One Room Challenge: Dining Room Design Reveal
Well hello there!
Thanks for stopping by, if you’re new here - via the One Room Challenge - my name is Johanna and I am a Designer and Architect living in Philadelphia. My husband and I moved in to our townhouse (built in the late 1800’s BTW) nearly 2 years ago and have been slowly transforming our “flipped” house into our own. Our home mixes in a lot of different styles, colors and textures - I don’t like to be pinned down or defined to just one style! If you’d like to learn more about me, head on over here. I am excited to share more about our home with you fine folks, so let’s dive in!
Spring 2019 ORC: Our Dining Room Design Reveal
Over the next 6 weeks I will be walking you through the transformation of our dining space! To give you some context of what we are working with here, our dining “room” is located on the first floor of our townhouse. It’s an open plan concept now, but it wasn’t always that way. I can’t talk about the design plan for our dining space without address some big modifications we made to the first floor of our home when we first moved in. So, here we go:
Our home was “flipped” before we moved in, but there were some FUNKY things happening with the floor plan. Like 2 separate staircases, one of which was eating up some prime real estate in our kitchen. The separate stairs, along with a weird closet under the original stair closed off each of the 3 spaces from one another - Kitchen, Dining & Living Room. I’ll share some of the original listing photos so you can get a feel for what I’m talkin’ about:
When we purchased the home, we knew we were going to move that stair so we can take back the space to our kitchen. The house sat on the market for a while so we used this as part of our negotiation to get the purchase price lower - freeing up some room in our budget to make these big changes. After we closed on our home, and before we moved in, we had the demo work done to move the basement stair. Of course, like most projects, we ran into some unforeseen conditions.
The wall at the back of the closet you seeing in the dining room photo? It was load bearing.
The joists of the second floor did not span the full width of the house. We paused construction and waited until we moved in and could find a structural engineer to help us solve our problems.
^^ This was our real life for several months - May to July of 2017 to be exact.
Eventually, we figured out a way to move forward with the help of some great engineers & contractors. We got the stair moved, opened up the space and fell in LOVE with how open it felt. To keep costs down, Mark and I (with the help of our incredible friends and family) had decided we would do all the finish work ourselves. Drywall, Spackling, Sanding, Painting. Trim. New cabinets, Shelving. EVERYTHING but the rough carpentry. I don’t want to blab on about all the time it took us to do those things, so we are just going to fast forward nearly 2 years. To present day in the Adamiak house:
Haven’t run away from me yet? PHEW.
Let’s talk design, you’re here for the pretty pictures anyways, right?
These are some initial inspo’ photos (click the photo to follow the link to the original sources) that I gathered that caught a similar mood to what we are planning. Modern, Mid Century Modern, and Industrial blend of styles. If you haven’t caught on yet, I am a bit of a plant fanatic (addict??) and I really wanted to introduce some greenery to soften the starkness of the modern elements in the space.
We have established that we have an open floor plan, so this dining space needs to blend the kitchen and living room spaces together. While I love the rich teal of the photos above, our space needed to be a bit more neutral. It’s the mediator between the other two spaces, both of which have their own colorful flairs & features.
So, the design plan (!!!):
Hello live green feature wall - I love you and can’t wait to make you real!! What is MOST IMPRESSIVE about this feature wall is how little effort it took to convince Mark that we should do it. We had this large wall as a backdrop to our space and I really wanted to make this some sort of accent or feature. As I mentioned above, adding some plants is a great way to soften the more stark, modern elements of the space. This area is quite a ways away from natural lighting, so we plan to hang two grow light pendants above so these plant babies can get all the glorious light they need to grow!
To speak more to the rest of the design, the space is nearly square, so I was set on bringing in a round table. This one is a pedestal and expands to an oval, which is great because we love to host our friends and family! I had VERY specific criteria for the table, ROUND, EXPANDS, PEDESTAL (I can pull up an extra chair when it’s not expanded & there is no leg interference) DARK, & MODERN. I’m not shouting, it’s just for emphasis, OK? But seriously, there are not a lot of options when you get down to searching for *my perfect table. There were so many traditional pedestal tables, or bright white tables so I sifted through thousands of tables on the internet and found this beauty!
Another thing I was nearly certain on was introducing dark chairs. In the design of this space Mark and I constantly were asking what could we “do less” with. There is a lot going on in our first floor, so we didn’t necessarily need this space to be a bold feature. The theme of this space is it is the mediator and we already have a variety of wood tones from the butcher block, wood floors and walnut shelving/trim. Lighter chairs were going to create far too much contrast. These black modern chairs met the criteria I needed, short lead time, modern, dark. Superb price point, too!
Moving to the opposite side of the room:
^^Full Disclosure: We are still a bit undecided about what to do on this side of the space, I’ll share with you our initial plan and would love some feedback/ideas in from you in the comments below!! We plan to go thrifting this weekend, and check out some salvage shops so this side may totally change if we get some new ideas.
Our initial idea here is to add a beverage cooler. We love to host and always wished that we added one when we did our kitchen expansion. In this design, we would build a custom “built-in” for the cooler to sit under and act as a bar area. While I love this idea, the cooler is going to stick out past the wall probably a good 6” to 8” which will shrink our dining space up a bit. We are also thinking of adding shelves above the bev cooler, ones that mimic the shelves we have in our living room.
Tell me your thoughts on this in the comments below folks, we are really unsure about this area now!!
Here is a quick floor plan of our space:
As you can see, we have some work cut out for us, but we are so excited to tackle this project and wrap up things we started nearly 2 years ago! Thanks for following along and reading all about our design plans for the space. I’d love to hear what you think of the design in the comments below. And please, if you have any ideas for the window wall I shared, send them my way!! Also, be sure to check back in next week to see the progress we have made on drywalling and spackling the stairs to the basement! We want to prioritize this finish work so we can get things lookin’ pretty.
Curious about the One Room Challenge? There are tons of talented designers and influencers taking part in this Spring’s ORC. Be sure to head here, to take a peek at some other room design reveals and follow along as we create some beautiful spaces!!
It is finally time to share our Dining Space! It’s been quite the experience to transform a space in our home over the course of 6 weeks. And by “quite the experience” I mean it was a ton of work, but dang it feels good now!