Dining Room Lighting Ideas for Every Style

What’s your entertaining style? The decor you choose for your dining room, including your lighting, can highlight the mood you want to create for everyone at your table. Whether your goal is rustic and cozy or chic and glam, you can use these dining room lighting ideas from us at Pottery Barn to enhance your entertaining.

Modern Dining Room Lighting Ideas 

Make your dining area feel fresh and modern by installing a statement fixture with clean lines and an industrial feel. Rather than choosing a single flushmount or chandelier over the table, use multiple small pendant lamps grouped together to add dimension and texture to the room. Choose on-trend modern materials, like translucent glass globe shades and minimalistic pendant lamp hardware, to keep your dining room style sleek and chic. 

If you want your pendant light installation to look as polished as possible, opt for a chandelier with multiple pendants hanging from a long, thin canopy. Look for styles that place the individual pendants at slightly different lengths for an elegant feel that makes use of varying dimensions. If pure minimalism is your goal, opt for a symmetrical pairing of two large metal pendant shades hung on either end of a rectangular table. Use a single pendant for a circular or square table to keep the arrangement simple.

Rustic Dining Room Lighting Ideas 

There are several different table lighting ideas that can work well in a rustic dining room setting. Pendants with rustic glass shades offer a classic look and feel. They provide elegance through light-diffusing translucent glass. Frosted glass can also be a good choice for rustic elegance. Remember that these light shades block your view of the bulbs inside the fixture. When paired with a translucent glass shade, Edison bulbs can be a nice finishing touch to take your rustic lighting design to the next level. If you’d rather go for soft mood lighting, frosted shades are the better choice.

The shade and bulbs aren’t the only parts of your lighting design that can underscore the overall style of your dining room decor. The pendant cord you choose offers a great opportunity to introduce one last hint of style. Consider pendant cords covered in fabric or rope as an alternative to metal or chain.

Traditional Dining Room Lighting Ideas

Lighting for a traditional dining room lets you introduce classic, lantern-style fixtures or elegant multi-armed chandeliers with scrolled details and curving lines. Brass, rubbed bronze and other metallics are ideal materials for this design style. You can control how formal or laid-back the space feels with the finishes you choose. Polished, high-shine metal is more traditionally formal; aged or oil-rubbed finishes are more suitable for a casual dining setting. 

As you shop, think about the lines and forms you see in your dining room furniture. Try to replicate those shapes with the light fixtures you choose. You don’t need an exact duplicate, but the swooping curves of tapered table legs can echo through the outstretched and upturned arms of a chandelier. When you decorate with shapes, you create dining room that feels fresh and cohesive. 

Glam Dining Room Lighting Ideas

Make your dining room feel like a chic, palatial space by going for high-shine materials such as polished metal and crystal. Crystal is a classic dining room lighting embellishment not only because it’s elegant and beautiful, but also because it helps to refract light around the room. This results in a softer, more cinematic setting for dinner parties and special celebrations. If you choose glam furniture pieces, such as tufted, velvet dining chairs and a marble-topped dining table, a crystal-embellished light fixture may tie the room together.  

You can also opt for a crystal flushmount paired with matching wall sconces. This can create a moodier lighting setup that’s more ambient. Pairing these multidirectional fixtures with a dimmable light switch setup gives you the power to change the lighting for specific events and moods, too.