Styling Dining Spaces For The Everyday - Studio McGee (2024)

02 March 2020 –

Open-concept floor plans may seem like they’ve been around forever, but it wasn’t too long ago that many large, new homes were built with closed, sectioned-off spaces to create as many rooms as possible. And now, although we’ve knocked down the walls and connected these spaces, it seems like there is still a question of how to style them.

The dining room is one of the most apparent areas of change in this space. Once created for formal, every-so-often events, they are now becoming places of gathering for the every day, and for activities beyond eating food. Whether or not your dining room is connected to your living and kitchen space, chances are you’ve had questions about how to style it when you’re not using it for meals. You’ll see great examples of how to style your dining table when not in use in our design project photoshoots and the shoots we do for each of our McGee & Co. collection launches. We love making them feel simple and laidback but not make it look like a forgotten piece of the room. Here are some of our favorite ways to style a dining table when not in use.

This fool-proof combo is ready for anything. Divide and conquer with simple stems, a low-maintenance statement bowl, and a beautiful vintage tray with everything you need for serving cookies or snacks. Move it to the side for game night, and re-style the pieces on the kitchen countertop, any dining space can pull this one off.

Simple and beautiful. We love pairing bowls with vases that can be dressed up with an arrangement or left alone. The key here is to pick pieces that can stand alone as well as can hold perishable items when you want to dress it up a bit.

Using two similar vases at different heights creates an eclectic styled look in minutes. For this look, we love using tall natural-looking stems to bring the outdoors in and create a curated yet effortless feeling to a more formal dining space.

Knotted napkins, a wild arrangement, and a batter bowl for fruit make for easy gatherings and a lived-in look. Cascading grapes are not required but strongly recommended.

Candles of any kind work well in your dining table styling because they look pretty unlit as well as spaced out a bit and lit during an evening meal. We particularly love the look that taper candles give, often providing some nice height to a dining table vignette.

We love this look! It’s so eclectic and gathered. The trick here is to not have too many contrasting colors or styles. Stick to one theme, whether that be three or four weathered grey pots or red ones of different shapes and styles.