Not sitting down to a formal dinner as much as you used to? You’re not alone. In fact, casual dining is a growing trend in dining room furniture these days.
Casual dining doesn’t mean you don’t cook up a storm or don’t have friends over for beef bourguignon. It just means you don’t get worked up over it. You’re also perfectly ok dispensing with fancy china. In fact, you may or may not own any.
If a more casual lifestyle sounds right for you, but you’re not ready to give up a little sophistication at mealtime, it is possible to bridge the two! Along with choosing the right new dining room collection like Legends by Hooker Furniture, and a few simple tips below, you can perfectly blend rustic, refined and relaxed.
Legends Dining Collection
• Choose a style of furniture that doesn’t fit just one style category. Casually elegant dining rooms are usually a little chameleon. Furniture is simple and transitional rather than too tightly boxed into contemporary, casual or classic style descriptions. The ideal furniture for a casually elegant room, in fact, can take on different moods just by changing accents and colors.
• Add Asian-inspired details; including a slightly rustic or organic wood texture, wood chairs and stools, rustic iron hardware, textured placemats, nubby rugs and simple drum-shaped lamps instead of fancy chandeliers. With its blend of organic and sophisticated ideas, collections with Asian influences like Legends have a relaxed zen quality.
• Choose a solid wood table top (or one that looks like it is)! Make a handsome dining room table top the focal point of the room, then show it off by using textured placemats instead of a tablecloth. A planked texture, slightly distressed finish, chunky proportions or worn edges add to the look of solid wood. (Hooker Furniture’s designers apparently spent quite some time perfectly simulating a solid wood table top for their Legends collection! By integrating four different wood species into a narrow planked veneer, they achieved the look of solid wood without the warping and splitting that tend to plague solid wood furniture… and without the higher price tag).
• Mix dining chair styles around the dining room table. Casual living today means relaxing the rules about ‘matching’ everything in a room, including the chairs. But avoid getting too eclectic with too many chair styles used together or the room will lose its elegance. The Legend’s rake-back chair, with its simple schoolhouse design complements the Legend’s Cheetz Copper chair, with its cheetah-like fabric print. But not to worry; the small scale of this animal print adds more texture than pattern. So it won’t have you becoming the victim of an over-the-top animal print fashion craze!
Legends is one of the dining groups featured in Hooker’s National Factory-Authorized Dining Furniture Sale-Get Ready for the Holidays happening now. You can even enter to win a dual-function TV/dining console that will help integrate you family’s meal and unwinding time.
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