Home Sweet Home: Formal Dining Room Inspiration and Plans

One of the must-haves in our new house is one that I think seems to be falling out of favor with most prospective home-buyers: a formal dining room.  But, I like the idea of a place to have extra-special meals on our good china - birthdays, anniversaries, Christmas, Thanksgiving, Tuesday... and it's important to us that our house is inviting and allows us to host big family and friend events.  So, a formal dining room was a must.  

Our new house has a nice, big dining room that the previous owners used as a sitting room, we think.  

We BY NO MEANS hate the walls in here.  They've been sponge-painted beautifully, but we don't think that the little bit of dining room furniture we have will work with them.  Too Halloween-y :-)

We bought this china cabinet a few years ago, mostly for storage and to display some of our china.  We are planning on using the china pattern as the major inspiration for the room.  This cabinet holds MASS amounts of stuff - at one point, I had all of our china and table linens, as well as all of my bakeware (which is a considerable collection, haha!) in it, easily.  It's no longer available at Value City Furniture, but we are very pleased with its quality and price, and with the service we got there, so we'd recommend them for anything you may be looking for!

This is our china pattern, around which we plan to decorate.  It is Royal Doulton's "Mystique," which as been retired since I was 4. :-)  We got it for a GREAT price from a friend's consignment and decor shop (where I can't wait to go shopping for the new house)!!  The newspapers in was packed in were from 1994, which I thought was pretty neat.

So basically, we are looking for simple black furniture with clean lines to coordinate with our china cabinet.  We found a set we like (it's in the collage... we'd probably do black all over instead of the wood top, and maybe a cream or grey cushion instead of the brown).  Planning on sticking with the soft neutral carpet... for now.  Maybe someday, a long way away, we'll do hardwood or a laminate that looks pretty doggone close :-)  We want to paint the bottom half of the walls a soft grey (with the slightest hint of purple undertones), and the tops soft white, with a white chair rail. 

Sherwin Williams "Wishful Blue" is about what I'm envisioning... but I've been trying for an hour to get it to show up right here.  The best I can do is add it as the background of my inspiration collage.  For some reason, THAT shows up correctly, but it doesn't show up if I save it as an image from Sherwin Williams's site! :-\

I'm not certain what we'll do about curtains.  I may have to just shop and see what strikes my fancy :-)  I'd love to do a medium grey, with maybe some silver in it?  But I don't want to darken the room too much, and I'm afraid that those curtains with black furniture would be too dark.  A very greyed-out purple might be pretty, or even white (but ugh, keeping THAT clean!).  We'll see :-)

The chandelier will be changing!  I might attempt to paint it like a brushed silver, or I may do the smart thing and just buy a new one ;-) If we get a new one, I'd like something pretty basic, not too ornate... but with the option to get pretty bright if we're doing something that requires more light... like homework or card games or something.  :-)

So... here's an inspiration collage with all these elements included.  Can you tell I'm a little bit on the excited side? Please pray that the government shutdown doesn't delay our closing too much!