breakfast is our formal eating and talking time. The goal is to use the table and space to create a safe space where truth is spoken in love—from silly conversations to philosophy and art to dreams to decisions. The dining room is that space and we should use it for that work. Much family culture is established and reinforced around the table in this room.
· Working: Typically, being the largest, flattest surface other than the floor itself, the table—and thus the dining room—often does double duty as a workspace. It serves as a communal desk for homework, budget work, crafts and projects, art and hobbies. They all often find themselves a spot to sit on the table. It’s very important to manage this well. My dining room table is centrally located in my home. The calendar, to-do lists, menu, and my computer all live on the table during the week because from this vantage I can see most of my home. Parts of our current detox protocols and my husband’s daily supplements also grace the table along with my crocheting and mending kit. I try to corral everything onto trays or calm piles at the end of the day so breakfast can be had the next morning. I also put as much of that away as possible on Saturday to signal the close of the week. This is a necessary space that should be utilized every day. We just need to make sure it is regularly tidied so that all that work isn’t the only thing on the table or we will miss the real use of gathering and feeding.
Beauty: The beauty of this room is paramount because we can’t gather and feed people well, we can’t tend, with ugliness. No woman since Eve has been content with ugliness. One of the greatest things we bring to a home is a sense of beauty. Go all out on this space.
· Clean and Orderly: I will say it a thousand times, and keep saying it: the biggest way we can keep beauty in our homes is to keep them clean and orderly. If our tables and floors are covered in food and sticky fingerprints, it doesn’t matter how beautiful our centerpieces or table settings are. The starting point is just keeping this space clean. If the space isn’t orderly, we can pile on the flowers, but no one will be able to see them. Focusing here will get us further than all the other things together.
· Lighting: The wonder of lighting in this room is its diversity. From bright light for the work to the soft light of romantic candles, this room wants it all. This can be achieved through dimmers, well-placed windows, and of course, actual candles. Don’t reserve candles for only special occasions or dinner dates. Use them with your kids, friends, high tea to PBJs. Candles elevate everything, plus they quickly show you which of your children/guests are closet pyros. Keep a close eye on those ones.
· Centerpieces: These eye-catching displays are the dining room's welcome mats. They draw in the people. They can be anything from fresh flowers from the garden to a tray holding salt and pepper, butter and napkins. Watch the height. Nothing is more annoying than trying to talk around a centerpiece. Maximalist or minimalist, foraged or store-bought, this is a perfect place to put that creativity to work. It’s also easily changed, so we can refresh it seasonally or even weekly.
· Table settings: Another area of creativity is the table settings. Pinterest is full of beautiful ways you can set your table for all occasions. Some of us are paper plates and paper napkins, some of us want placemats, and some of us like a more formal, cloth napkin layout for our meals. Many meals are also the times we take supplements or manage other duties, so let’s not get married to our table settings. They work for us, not us for them. They also can take a fair amount of time and are easily destroyed. Consider having a ‘family’ table setting and a more formal table setting. Either way, the goal is to welcome our people of all ages to the table to refresh their bodies and their souls with food and conversation. That’s our goal, now let’s have fun!
· Rugs: I’ve always loathed having a rug under my dining room table because it seems like a guaranteed mess in the making. Yes, let's put a woven or hairy object under the place we eat soups, salads, spaghetti, and more. (Sarcasm). But, alas, I also have had to place a rug under part of my table because the chairs were wearing out the floor. This is a high-traffic area. Lots of chairs being moved around, lots of sitting and standing, lots of entering and leaving. A rug under the table can preserve our floors and demarcate the table and the space. We just need to be smart about what kind of rug we have under the table if we end up needing one. If you don’t need one, enjoy the sanity that is your life.
· Table and Chairs: 90% of the beauty of this room comes from the table and chairs themselves. This is another piece of furniture that is worth saving up for and investing in. Not only because it is a memory holder, but also because it sets the tone of this room. We should absolutely accept hand-me-downs while we’re thinking about what kind of table we want. Watch and keep in mind family size, possibilities of growth, and how often people come over. Take into account how easy the table and chairs will be to keep clean. And for all the love of everything, let’s make sure we love the table and chairs because, Lord willing, we will be looking at them for a very long time. Choose functionality and beauty every time!
From a kitchen table utilized by everyone in the family to a formal dining room never touched unless guests are over, the tables in our homes and the rooms that house them are an important part of tending our hearths. They function as workspaces, but more importantly as gathering spaces. When we look at our dining areas, we need to assess our management by how well they’re serving to gather people in. Are they a mess? Is work piled all over them? Are they crumb ridden? Can our families happily pull up a chair to enjoy a meal we made in our beloved kitchens? The state of our dining room directly affects the culture and communication in our homes. True safe spaces don’t belong out in the world. They belong in the home, centered around truth, and they’re most often found around the family table sharing a family meal. We all need to take the table and this room seriously. We all need to delight in harnessing the power of this space and clothe it with beauty.
