In most cases, dining rooms start with the table. You decide on a dining table, then on dining chairs, maybe on the rug. And finally end up looking up at the blank walls wondering what should go there. At this point, most dining rooms stay unfinished, being functional but not complete.
The walls of your dining room play a greater role than you think. In most cases, they frame all your meals and gatherings, making your dining room what it is. To put it simply, if you fail to get them right or leave them empty. You’ve made one of the easiest and most common mistakes in home interior design.
Here are twenty actual ideas that will help you decorate your dining room walls successfully. Each of these ideas is worth trying out. The only thing left to do is find the most suitable one for your room.
Start with Symmetry It Never Goes Out of Style
The most obvious way to create the illusion of design rather than happenstance. When decorating the walls of your dining room is to use symmetry. Rather than hanging just one large piece of artwork, hang two pieces of artwork on each side of the light fixture or chandelier. The effect will be instantly satisfying.
Wake and Loom did this wonderfully with their Santa Monica Bungalow design. Two panels on either side of the light fixture created an entire dining room that felt thoughtful. The same result can be created using two photographs or posters with colors or sizes that complement each other.
The best thing about symmetry is that it does not need expensive items to create a great effect. Using two inexpensive pictures, placing them at the same level on either side of a focal point will always look better than placing a larger picture off center. This should be your starting point if you are unsure how to go about it.
Gallery Walls The Most Versatile Dining Room Wall Solution
A gallery wall is the most versatile option for wall decoration in a dining room since it goes well with almost any grouping of artwork, any sized wall, and any style of design as long as two principles are followed theming and color.
Theming ensures a cohesive look for a gallery wall and prevents it from turning into an eclectic mess. Choose your theme whether it be portraits, botanical artwork, geometric shapes, or travel photos and stick to it. Each item may differ in terms of size and artistic approach, but they all should revolve around one common theme.
Color serves as the best unifying element. In the West Village Duplex project designed by Pippa Lee, she used pastel colors to unify an eclectic gallery wall of artwork with no apparent connections between each other. Each item had its own color palette which tied the entire arrangement together.
Tonal Neutrality
Tonal neutrality, on the other hand, is the opposite of color harmony. The combination of sketches, watercolors, and little paintings all in the same shades of brown, cream, and sienna produces an elegant and calm display when arranged in an asymmetrical gallery wall on a wall in the dining room of a Manhattan apartment designed by interior designer Jae Joo, which combined rustic furniture with an industrial setting and neutral-toned gallery.
The easiest way to create this gallery wall would be to use the technique of Leanne Ford in her works done with Restored by the Fords where a single metallic clip on the wall allows changing posters and prints depending on the season or inspirational quotes.
Mirrors, Metallic Pieces, and Reflective Wall Decor
The other option would be the golden framed mirror which is arguably the best choice for a wall in the dining room. It is timeless, can be placed above a long buffet table, or behind the main dining chair and brings something that no other piece of wall art can it bounces light back into the room.
The obstacle is price. Actual antique ornate mirrors are expensive. The Gleaming Primrose Mirror from Anthropologie at $498 and up solved this problem for a generation of decorators. HGTV hosts from Jillian Harris to Joanna Gaines both used it in their spaces a modern-day heirloom that reads like the real thing at a fraction of the cost.
Wall Of Antique
For an item that is a little more textured and three dimensional than a normal mirror, the heirloom silver concept really shines through. Joni Spear hung a wall of antique silver tea trays in her charcoal dining room, and the effect is incredibly chic more refined than a normal china wall filled with antique saucers and plates, which can veer into cottage core or shabby chic territory if overdone. Silver isn’t even necessary for this effect. Nickel-plated trays from the dollar store provide the exact same reflection at an almost nonexistent price.
The same reflective qualities are true of brass planters that are mounted as wall sconces. Terrain’s brass and glass bowl wall planters at $38 are decorative sconces that happen to hold succulents and air plants – living art and reflective metal all in one.
Texture Based Wall Decor Baskets, Textiles, and Living Art
A flat artwork is not your only choice when decorating a dining room wall. Textures and three-dimensional wall art pieces give more depth to the décor than flat photographs or prints ever will, particularly when they complement dining rooms with warm, natural, organic elements already incorporated in the furniture and tableware.
Woven baskets serve as the easiest starting point for such wall décor. Hanging several handwoven baskets on a wall gives more texture than any flat picture while maintaining its warmth and organicity. When you have a sisal or jute rug in the dining room, the woven baskets create a continuity of the material theme. A ready to hang wall art set of four handwoven baskets by Pottery Barn costs $499, but you can create a similar composition purchasing individual baskets in thrift stores at much lower prices.
Complex Type Of Fabric Art
A more complex type of fabric art also operates under this idea, although it involves some additional construction work. Textiles will always be preferable to photos, but tapestries and other woven wall art pieces are simply not suitable for use in a well-designed space and will make it look like a college dormitory. The trick is to stretch the textile across a canvas frame using a staple gun. It looks extremely stylish and the effort required is minimal.
The West Elm’s Modern Sprout Landscape Growframe at $239 is even better than this. Unlike framed fabric, it contains live plants such as succulents and small ferns in a framed wall unit that comes in white, matte black, and slate blue finishes. It is literally a framed garden that represents live art and changes with the season.
Formal, Traditional, and Statement-Making Approaches
When it comes to designing a dining room that is formal and classic in style, there is no other element that can be more formal and grand than an oil painting. Antique oil paintings tend to be costly, but one can get the same effect by getting an excellent reproduction of a famous painting and putting it in a frame. In one interior design project for a Valencia Corridor house’s dining room, designer Antonio Martins combined a large oil painting with an attractive chandelier, creating a formal yet eclectic space.
Custom neon signage is the other end of the spectrum and can be equally effective. Interior designer Lauren Svenstrup incorporated a custom neon sign into an eclectic dining room to create something unique and funky that includes your own personal initial, last name, or word that inspires you created from LED wiring attached to an acrylic backing. It may not be for every dining room, but when it works, it will stop you in your tracks.
A contemporary mural painted right onto the wall falls somewhere in between. Kerra Michele Huerta painted a hexagon display on the dining room wall in her Washington DC rowhouse. This created a bold accent wall that needed no frame, no mounting hardware, and no additional wall art. If renting, removable wall decals can produce a geometric or pattern design with none of the commitment.
Personal, Meaningful, and Unexpected Ideas
Among the best options for dining room wall decoration are those where the wall is used as an expression of the people who live in the home, not just as a neutral background for good taste.
One option is family portraits. Portraits of babies, families, and pets are great for enlarging, framing, and displaying as wall art. Creating a wall of family pictures using one style of frame, either all black frames or all white frames, gives a special warmth and significance to the room that cannot be achieved by any purchased artwork.
In addition to photography, the concept can be expanded to include framed sheet music. Photography is the immediate choice for making the room personal, but memorabilia with significant meaning is always more engaging. Dried flowers, handwritten recipes, sheet music of important songs these are things that hold unique meaning. By framing and hanging such items thoughtfully, the dining room wall becomes personal history.
Curated vintage shelving sits at the intersection of storage and wall decor. Katherine Carter Design demonstrated this in a Pacific Palisades project a narrow niche lined with mismatched teacups clustered together and a row of green vintage glass bottles functioning as both storage and display. Some say open shelving is messy. The answer to that criticism is grouping: putting similar items together makes even mismatched collections look tidy and intentional.
Calligraphy And Kraft Paper Idea
The calligraphy and kraft paper idea from Terrain’s mounted roll at $58 offers a completely different kind of personalization a rotating wall surface where the content changes as often as the occasion demands. A dinner party menu, a seasonal greeting, a family quote. The wall becomes a living document rather than a permanent fixture.
For a dining space that is open concept or shared with the kitchen where the table is as likely to be used for homework and working from home as for meals a stylish mega calendar used as functional art makes the wall decor serve double duty as a command center. The design principle is the same as it is everywhere else: everything on the wall should earn its place, either visually, functionally, or both.
Conclusion
A dining room wall does not have to be complex. It has to be planned. Whether it is a set of symmetrical prints around a chandelier, a coherent gallery wall based on color or tone, a gold-framed mirror above the buffet table, a bunch of woven baskets for some natural elements, a collection of antique silver tea trays reflecting candle light, or even just a few family portrait pictures in frames, the common thing they have is that they have been done with purpose.
These twenty dining room wall ideas range from very basic to expensive, from very luxurious to modern, and from traditional dining rooms to open concept dining area corners of studio apartments. None of them need a big budget or a professional designer. They just need something else: a purpose, and a dedication to accomplish it.
