Classic Coastal Living Room & Dining Room Design Plans

Good morning! I’m back today with another set of design plans for our new build – focusing today on our classic coastal living room and dining room design plans.

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Before we jump into our classic coastal kitchen design plans, and in an effort to avoid redundancy, if you missed my preview update reports, you may want to start with those first! I go into more about why we’re moving, some of our favorite features of our new build, as well as the initial progress and selection meetings:

Since my last update, I’ve also started sharing some of the design selections and mood boards for various spaces in the home. I have plenty more to share soon.

Last week I shared our Classic Coastal Kitchen Design Plans, and I want to bring attention to that again because the two spaces I’m sharing today are connected in one large open space. So, I needed to ensure all three flowed really well together. Let’s jump into both the dining room and living room design plans.

Classic Coastal Dining Room Design Plans

I shared pretty early on in this build process that the dining room was one of my least favorite aspects of this floorplan. The house has a really incredible floorplan, but I don’t love an open concept, and I’ve never really loved a dining room sandwiched in between a kitchen and living room without any real separation. But that’s what we have. The flip side is, we literally use our current dining room only on the occasions we have guests and are playing cards. I think we’ve eaten in there twice ever. So, it was a floorplan “flaw” I was willing to live with. The pros definitely outweighed the cons here.

Here is our initial design plan for the space. I struggled most with selecting a dining table. The room is rather wide, so we wanted an extendable option that could fill the space should we host a larger party or dinner. Although it wasn’t exactly what I initially envisioned, I think we’ll be really happy with this dining table that we ordered. I loved that there are six stain options and three lengths (all of which are extendable).

Fun fact: I was set on the above dining chairs. And then when I placed a big order a week or two back with our sofas, outdoor furniture, dining table and a bunch of other items, I somehow ordered these chairs instead. Admittedly, the fabric was the biggest concern (after the test I performed in this post I knew I wanted the white Sunbrella performance slub tweed), but I was still a little annoyed at my slip-up. Thankfully, the chairs I ordered were my backup, so I think they’ll work just as well.

With that, here’s a more accurate peek at how the space will look.

With the chairs being skirted, I’m not sure that I’ll add a rug and figured that’s something I can easily add down the road if we decide it needs one! I also want to add that all of the lighting in this post was purchased pre-price increase and during Black Friday sales. I’m so grateful I did that seeing the new prices on these!

I also created a (slightly chaotic) version where I stacked the kitchen design plan with the living room design plan so I could see how the elements would all work together!

Classic Coastal Living Room Design Plans

Next, let’s chat about our living room design plans! I shared a peek at the look I was going for probably a year ago, and honestly, not much has changed. I knew from day one that I likely wanted light blue sofas. I also narrowed down the light fixture I wanted for the space pretty quickly. So, here was my design board from last year.

As I shared in yesterday’s post about the repeat items we’re buying, the sofas have been ordered but everything else is in a holding pattern for a sale or when delivery times will more properly align with our moving date. I originally thought I’d be ordering the Chambray color of the Performance Rustic Linen (which I tested in this post) but shortly before I went to order, they released the Seaglass option which was a bit closer to the look I wanted. I almost ordered the Chambray on another piece of furniture because it’s truly beautiful too!

Performance Linen in Oatmeal (our current sofa fabric) | Performance Rustic Linen in Seaglass | Performance Rustic Linen in Chambray

I ordered this rug and this rug during a recent 40% off sale directly on Annie Selke (but they’re both cheaper on Wayfair now so I linked there). I don’t know which will go in the living room, but I needed the same size for my office, our bedroom and the living room and knew these two would go somewhere. It may be a game day decision which one goes where!

The sideboard tables are currently just placeholders. I really like the look of them flanking the fireplace (to hold blankets and pillows, etc.) but I’m hoping to find something I like equally as much at a lower price point.

With the volume of decisions I’m having to make refurnishing an entire home, I haven’t even begun to think about pillow covers or other textiles and decor. It will definitely take some time once we move in to decide on some of those items, and I’m totally okay with that! But we really wanted the essential furniture in places as soon as possible once we move in.

Current Look at the Living Room & Dining Room

We’re probably two and half months or so out from moving into our new home. When I peeked inside last night, they had painted the first coat of paint on our interior doors and I was thrilled to see how they looked! I share a lot more in this post, but we opted to paint all of the interior doors Benjamin Moore Silver Gray (a subtle bluish gray color). I’ve been anxiously awaiting to see them painted in real life, and I’m so relieved by how great they look. You can tell they’re a bit gray in some lighting conditions and a bit more blue in others.

There aren’t actually going to be any doors connected to the space in the living room or dining room, but I included the paint colors on the design boards above since they’ll still be in some sightlines. There’s quite a few doors in the space right now for painting but here’s a look from last week. The chimney will all be a Venetian plaster finish (we aren’t using the mantel in the design board – that was just to share an initial vision).

Here’s an older pic where I’m essentially standing in the dining room area looking into the living room.

AI Renderings of the Design Boards

And you know I couldn’t help myself and had to plug this into ChatGPT to get a rendering (you can see my tutorial on making these here). As you can tell, it still takes some liberties on changing the furniture and adding items I didn’t ask for, but it gives a general idea! It’s also a good time to mention I actually wasn’t planning to put the drapes on the fireplace wall, but rather on the large sliders. I’m guessing we’ll use an automated woven roman shade on these windows instead.

And here’s a look at the 3D rendering of the dining room! Again it look some liberties with the room, but overall gives a good idea!

And lastly, here’s how it tried to blend the dining room and kitchen. We only have one pantry doorway on the left so I don’t know where the bonus one came from. Also, our island definitely won’t be long enough for six stools. It grew our house for us 😉 But again, still helpful to kind of visualize!

With a little more prompting, I was able to get it a little closer to “real life”.

That wraps up today’s post! I think the next space I’ll share will be all the carriage house design plans since those are mostly wrapped up!

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