Designer: Sharon Simonaire

The Inspiration: “My own dining room doubles as my office during the day,” says Sharon Simonaire, describing the genesis of her minimalist and multifunctional scheme. “I prefer benches, and I pull in wing chairs for the heads of the table when needed. I don’t like to have a lot around.”

The Ideas: Simonaire designed the benches herself, then had them covered with a striped silk in pea green and navy. Restful colors from nature, such as the grass green Tai Ping wool carpet and the sky blue wall, are light-as-air counterparts to the substantially sized furniture.

An industrial light fixture looming above the setting keeps the room from seeming “frilly,” says Simonaire, who asked muralist Juliana Merz to decorate the wall with a charcoal mural. Freehand drawing is a cinch for even nonartists to pull off, but you could also use a slide projector to cast “an image onto a wall and trace it,” Simonaire says. “All you need is a silhouette to follow.”

Designer Tips and Tricks: To reinforce the spare aesthetic, Simonaire set her table with matte white china and willowy, gossamer-thin stemware. She created an equally simple centerpiece by repurposing Lorina lemonade bottles into a suite of vases, each one filled with a single peony (a showier flower arrangement would have detracted attention from Merz’s mural). “I love reusing the bottles,” Simonaire says. “At Christmastime I make my own limoncello and give it away as gifts.”

Source List

Table: Jonah Meyer.
Benches: Fine Upholstery by Pizzillo, 212-889-7070.
Bench Fabric: C&C Milano, www.cec-milano.com.
Carpet: Tai Ping, www.taipingcarpets.com.
Light Fixture: Thomas O’Brien, www.visualcomfort.com.
Wall Paint: Farrow & Ball, www.farrow-ball.com.
Mural: Juliana Merz, 646-643-8440.
Tableware: Calvin Klein Home, www.macys.com.
Bottles: Lorina, www.lorina.com.