Reinventing the Classic Dining Room with Canadel

If you’ve seen any newly-built homes recently, kitchens have begun to shrink from the cavernous amphitheaters of the open-concept to more functional, organized sizes; this means contemporary home design is returning to the distinct, concise room theory. With working from home being more popular than ever, rooms have seen their purpose evolve dramatically, the emphasis now being on a clear division of roles in the household and of course, privacy. In addition to more rooms and less shared expanse, the dining room has been reformed from its reduced role as an undefined, ambiguous area with a table and chairs that merely occupied the space between the living room and kitchen, to a more purposeful, authentic performance. The dining room is a room again, typified by an enclosed set of walls with little to no view of the kitchen. The exclusion of the space from the rest of the house ensures it can operate as intended: a nice, quiet place to share a meal. To keep conversation flowing through the room, a server table–like the Highlands Server from Stickley–can keep a smattering of dishes within arm’s reach while freeing up the main table of unnecessary plate traffic and eliminating second trips to the kitchen. Free from the all-consuming gaze of the television (or any other distraction, for that matter,) the fine dining experience can once again become a mainstay of the home.

Wondering where these trends are pushing up in the furniture game? Just look at china hutches (also called hutch dressers, sideboards or buffets.) Once a commonplace figure in a fine dining spread, hutches have had a steady decline in popularity from the 1960s up until about five years ago. As kitchens and their cabinets increased in size, chinaware storage elsewhere in the home became irrelevant. Thankfully, this recorrecting shift in dimensions has awarded the buffet a new lease on life: it’s back and better than ever! With the ‘grand-millenial aesthetic’ and maximalism at the helm, modern interior design has helped us reshape rooms into vivid expressions of ourselves. The hutches and buffets of yesteryear still provide that fine dining experience but are now being utilized under different contexts and with updated nomenclature. Instead of just china, some have been using them as displays for various curated items: collectibles, art, jewelry, etc. Like the Metal Prism Deck from Sligh, for example; it’s no longer just a ‘china’ hutch, but more so a gallery shelf with a buffet dresser underneath. Lacking traditional cabinetry, the open-air design allows the brass fittings to glint a perfect polished trophy glow. These pieces of furniture have become invaluable to the expressive nature of maximalist design.

At Ennis Fine Furniture, we embrace the wide spectrum of utility a sideboard, hutch or buffet can provide. Many of these pieces are by our innovative contemporary brands, with modern styling and design cues; similar to the classic type, but only in functionality. We have Canadel buffets in stock that are strikingly industrial and contemporary. The Dining Room Buffet–warm, natural solid wood finishes, clean lines and bold wrought-iron black hardware–a lovely modernization of a vintage favorite. Not finding a combination you like? Let our interior designers work with you and the manufacturer to provide custom-built pieces, with a host of woods (ash, cherry, oak, poplar, to name a few) and custom fabrics to choose from. We provide these services because we think fine furniture stores should, bare minimum. Come down to one of our three Pacific Northwest locations (Boise, Richland and Spokane) and see what makes us the standard for fine furniture.