10 Sep 2009

DINING ROOM – SADDLE RIVER – NJ

The showhouse, by nature, is all  about unrestrained luxury and pure design aesthetic. Your house, on the other hand, is likely to owe at least some of its design to simple practicality. In fact, the most recent Designer Showhouse of New Jersey in Saddle River, sponsored by New Jersey Life in the fall of 2008 to benefit the new John Theurer Cancer Center at Hackensack University Medical Center, straddled both worlds. While is offered enough luxury to satisfy even the most devout designophile, the luxe was leavened with unmistakable undertones of real life. Out of the rooms designed for the Showhouse, the four profiled on these pages caught our eye for their fashion-forward approach, attention to detail, and smart design. We think you’ll agree that they dish up not just fantasy, but also design ideas that translate easily from showhouse to your house.

The dining room, designed by Malcolm McKinstrie II of the Macleod Design Group, is a case in point. Given the size and formality of the house itself, McKinstrie easily could have take the room in a direction that was strictly formal. But, he figured, the six-bedroom home was likely to be inhabited by a family that included children. And the family he envisioned was relaxed enough to allow those children, on occasion, to eat in the dining room. Rather than traditional mahogany, they the table is white-lacquered Chippendale. “If anything spills, you wipe it off with a sponge,” McKinstrie says. And although the table is balanced at each end by two tall chairs upholstered in elegant Belgian linen, the rest of the seating is decidedly more relaxed: mahogany stools with seats upholsterd in bluc denim. “If they get ruined, you just buy more denim,” the designer explains. The rug is simple sisal with a pearl-gray border. McKinstrie is a fan of unadorned dining room rugs, not  just for practicality’s sake, but because expensive, elaborate  rugs often get lost under a large table and chairs

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