Thank you for your help and the pictures of these lovely ceilings and rooms. Sorry they are not the one I remembered. The kitchen was open to the family room. The two rooms were visually separated by a "detailed header" with a coffered ceiling in the family room. Maybe it was the kitchen and my mind is just playing tricks with me - again. LOL! I also remember seeing a fireplace in the FR.

I wish I had some pictures, but I don't have any handy right now, and it is where we've stowed a lot of our kitchen stuff while we are renovating, so I can't take any good ones now. I live in a historic district, and every other year, they have a house tour of some of the beautiful old houses in the neighborhood, and I got my inspiration for my DR from a lovely Victorian up the road from me. They had a green damask fabric lining their dining room walls. It was so luxe and lovely and plush, I wanted to do that. Doing my entire room in fabric was too expensive, but we got a similar look with our wallpaper. I've put a link below to our wallpaper. This company, Thibaut, makes beautiful historic wallpaper, and they've been in continuous business since right around when your house was built. The wallpapers are affordable compared to many similar wallpapers I've seen, and there is a large selection. I didn't want to make the dining room too "Victorian," but I wanted it to fit with the age and formality of my house. We have wallpaper in all the formal spaces in our house. So in our dining room, we have the green damask wallpaper, a Schonbeck crystal chandelier, and beautiful green iridescent silk window treatments. I forget the exact name of the style, but they are basically balloon shades, and we have crystals hanging from the bottom. I shudder to think of how dusty those window treatments, with all their little gathers, are getting with the work in my house. I don't think I can take them down to clean them without ruining them. I think I'll have to have them steam cleaned in place. Some day, I'd like to get a nicer antique chandelier, but they were just too expensive at the time. Over the mantel, we have an antique Mexican silver mirror that I got in a local antique store. It is very tall and heavy! It is very lovely, but what I'd really like to do is put that mirror over a different fireplace, and panel the whole space in my DR in antiqued mirror. My sister-in-law is a designer (www.theparisapartment.com), and she had a booth in the Architectural Digest show in NYC recently, and she basically made a wall out of antiqued mirror with a huge sconce built into it that was spectacular. She has pictures of it on her blog. Our dining room has the original hardwood floors, with an inlaid Greek key design around the perimeter. These floors desperately need to be refinished. We have an Oriental rug under the dining room table. The room still needs work. The mantel is not the original, and it is very plain and the brickwork is not very attractive. I'd like to replace the mantel with a stone mantel, or at least put ceramic tile over the ugly brick. My china cabinet is the wrong style for the room. It is a craftsman style, and I love it, and it fits perfectly, but it is a bit out of place. Adjoining the dining room, connected by a very heavy pocket door, is a small drawing room that we call our music room, mostly because the PO's called it that. We have a piano in there, and we did striped wallpaper with dark brown red and green stripes, maybe a little gold, I forget. Very masculine and libraryish. Also from Thibaut. We collect maps, and the walls in that room are covered in maps. That room also has a fireplace, white painted brick. And a window seat that looks onto our porch. When I sit in a chair in that room and look out the window, I can only see houses that were built in the 19th century, and I can't see the paved road or cars, so it is like traveling back in time. It would be a weird small room in a modern house, but it is one of my favorite spots in the house to sit with a book. I imagine that, when the house was built, after dinner in the dining room, the women retired to this room to play cards around a round table, or the men sat and smoked cigars. There is a servant's button built in the middle of the floor, so you know they had a table right there. I think it may also have been a breakfast room. Not sure. Our dining room is a nice size, but not huge, so when we have a very large crowd, we set up an extra table in this space. We can seat about 25 in the two rooms together. I'm sure that was way more than you needed to know! Here is a link that might be useful: Thibaut

Thanks! That light fixture is from a fairly small company called O'lampia, located in the lighting district on the Bowery in NYC. They are awesome. All their fixtures are custom-sized, but our fixture was delivered in just a few weeks. We told them the size of the island, and the height of the ceiling, and they made the light the exact right size. No fuss, no muss. And it does do a good job of lighting the whole room. I have been consciously trying to use it, and not just automatically switch on the recessed lights. We went to the store in person, but you can order over the phone as well. Here is a link that might be useful: O'Lampia

Open concept still needs the idea of "rooms", and the differentiation of spaces. Consider creating large cased openings to differentiate the space as rooms open to each other rather than a ceiling treatment that takes away from the ceiling height and that doesn't relate to the function of the spaces.