Between Us

A separate dining room is an uncommon luxury, and also a trap: without character it ends up being the room that only gets used at Christmas. The brief was precisely that — to stop it from happening.

The strategy was to put all the weight on a single piece. The table, in heavily veined marble in grey and earth tones, works as a piece of art in its own right: it fills the room without needing anything else. From there, everything else drops its voice.

The chairs were chosen upholstered in white, with an enveloping shell and pale wooden legs: they are comfortable enough for long meals and, being identical and neutral, they do not compete with the table. A wide-plank timber floor and off-white walls complete the backdrop.

The ceiling is the second gesture of the project. A plane of timber slats runs across only half the room, directly above the table, bringing the height down in a controlled way. It is how you give the eating area some intimacy in a room with high ceilings, without building anything that reaches the floor.

The blown-glass bubble pendant does the opposite job to the table: it carries almost no visual weight, lets the window light through and at night turns into a cluster of warm points. The oval mirror with its brass arc, set opposite the window, throws the garden light back into the far end of the room.

The result is a calm dining room, easy to look after and hard to tire of. It is the kind of room that never goes out of fashion because it never chased fashion in the first place: it is simply well resolved.