I too am wanting to do chair rail but for the kids rooms and I absolutly love those photos so much maybe I should do it for my dining room too. To me it's a traditional classic look but my house is medeterranian style so I don't think it necessarily goes with my style but I love it and am seeing it more in more in Pottery Barn cataloges so I don't think it's "out". My son really wants a red room. I can't paint an entire room red, it would drive us all nuts and probablly not help to calm him down. But I was thinking of doing red at the bottom and then 2/3 of white to tone it down with navy blue accents. Is red just too hard of a color for bedroom? I could also do navy with white and do red accents if it's too much (like the drapery and picture frames). The two kids rooms have a hallway that runs between them with a bath in the center, would you copy the chairrail then for her room too? I wanted to do a light fresh stem green color in her room because her chair, bed, drapes, rug are pink. Thanks for any input on how to pull this off.

"In olden days a glimpse of stocking was looked on as something shocking, but now, G*d knows, anything goes..." Those immortal words & the jazzy, syncopated tune that accompanied them are by the late, great Cole Porter, whose business it was to be attuned to all the latest fads & foibles of the fashionable set, and these days, it's kind of the same way with the question of chair rails & where to put the dark color, too. People remind me all the time that "There are no rules!" Please. There are always rules, and just because a lot of people ignore them--or never bothered to learn them in the first place--doesn't mean they don't exist, and like the judge says, ignorance of the law is no excuse. Knowing how (and when) to break a rule is one of the skilled decorator's greatest tricks, but in order to make it work, you first have to know the rules. Otherwise, it's meaningless. Decorating without rules is like playing tennis without the net: what's the point? Of course, we live in a free country, so people can put the dark color below the chair rail if they want, but doing it that way is a fairly recent development, dating not much further back than the time the time Madonna wore her bra on top of her sweater, setting off a tacky (and, fortunately, short-lived) fad among the middle-schoolers in the town where I used to live. That's kind of what I think of whenever I hear someone proclaim "There are no rules!" The Green Room at the White House after Theodore Rooselvelt's renovations. Anyway, that dark-color-on-the-bottom bit took off after somebody on one of the early cable decorating shows did it that way, and since then, it's become common, but historically speaking--especially when it's traditional decorating you're talking about in the first place--it's all wrong, and for a good reason. Here's the thing: in decorating, most "rules"--if you take the time to do any research about them--originated with simple practicality & common sense. Historically, dark paint (or fabric, or wallpaper)--that is, the expensive stuff, what with the high cost of pigments--went on the upper walls because that's where people would see it, not down below the chair rail, where it would not only be below eye level--especially when seated at a dining table--but where it would also be partially obscured by furniture pushed up flat against the walls, which is where the term "straightening a room" came from. If the woodwork--including the chair rail, which was there not for aesthetics but to protect expensive materials & fragile plaster--was painted at all in such a room, it was generally painted white, because white paint (or lime wash) was cheap & it could be refreshed easily when it got dingy. Anyway, that's the logic behind the traditional dark-above-light-below color distribution. Even if the specific reasons for that distribution no longer apply, the look still seems right, especially in a traditional decor. If a designer (or decorator) decides to ignore historical precedent for one reason or another, that's one thing, but if he or she is truly unaware of it, I'd start to worry, because such historical background is part of the traditional education in the field. Ignorance of that of thing would be a big red flag to me. Kind of like the be-jeweled & be-scarfed "designer" I met at a suburban decorator showhouse who--totally without irony--referred to blotchy mess of a would-be Venetian plaster wall as having "a lovely faux-pas finish." It was the funniest thing I'd heard in a week. Regards, MAGNAVERDE

This is a unique, beautiful layout, but - Holy Cow - there's way too much going on. Simplify. As others suggest, raise the living room floor and get rid of the step down and railing. It would combine the entry and living room and really open up the space. It would be safer, too, because it's easy to forget situations where there's one or two steps, especially for guests. Paint the brick. Easier and cheaper than drywall and would retain the interesting texture. Lighter color railings would help. The hillbilly front door has got to go.

@Clare Reiss (sorry just saw your second message!) yes, it is open to the foyer (which also has a wood chair rail that is staying, walls likely being painted some shade of white, undertone TBD. DR is to the right of foyer, living room to the left (no chair rail, but wood trim around windows, and molding) also a light, off white TBD. More chair rail found through to the office... and den... **added a screenshot of some of my Pinterest board, as well as the view from inside my dining room, looking out.