5 Neutral Dining Room Ideas

A neutral dining room ensures an atmosphere that doesn’t need to shout to be heard. Made for entertaining, allow your guest’s chatter and laughter to fill the room rather than relying on statement decor and garish colours. Instead, mix on-trend style with muted and subtle tones to create a warm and welcome atmosphere you will want to spend day after day inside.

To help you put together your dream neutral dining room, we have put together 5 ideas to inspire you on your styling journey today. Plus, don’t forget to explore our full range of dining room furniture on offer for even more inspiration.

What is a Neutral Dining Room Style?

Before we get into our top 5 ideas, it might be helpful to define what we mean by neutral decor. When it comes to style, neutral theming offers an understated backdrop that leaves room for family and friend’s characters to take centre stage. By using neutral colours and wooden furniture, you can create a fail-safe scheme to stand the test of time, and the addition and combination of paint, fabrics and accessories will ensure you never grow bored of this chic look.

When it comes to neutral colours, think of palettes containing ivory, beige, and taupe tones with dashes of white to highlight. Undertones of these colours offer a variety of hue combinations that require a lot of thought into your decorating, so don’t dismiss the neutral theme as being easy to achieve. Every decor theme is a work of art in our eyes!

1. Keep Furniture Simple

The key to creating a neutral dining room is to keep furniture simple. At Noa & Nani, we have a huge selection of Scandinavian style dining room furniture that boasts a variety of neutral and simple pieces. Start in the heart of the room with a classic, wooden dining table in a light tone to set the scene. Next, explore dining chairs and mix and match your seating to create a subtly simple vibe that is right on-trend. To take it one step further, choose bench seating for one or both sides of the dining table to create the illusion of minimal furniture in the room and open up the space.

Once you have your most important dining room furniture pieces selected, complement the room with a sideboard or wooden bookshelf to fill in walls with too much blank space and balance the lines between simple and empty.

2. Bring in Nature

Welcome nature into your neutral dining room to add small dashes of colour and interesting textures. Make it effortless with natural centrepieces on the table that bring in exciting colour combinations of fresh flowers and greenery. Adding potted plants or tall, dried grass to the corners of the room will also create more atmosphere and character to ensure the room doesn’t feel too bare.

Another way to incorporate the soft touches of nature into your neutral dining room is to add delicate foliage in the form of embroidered table linens or printed crockery. Whatever you decide, make sure you keep the decorations simple to ensure a seamless style throughout the room.

3. Take Advantage of Natural Brickwork

If you’re lucky enough to have natural brickwork in your home, then avoid covering it up! The beauty of natural brickwork is a timeless style that you want to accentuate, never hide. Exposed brick will add texture to the room and can add a more industrial element to your neutral style to keep the theming interesting. Utilise exposed brick as a focal point in the room and enhance the look with industrial style metal accessories, such as lighting, to play up the natural and effortless aesthetic.

4. Accentuate with Pops of Colour

Although neutrals are all about understated tones, that doesn’t mean you can’t have fun adding a pop of colour. Your natural palette will still stand out, and this will only be enhanced by the dashes of colour that you add. Especially as the seasons change and you bring in oranges for Autumn or reds for the Winter, you can have fun alternating your colour choices thanks to your neutral background.

Another way to play around with colour contrasts is to add more definition to the space with darker elements. For example, a dark slate flooring or even a deeper toned carpet or rug choice will ground the simple style and add more prominence to your soft colour choices.

5. Layer with Natural Materials

With so many neutral colours mixing together, it can sometimes begin to blend into one another and take away from the paired-back look. To counteract this and keep your dining room alive and interesting, mix in and layer natural materials to give the area more dimension. Consider using linens, lace, and woven fabrics to highlight different areas of the room from the floor, table settings and curtains to invite in more warmth and life that will welcome guests further into the room and atmosphere. We love rattan pieces to achieve more texture in the dining room, as this is a style that is right on-trend!