Room Tour: The Dining Room

If you live in a house for any length of time you become aware of certain views - inside and out - that you grow to love. One of my favourite in this house is the view from the kitchen into the dining room. Both rooms are always flooded with light - particularly in the morning - and they've become my favorite part of the house, especially during the summer months when all the doors are wide open.

The door between the rooms was already removed, creating this doorway opening which looks directly onto the sideboard and the gallery wall I've hung above it. Every time I make a cup of tea or go to the sink, I see this.

These pictures form our family wall, a muddled assortment of memories and souvenirs and they all hold meaning for me. There are pictures the children have drawn, prints we've brought back from holidays (Copenhagen, Cornwall), a print I had made for John for our tenth wedding anniversary, my embroidered Cornwall holiday diary, a postcard from a dear friend. The display is not finished and will be added to as time goes on, and the top of the sideboard provides a nice surface to display things which change with the seasons.

Above the gallery wall hangs our new light shade.

Now, I have to be honest - I had a bit of a wobble when it first went up. I wasn't sure if I liked it after all. (I kept this to myself and didn't tell my Dad who spent an hour cursing the light as he fitted it for me.) It's such a statement, and such an investment piece too. But you'll be relieved to know it grows on me more and more each day and now I completely adore it. It's not to everyone's taste, I know, but we thought that this fabulous 1960s house (and I still pinch myself that we live here) with it's high, sloping, wood paneled ceilings deserved something suitably retro and bold. 

I especially like the way the shape of the shade echoes that of the round table below, and my four seasonal embroideries hung on the wall by the door. We used to have a very large, rectangular table in our old house but we knew that we would really struggle to ever find a house with a dining room big enough to hold it. So, we part exchanged it with some good friends of ours just before we moved. It now sits in their (enormous) dining room and we have their original 1960s G-Plan dining table. It is the most perfect table for this house and this room. Just big enough for the four of us day to day, it extends to fit eight (at a push) when we have guests, and I love the contrast of the warm wood against the white chairs.

And that brings me to my other favourite part of this room - the bookcase holding all my cookery books. It makes perfect sense to me that they are here not in the living room with the rest of the books, because it's here that I sit and read them. Eventually, I would like to get rid of that bookcase and build some floating white shelves directly onto the asymmetrical chimney breast (on the other side of this wall is the fireplace in the living room), changing the width of the shelves so that they are in line with the angle of the wall. 

One of my other favourite lines of sight in this house is from the living room door through the dining room to the garden. The patio doors are open most of the time and I like the way the light bounces off the prints and pictures on the wall.

You can see that this isn't a large room at all, but the high ceilings, big window and natural light trick you and make it feel more than the sum of it's parts. Do you have any favourite views or sight lines in your home?

While I'm talking about interiors, something rather exciting and lovely happened recently. Have you heard of the Amara Interior Blog Awards? Well, someone apparently nominated me in the DIY & Crafts Category! (Mum, was it you?) Thank you, whoever it was. If you'd like to vote for me that would be brilliant and you can do that here. My expectations are low - it's an extremely popular category with some very professional, gorgeous looking blogs and I'm now slightly embarrassed by my holiday snap profile photograph complete with windbreak in the background - but how nice have been nominated.