Why This Queen Anne Dining Room Went Dark Green

Step through the carved doorway and the light changes. The dining room is deep green, botanical and enclosed. With eleven-foot ceilings, it could easily have felt cavernous. Dark walls make it feel like a room you’d stay in.

We leaned into the formality instead of softening it. A Sandberg botanical, custom-sized in forest green, wraps the upper walls. From the doorway it reads as texture; up close, the leaves and branches come forward.

Paneling below, plaster above

The pattern works because it’s held in place. Below is white square paneling drawn from the house’s original millwork. Above, a new eight-inch plaster crown by Arkada gives the tall room a proper finish.

The paneling gives the room its structure. The wallpaper gives it its mood.

The painting that refuses to blend in

A quieter painting would have been the safe choice. Instead, Petra Schott’s Life Force, about four feet across in rose, ochre, green and charcoal, hangs against the pattern. The wallpaper repeats; the painting doesn’t. A clean frame gives each its own edge.

A shop cabinet from Antwerp

Beneath the painting is a cabinet nearly nine feet wide that held stock in an Antwerp hardware shop around 1900. Its numbered brass plaques and worn knobs still tell you how it was used. On top sits a Victorian burr-walnut writing box from about 1860, with its green baize and hidden drawers intact. Neither was chosen for being old. They were chosen because their past lives still show.

A room made for company

At the center is a ten-foot table in pale ash, a necessary pause between the dark walls and the painting, with soft linen chairs around it. A dark-shaded chandelier hangs beneath the plaster medallion and pulls the light down to the table. The ceiling is high and the trim is formal, but the room does the opposite of what you’d expect. It asks people to stay late.