From the best lighting to how to seat your guests, it’s the small things that make the perfect dinner party
Lighting
How you use light is surprisingly important, in a background kind of way. Your goal is to create intimacy and atmosphere. Dimming the lights is the obvious place to start; it turns the night on, much in the way that brightening them signifies the end of it. Light that has been diffused – either through a reflection off another surface, or a fairly opaque shade – is the gentlest and most complimentary.
In the living room
Go for lots of smaller, lesser light sources rather than a single brighter one. It creates pools of light that people gather into. Table lamps are reassuring and intimate. Use the lowest wattage bulb they can cope with.
Standard/floor lamps are particularly good in sitting rooms and useful for breaking up rooms where everything – tables, sofas, chairs – is more or less at the same height.
Pearl bulbs diffuse light more softly than clear ones.
Reflecting light diffuses it – point your angle poise towards walls, mirrors and ceilings.
Putting a plant in front of a lamp will diffuse the light quite well.
Uplighters are wonderful for a soft, general light, but only work in rooms with fairly high ceilings – if the lamp is too close to the ceiling, it will have a spotlight glare.
Where you eat
There’s nothing as pretty, flattering and intimate as candlelight. Use whatever shape and size you have or prefer – the more, the merrier. Shot glasses or small tumblers half-filled with sand, soil or salt all make good candlestick impersonators.
It’s important to keep electric light very dim if you have candles and fire, otherwise the flames won’t stand out.
Don’t think of fairy lights as a light source but more as a festive addition. The tiny ones look prettiest, whether draped around a window or piled into an empty fireplace or vase. Don’t put them on a flashing setting unless you are having a disco.
If the kitchen is the heart of the house, the table is its soul. It’s where you sit in the morning when the day is full of promise, and at night when you’re spent. It’s a place to commune over a candle and a bottle of red as well as disappear into solitary daydreams over the Sunday papers. It’s where you chop out your love into onions for soup, and decorate cakes for tea. It should be a place full of romance, imagination and delight. It’s not surprising that at the auction of Elizabeth David’s things after her death, it was her kitchen table that Prue Leith bought.
If the kitchen is the heart of the house, the table is its soul
More often than not, the kitchen/dining table becomes a central dumping ground, as likely to be used for doing admin and leaving notes for the rest of the household as for eating. When you’re having people around, you first need to sweep the mess of life off it and out of your head.
Consider a tablecloth. As you shake it out, the junk of the day goes with it. It doesn’t have to be fancy or expensive – you can get a length of plain white cotton (bleached calico is cheapest) from any fabric shop and get your drycleaner to hem the ends. If that seems too formal, try a few large white tea towels, well-pressed. If they cover most of the table or at least the middle of it, you will have a focal point and some sense of ceremony. Mats protect the table as well as framing the plate; a tea towel or large napkin works well for smaller numbers. Best of all, if you’re ever passing an oriental supermarket, are the fine bamboo mats used for making sushi rolls. They’re cheap and easy to clean and store.
Think of the laid table as a single image rather than lots of different objects, and try to see it in terms of shapes and colours. Food containers –wooden salad bowls, shallow china dishes, a glass fruit bowl – will be decorative in their own right. As a starting point, you’ve always got the shape of your plates, cutlery and glasses. It doesn’t matter whether they match or not. The white tablecloth holds the whole thing together, as do jam jars of wild flowers and cow parsley from nearby hedgerows, and tin cans of roses and herbs. It doesn’t have to be flowers though – whatever is in season: bowls of lemons, or stacks of gourds would look just as lovely, as would a more year-round collection of objects, like shells, pebbles or tiny pots of growing herbs.
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