Here’s your nightmare: a house full of guests, seated around a typical dining room table. Beige walls, beige carpet. At first, everything seems to go fine. Conversation focuses on work, the kids, the food. After a while, though, the conversation starts to dwindle. By the main course, the majority of your guests are focused only on the food in front of them.
By dessert, everyone is utterly bored. By your next dinner party, all of your friends seem to be away on vacation, working late or washing their hair. Your communications start to become littered with a series of cheap, grade school excuses: “Isn’t this the fifth grandmother who’s died on you … this year?”
If this nightmare is starting to become a reality, consider that it is not just your conversational skills that need improvement. What lacks are interesting decorative items that trigger conversation and make for fabulous dinner parties. This is a guarantee: with a few interesting interior features, your guests will never get bored.
Conversation’s New Table of Contents
Simply enough, a table is a flat surface with four (or three or five) legs. What’s to talk about there? For a more conversation-inspiring piece, why not make the surface from something other than typical wood. How about something interesting you can talk about for hours? Imagine how much more fabulous that canoe coffee table becomes if you can follow mentions of it with, “That’s the canoe that saved my life when I was lost at sea.”
It’s a Bird, It’s a Plane; It’s a Red Ceiling?
One of the most abandoned and thus boring parts of any decorating scheme is the ceiling. If you want to be the hostess with the mostest, don’t forget the topside! Paint your ceiling red, or blue, or green, but make that space noticeable. For a truly noteworthy ceiling, add pictures of interesting places or people. Sure, you could talk about why you chose a white ceiling, but isn’t it ultimately more interesting to discuss the ceiling mural of the Pope, whom you met last year?
Turn Your Space Around
The predictable is boring. After all, the majority of your house guests have sat on horizontal sofas. They have looked in mirrors, hanging predictably on walls. They have eaten at blasé tables. For a truly interesting interior, consider turning your furniture sideways.
Things to turn sideways:
- pictures,
- chairs,
- tables,
- mannequin arms,
- your spouse.
Okay. Decorating with your spouse might not be the best idea, but you can turn almost anything inanimate sideways or upside-down to create an interesting statement. For example, attach a dining room table to the ceiling to create a high shelving unit. Or, you could drill holes in it and create a space for canned lighting. Or, speaking of lighting, why not tie some lamps together and hang them as a chandelier in your foyer?….
One is the Prettiest Number
When to use it, when to not: when you first start creating over-the-top conversation pieces, it can be tempting to get carried away. But if you change everything—every clock, every table, every chair—into some creative piece, your space will begin to look like the Mad Hatter’s house. Instead, choose one noticeable feature per room. Support this feature with less noticeable side items.
If you are a musician, a chandelier built from old violins will start many a lively conversation on Paganini or the price of Stratavarius instruments. To keep the conversation rolling, place black and white photos of different violin crafters throughout your dining space to encourage continued conversation on the regional differences of violin crafting.
As you can see, when you creatively mold your space around your interests, you create guidance for conversation. And good conversation with good friends means a rich life. All from a few, interesting decorative ideas.