5 Outdated Dining Room Furniture Pieces Designers Urge You to Replace Now

Key Points

• Break up heavy, dark furniture for a more modern and mixed look.
• Update antiques with fresh fabrics or colors to add personality to your space.
• Use light window treatments and display china creatively, not in cabinets.

If your dining room doesn't reflect your aesthetic, it's possible that it's looking a bit too dated. Rethinking your furniture scheme and window dressings will make a major change. Designers stress that the wrong furniture and drapery styles can really set the tone of a room—in a negative way.

Here, three pros chime in with the design decisions they'd suggest you avoid making in order to create a dining space that's current and full of style.

Meet the Expert

• Meg Spellman is the founder of Meg Spellman Interiors.
• Andrea Schumacher is the founder of Andrea Schumacher Interiors.
• Lauren Saab is the founder of Saab Studios.

Heavy, Dark Furniture Sets

While designers love peppering classic wooden pieces throughout a space, they're not so eager to decorate a dining room using solely heavy, dark furniture.

"Matching dining sets with bulky, dark wood tables and ornate chairs can make a space feel overly formal and dated," Meg Spellman says.

If you own or inherited such a set that you're not willing to part with completely, consider splitting up the pieces so that they're put to use in various rooms to break things up a bit.

Only Using Antiques

As you move away from heavy, dark furniture sets, Spellman suggests outfitting your dining room with a mixture of both vintage and contemporary finds to create a more curated, mixed look, which she says is in vogue today.

Andrea Schumacher agrees that dining rooms that only contain antique furniture and decor are automatically going to look dated. Pick your favorite older pieces, but make them a bit more playful, she suggests.

Overly Formal Window Treatments

When dressing your dining room windows, it's again important to keep contemporary styles in mind and not look too far back into the past, Spellman notes.

Skip any dated dressings like swags, valances, or heavy drapes—all of which Spellman says feel fussy and out of place in modern dining rooms.

What should you install instead? The answer is to keep it clean and simple. Roman shades and linen panels are both fair game, Spellman shares, but truthfully, she explains, window treatments in this space are not a requirement.

Matching Dining Sets

Avoiding dark furniture sets is particularly key to creating a current dining space, but matching furniture sets as a whole are also seen as dated, no matter their style, Lauren Saab says.

These, she says, tend to feel staged and one-dimensional. Like Spellman, the designer agrees that it's best to mix materials and eras for a stylish look. The goal, she says, is to create rooms that evolve, and not repeat themselves.

China Cabinets

The china cabinet had its time in the sun decades ago, but is no longer an integral component of the dining room, Schumacher explains. That said, the designer is all for finding creative ways to display your china that don't involve keeping pretty plates and bowls behind closed doors.