Dining Room Picture Ideas

Eclectic

• An eclectic dining room offers plenty of opportunity for experimentation and integrating old treasures with new finds. Try a large electric waterfall picture, such as the kind you find in some Chinese restaurants, on one wall, with a mosaic of your own landscape shots on the opposite wall, illuminated from above by track lighting. If you have a favorite ingredient, devote your dining room pictures to it: apples in every incarnation, from strange, thrift-store folk art, to a needlepoint your grandmother made, to a Lite-Brite apple image make the room feel happy and alive.

Elegant

• An elegant dining room may be austere, employing tones of white, brown, black and gray to achieve a calm, restrained look suitable for showcasing gourmet food and allowing guests to bask in style. Pictures can be ultra-modern, such as prints made by contemporary abstract artists who limit themselves to a narrow color range, or antique-oriented, with portraits handed down for generations.

Country

• Country dining rooms feel inviting when they are filled with paintings or prints of scenes from rural life. Choose botanical images in a garden-oriented home; go with oil paintings of large landscapes to feel as if you are living in a picturesque escape at every meal. Drawings or photographs of animals can be playful and festive or hunter-like and masculine, depending on the style of the pictures; choose rustic, natural-finished wooden frames to enhance the frontier feeling or wood painted in red, white or green for a country-modern look.

Contemporary

• For a contemporary look, enlarge portraits of family members with a computer scanner. Make them all the same size, cropping them into a square shape. Then change the colors so that each photograph contains only two colors. Green and white looks fresh; red and blue feels stimulating; black and white suits a multitude of decors. Try this with non-family images, or text, to create a cool, artistic-feeling dining room.