Whether you eat in it frequently or only use it for holiday meals, the dining room is one of the most important places in the home. It’s where you and your family gathers to sit down, enjoy a meal and connect with one another.
Creating the layout for your dining room is pretty easy. You find a nice table, add some matching chairs, keep some candles on hand make sure that the lighting is comfortable enough to spend a few hours in.
Where most people get stumped, however, is their dining room wall decor. What’s the best way to decorate your dining room walls? Do you hang pictures like you would in the living room? Add shelves to display family memorabilia?
Fortunately, there are no rules when it comes to adorning your room. However, we’ve outlined a how-to guide (and shared some images of our favorite dining rooms) to help you get started.
Below, I share six decorating secrets to give your dining room a chic, refined look.
1. Compliment Your Furniture 
This one might sound obvious, but your dining room’s wall decorations should go well with the rest of your furniture. If you’ve got a cherry-stained table with matching chairs, look around for some complementary pieces of wall art. If your chairs are upholstered with a patterned fabric, see if you find some decorations that highlight the various colors in the pattern.
Ultimately, you want your dining room’s theme to be unified and cohesive, creating an environment that feels nice to spend time in.
We love the way that this large wooden clock leaves room for the grey wall to show through, complimenting both the color of the wooden table and the upholstery of the chairs as well as the pattern on the carpet.
2. Hang Some Signage 
Some of the quaintest dining room wall decorations are wooden text cutouts. Usually written in casual script, like the kind you’d find on your mother’s grocery list, there’s something about these signs that make them perfect for the room where you eat. Adorned with words like “gather” or “family”, they’ll provide a reminder of what the dining room is all about.
When combined with some found objects like plant pots or window blinds, as seen below, they help to create a cutesy, calming aesthetic that’s both traditional and contemporary.
3. Show Off a Collection 
The dining room is a great place to show off your family heirlooms and any unique objects you may have collected over your life. Have an old set of plates that your grandmother gave you but don’t want to eat off them? Hang them on the wall! What about those illustrations you’ve been tearing out of cookbooks for years? Put some frames on them and use them as decor!
There are all types of hanging devices and shelving units designed specifically for displaying collections. If you have an archive of objects that you think would make great wall decor, you should find one that you like.
4. Go Green 
These days, it’s fairly common to repurposed food containers doubling as wall decor. Old wine bottles, beer bottles, and mason jars, in particular, can easily be turned into DIY wall art. When mounted on a piece of up-cycled wood and used to hold flowers, these containers help to create a casual, vintage feel in your dining room.
There’s an endless amount of DIY tutorials that can help you create your own wall pieces for very little money. If you’d prefer to have yours crafted by a professional artisan, though, there’s no shortage of handcrafted wall decorations on sites like Etsy.
5. Light and more light 
Many homeowners opt to hang a chandelier above their dining room table for lighting. However, that’s not everyone’s style. If you’re going for a chic vintage feel, you may want to consider hanging some rustic-looking sconces on your wall. There are plenty of DIY sconces to be found on all of your favorite websites.
The nice thing about using sconces as wall decor in your dining room is that they’re both aesthetic and functional. You can place electric tea lights in them if you’re worried about the flames or use real candles if you want authentic candlelight.
6. Shelves are a must 
Ask any interior designer the best way to decorate when you’re working with a small space and they’ll probably say one word: shelves. The nice thing about shelving, particularly in the dining room, is that you can use it for both storage and aesthetic purposes. Those dishes that you LOVE but hardly ever use will look great as wall decorations and be readily available for use (if you ever get around to that).
Even better, shelves come in every size so you can arrange them on the walls of your dining room however you’d like. We recommend that you hang them around other pieces of wall art to create a super stylish composition along your dining room wall.