If you’re lucky enough to be able to hire an interior decorator, you’ll go through the design process together and when it’s done you’ll have a beautiful room (or entire house) completely pulled together, all at once. I’m not that lucky.
Mike and I change décor like some people change their cell phones; we’re forever trading up. And with each new fabulous piece that enters our lives, we discover that—yet again—the rest of the room has to change in order to keep up.
Our dining room is perhaps the most extreme example. I wish I had a picture of the sweet, little, mahogany table and chairs we started with but alas, the set was sold on Craigslist before Santa brought the digital camera. We needed a larger table with more chairs for entertaining and although we didn’t LOVE them, we found a big glass and steel indoor/outdoor table on sale at Pottery Barn (not shown), and a set of eight extremely cheap Umbra Oh Chairs at Chair Source. So we went for it, knowing full well that sooner or later, we’d trade up.
Turned out it was sooner. Within six months we found a gorgeous 1970s chrome and black glass table on CL for $150. Then we scored some beautiful, 70s chrome chairs (also on Craigslist, four for $50) and had them recovered in bronze velvet on sale for $8 per yard at Designer Fabrics. Of course, the new dining set required a new colour scheme and so we painted the room for a third time (Farrow & Ball’s Ointment Pink to Biscuit).
And as much as we loved that table, we just couldn’t resist the custom-made, brass and marble showstopper we found a year later on Craigslist. The seller was moving to Budapest and didn’t want to ship something so heavy; she paid $4,000 for it and sold it to us for $300. And so the room changed again. Now, you may prefer the hard, masculine look of the black table but at 66″ x 36″ it took up a lot of real estate. The 48″ diameter of the new table seats six comfortably and makes the small room (10’ 10” x 10’ 2”) feel much more spacious.
Our dining room has been painted six times in three years. It’s ridiculous, we know. And because we’re Farrow & Ball snobs, that’s about $500 we could have put toward the cost of an interior designer who would have saved us from ourselves. But then we’d have missed out on all the fun and fantasy that went into creating what is finally, our ultimate dining room. Our home is our design laboratory and the best way to learn is by doing. We’ve learned a lot!
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