Hi, Sarah.. I am coming into this thread late in the game but I did read through all the posts. I wanted to share a couple of thoughts and experiences but I am short on time so I will apologize in advance if I sound short or harsh. I have a red dining room and I have grown to hate it. My wood is a medium to dark oak and I think it does nothing for it. I think it will do much less for your darker and more formal wood. My sister just did her dining room in a blue (leaning towards teal) and it looks smashing with her dark wood. I am the LAST person to choose blue.. it's just not one of "my colors" but I have to say I think it works very well in your room. I tend to green and I still prefer the blue mockups over the greens. You keep referring to this as the "formal dining room" but the southern living elements you are wanting to decorate around are much more casual to me. I think you need to stop and take a breath and think about whether you want a formal dining room as your furniture suggests or a casual family style dining room like your bowl suggests. If you want the formal dining room then I'd use the tuscan bowl and the other southern living pieces in the kitchen. Whether the dishes in the china cab are valuable monetarily or or personally, they are on display for a reason, I'd presume? Are they family heirlooms? I would never suggest that you store them away-- if for no other reason, because they work much better with your furniture and with the gorgeous shutters. I strongly recommend that you look at pictures in the gallery and review the ones shared in this post with similar furniture and see if you can find a style that is cohesive and approaches what you see in your minds eye. I don't mean this disrespectfully (because I have been there myself) but you are going in the direction of a real mish mash of styles and your furniture is such a strong element in the room I don't think it's a room that will gracefully accept the eclectic look. I agree with all others on the shutters-- love them! They look beautiful as they are.

Still undecided here. I think it's best to keep the furniture arrangement like it is. I had considered flipping the two rooms, but don't want the dining table obscuring that first view of the fireplace when you enter the house. So that's decided. Still pondering the suggestions of the storage/shelving being in the other room... The idea the cabinet guy and I came up with is to split the dining wall into thirds, do two 55" bookcase/storage cabinets right up to the ceiling, with an equally sized wainscot between, allowing space for some sort of table I can store stools under (to be used at the table when we need extra seating). I'm also trying to fit in a desk of some sort for a computer, maybe on the opposite dining wall. But I don't want it to look like Apple is taking over our dining room, it's gotta be inconspicuous. I love the look of this room too, and it would fit great with our lifestyle - four kids and lots of homework:

Les - That is a good point about us not having a lot of wall space in the room. Plus, with my piano up against the one real wall, it is going to hide much of the red and the chair rail if we only do the red under it... I guess that's OK if we don't want it to be too overpowering, but I DO want to be able to see it, KWIM? Oh and yes we will be going contemporary with the new dining set - probably not glass top but definitely modern wood and black leather styling - and we do plan to get a beige rug (maybe with a little red throughout) for under the table and some beige silk curtains for the windows, with one of those really large rods. So if we do the whole room red, that will tone it down a bit and help to balance it out. Oh, and you will be happy to know, LOL, that IF we do the whole room red, we will not be painting the niche red. Instead we will be painting it Hopsack, the next darker shade on the Latte strip, or maybe even 2 shades darker. I think the red niche, in addition to the entire red room facing it, would be too much red. Plus I love that Hopsack color and am dying for a chance to use it somewhere LOL. Laurie - LOL thanks for bringing that up; for some reason my brain is mush and I hadn't really thought about it! But I think the kitchen is a stickier situation b/c of the dark cabinets as well as the tile issue. Something about that area just isn't working with the reds. But I painted some samples in the formal DR today and IMO they look great. Fireweed is looking just gorgeous in there after I put the recommended grey-tinted primer underneath it. WOW it really pops, and it seems to look fine with the tile. Plus, once we get our beige rug in there, that will hide a lot of the tile too. But I'll post some pics and see what y'all think after it's dry. I could use all the help I can get LOL!

Thanks everyone. If we did the remodel, there would be a wall at the entry and the remodeled room would be off the kitchen. There is a tiny laundry and a very tiny pantry in the house now. I think you're right that a buyer would expect a formal dining room. If I had a crystal ball and knew for sure we'd be staying, I'd get much more use out of the remodeled room, but that's an unknown so I'll leave it's use as a formal dining room.