When choosing chairs for your dining room, you can bring in multiple designs to the table. They don’t need to match!

Using mismatched dining chairs is a great way to display your love for design while adding a sense of personality and clear interest to your place. You don’t have to reduce your choices to well-known designers, either – any chairs that catch your attention are a good find, whether you saw them in the pages of a catalog or you come across them in a back corner of a garage sale.

Nevertheless, there’s an art to organizing a collection of chairs so that they complement each other and have a purposeful look.

Read this definitive guide to mismatching dining chairs and never look at your dining space the same way again.

Make a boring room come alive

Use mismatched dining chairs to add personal taste to a basic room.

Mismatched dining chairs add personal taste and interest to any space. They have a unique and simple way to add brightness and color to your home without spending lots of money on decorating. You can use this design technique in any location and with any interior style, and it will be striking in appearance.

Like many decorating techniques, mismatched chairs can be difficult to find, but if you get it right, you will love the outcome. It adds lots of personality and noticeable interest to any place and makes your dining room uniquely yours.

Watch that height

It’s best if you think about the seat height when it comes to dining chairs.

The seat heights need to be really similar; otherwise, it can look a little disoriented or tacky. Besides, you don’t want your dinner guests leaping up and down, do you?

Color consistency is key

If you want to be brave and use different color chairs, we think you should commit to it and go all out.

It can help if you stick with the same or similar chair style throughout for consistency when using mismatched colors.

As for the color, there are two ways you can do it. Either you have a rainbow collection of the same chair, that is, lots of colors as you like –this is really good with a classic chair design –or a collection of different chairs and make them look cohesive by staying with one color scheme.

Have fun

Don’t be scared to combine eras and styles, provided that the shapes complement each other.

You can even have tulip chairs hanging out with barrel saloon chairs. Both are entirely different eras and styles, but the shapes create some uniformity.

The rule of pairs works to make them work together, but also because the curves reflect each other. The shape of the table matters, too.

Choose a balanced contrast

A mix of old and new can works.  For instance, you can make use of a couple of Thonet chairs that you found at a garage sale worked in with a more recent version of Thonet chairs.

Be careful when mixing because too many combinations of “highs and lows” or “old and new” can detract from the rest of the design elements.

It helps to mix and match in pairs. If each chair is part of a couple of chairs, the scheme will be aligned and work better together.