5 Tips For Your Dining Room Buffet

One of the nicer things you can do with a dining room is install your own buffet counter. It doesn’t have to be huge, but having a counter available for this specific purpose opens up all kinds of possibilities for entertaining friends and family. You’ll be better equipped to host holiday meals and brunches, you can set up fondue stations or a make-your-own cocktail bar, etc. It’s just a very fun way to set up occasions on which you can both host and allow your guests to do their own thing. Plus, you can show off a little bit with whatever you arrange on the buffet!

Here are some interior design trend ideas for how to make the most of this kind of space.

1.) Opt For A Modern Surface

If you’re going to the trouble of installing a dining room buffet (or even a bar area, for that matter), make sure you’re doing it with trendy, modern materials. At the time of this writing, trends in kitchen counters include quartz, veining patterns, and neutral colors. These are just a few ideas, but they can certainly be applied to buffet counters as well, and give your dinging area a nice modern accent.

2.) Support With Cabinets & Drawers

One thing you definitely don’t want if you’re designing a new dining room buffet is for it to be burdened with stacked plates and silverware all the time. For this reason, it’s imperative to support the counter with built-in storage in the form of cabinets and drawers. Ideally you can keep some dishes and silverware in these areas, and if you’re able to build in high cabinets you may even be able to permanently store some centerpieces so that they’re easy to pull out when you need to set the buffet.

3.) Go Big On Inspiration

Speaking of centerpieces, it’s not a bad idea to go big on inspiration for how to dress up and decorate your buffet. That means visiting or at least looking at some famous buffets. Vegas has some great ones, as a starting point, and while they’re obviously over-the-top and meant to cater to thousands, they can still give you some basic ideas. Look through things like the Bacchanal Buffet at Caesars Palace and the Wicked Spoon at the Cosmopolitan and you’ll get a few interesting ideas about what makes for a glamorous buffet.

4.) Light From Above

This is a small tip, but a fairly crucial one if you really plan to use your buffet for serving and not just to accent the room. A lot of people would like to light this kind of space with candles, and yet that tends to take up very valuable countertop space – not to mention there’s a risk of people knocking candles over while picking out items! For this reason it’s a good idea to light from above. You can do this via new lighting fixtures in the area, or you can even look into how to hang candle lanterns and get a few ideas for lighting that can be almost enchanting.

5.) Invest In A Serving Cart

As a final, small interior design trend tip you may want to invest in a serving cart, and preferably one that comes up roughly to the same height as the countertop. This is just a means of expanding the counter’s usage if you have a large buffet, or even putting out condiments or additions that people might want to use after filling up their plates at the buffet. And naturally, with a cart, you can remove it and put it out of sight on occasions when you don’t need it.