Swedish Interior Design

We often get asked by clients to design their dining rooms for them – its fun and challenging as every space is different and everyone has different needs.
So i thought you might find it interesting in a series of posts to look at how we design a dining room and what things need to be thought through.
We always start with the centre piece – The Antique and 1900s Gustavian dining table.
This classic design hails originally from the late 1700s in sweden as part of the early Gustavian era. The design changed slowly over the years into the classic Gustavian we now know from the early mid 20th century onwards.
The design elements you will find in your Antique Gustavian dining table are subtle and refined. They include:
Round Fluted legs topped with a Gustavian rosette design (norwegian forest cat strictly optional)

The Gustavian dining tables have generally either a reeded edge as you can see in the above picture as a sidebar decoration or on rarer tables an egg and dart motif like this.

 
The dining tables almost always extend using a series of wooden interconnecting bars under the table top so they can be closed in a round seating 4 usually with a diameter of around 110-120cm. They then extend with extra leaves of 50-60cm to a full length of up to 3.5m ( in the rarest cases).
Its worth remembering that the extra leaves do not have the decorative sidebars on them on original tables – i guess to make for easier storage but we can add in sidebars to your chosen like this using moulds taken from original gustavian rosettes.

 
The key thing to remember is how many people you need to seat. So 10-12 people need a 3m table, 8-10 need 250-260cm, 8 people need 230-250cm and so on. It all depends on the width of your dining chairs and how wide a place setting you use. Our classic Gustavian dining chairs are around 50cm wide and a standard place setting is around 50-60cm wide.
Here’s a Gustavian dining table we repainted for a client with added sidebars seating 12

 
Talking of repainting, our gustavian dining tables look amazing when resprayed – you can choose any colour from farrow and ball, paint library, ecos, little green paint company, mylands, fired earth etc. This really brings out the quality of the carvings on the dining table as you can see.
The proof of course is always in the pudding so here’s a few of our dining tables, resprayed and with extra sidebars in clients’ dining rooms.

Here repainted in strong white 2001 with farmers rococo dining chairs

Again String white 2001 with a mixed set of our 1900s gustavian axet and shield back dining chairs
Next time we’ll look at choosing dining chairs