Dining Room

Q: I have inherited some dining-room furniture that is a high-quality reproduction of both Hepplewhite and Sheraton styles. Now I'm puzzled about how to treat the dining room itself. It's a fairly large space with a 9-foot ceiling and two narrow but not-so-tall windows.Any suggestions?A: I assume that you want the room to look elegant and relatively formal.That shouldn't be too difficult to achieve, though you will have to sort through a number of choices relating to your taste, budget and the availability of certain items.

Q: I'm looking for some comfortable dining-room furniture that doesn't need constant care even though it will be used by a young family. The pieces are to accompany Oriental rugs and a mixture of antique and contemporary furnishings. I also prefer that the dining room ensemble not go out of style as soon as the latest fad passes. One possibility, I'm told, is "art or architect's furniture." Where can it be seen?A: You should start with the understanding that "art furniture" and "architect's furniture" are not synonymous.

Now that our kitchen restoration is finished, my wife and I have moved on to the next phase of such a project, namely second-guessing ourselves. Figuring out what we did right and wrong. It is amazing how quickly you move from enjoying a comfortable and well-functioning space, to entertaining nagging doubts about how you restored it. In our case, a once-dark and narrow ground-floor kitchen was transformed into a large, airy, combination kitchen and sitting room. Daylight now streams through windows that we barely noticed before.

I'm so used to restaurants taking weeks, if not months, longer to open than originally planned that I was surprised to learn that the new Alizee (4 W. University Parkway, 410-235-8200) is up and running. Alizee, a "boutique bistro" and wine bar, opened quietly last month in the Inn at the Colonnade dining room where the Spice Company used to be. (The Spice Company closed in early February.) When I spoke to the new owner, Joe Chen, a couple of weeks ago, he was planning a soft opening on March 1. Chen has big plans for Alizee, including a sushi bar and a menu ranging in price from $19 to $65 for something "with foie gras."

The Cunninghams found their contemporary home in Camelot. "That's what the previous owner called his house," Carolyn Cunningham said of the 1985, custom-built, two-story home of brick and cedar-shake that the couple purchased five years ago. "It was everything he wanted in a house." Clean modern lines, a basement, and an acre were everything the Cunninghams wanted, so they put a bid on the house and took possession in February 2002 for $340,000. "It was in great shape," Allen Cunningham, 48, said.

The dining room at Sarah's House once was a nondescript room with yellow cinderblocks and bent blinds in the windows. Residents of the homeless shelter at Fort Meade sat at long tables and fed their children from sometimes-rickety highchairs. They pulled their plates from precarious stacks on open shelves above a plywood countertop. The room in the converted Army barracks has undergone a slow transformation since Thanksgiving. A wall mural has become the room's focal point. It depicts a shadowed stone wall overgrown with purple-flowering vines.

It came down to this: The Middeltons loved their Ruxton neighborhood but their 86-year-old house didn't suit their lifestyle. From the kitchen, Courtney Middelton couldn't keep an eye on 5 1/2 -year-old Hadley playing less than 20 feet away. The back door was like a one-lane bridge from the kitchen to the deck, always with somebody waiting to get in or out. And getting around seemed uncomfortable, especially during family gatherings and small parties. But when Courtney and Dan Middelton looked to move, they found that though prices in the community were no longer at their peak, they remained out of reach.

The chef reaches up, pulls down a ticket, shouts out an order, spins around and inspects a couple of plates going out, wiping the edges with a towel. A loud clatter of dishes, a line cook barks back and another order goes out. This is the Foundry on Melrose, Eric Greenspan's hot new restaurant in Los Angeles. It's hectic and tense and noisy, but we're not in the kitchen - we're in the dining room. Though the new spot already has become known as a place to be entertained - there's live music six days a week - the real show is chef Greenspan himself.

Brian Fox follows the debate over Baltimore's proposed smoking ban - he can recite where every city politician stands on the issue - but that doesn't mean he's looking to City Hall for answers. Tired of waiting for action, Fox, who owns the Sly Fox Pub, recently made the Fort Avenue bar smoke-free. It was a gutsy move in South Baltimore, which many revere for its old-school and often smoky neighborhood corner bars, but the decision appears to be paying off. "I've always been for the smoking ban," said Fox, who opened his pub about two years ago. "This is very much a common-sense issue to me. There are more people who avoid places because they're too smoky."

Stone Hill, near the Jones Falls in Hampden, is an appropriate name for a cluster of homes built almost two centuries ago. Dotting a few hillsides on what was once the site of a large flour mill, followed by a sailcloth factory, these quaint two-story duplexes are built of local fieldstone granite and were the 19th-century houses of mill supervisors. One house at the foot of the hill, however, stands out from the others, distinguished by its larger size and detailed appointments. "We walked by this house for 15 years, but thought we could never afford to have something like it," Robyne Thistel remembered.

Two years ago last August, Melissa and Rick Henry decided to sell their Baltimore County townhouse and move to a single-family home. "We were looking for an open floor plan," said Melissa Henry, a stay-at-home mother of two. "[We] wanted to see our kids from any room on the [first] floor." Rick Henry, a 35-year-old liquor salesman, on a different wave of thought, added that the couple likes to welcome guests. "We entertain a lot," he said. "This house is great for entertaining."

What's a nice semi-boneless quail with couscous and roasted shallots doing in a place like this? From what I understand, the new Reserve is a serious upgrade from what was there before. But the upgrade consists of two bars, more flat-screen TVs than you can shake a stick at, some high-top tables, exposed brick walls, really loud music and no fabric to speak of. All that adds up to a typical South Baltimore bar, nicer than some, but not exactly where you expect to find duck confit salad and creme brulee.

Baltimore's Center Club is holding two "grand reopening" celebrations next week to unveil the results of a $2.7 million renovation completed over the summer. The private dining club at 100 Light St. has scheduled a reception for government, business and civic leaders on Sept. 9 and a members-only reception on Sept. 10. The project represented a show of faith by the club and its board of governors in downtown Baltimore, where it started in 1962. The club's first significant upgrade in 20 years, it included a new harbor-view dining room, wine room, bar and lounge area, dance floor and private dining rooms.

In October 1998, David and Susan Balderson moved one mile across Route 29 in Ellicott City, from the east side to the west, because they wanted to own the imposing Colonial home whose 34 windows always boasted a lighted electric candle. Wayside Inn, circa 1780, was up for sale and the couple felt lucky to acquire the house and property for $400,000. In one year's time, they would completely renovate, and David Balderson would take up where the prior owner left off - running the 6,000-square-foot home as a bed and breakfast.

When they became engaged last year, Ed Stone, a Perry Hall native and Kathy Merz, who lived downtown in Federal Hill, began to look for a home. They wanted a new place where they could start their life together. "[Ed] didn't want the city," Kathy Stone remembered. "And I didn't think I could leave it." Then the couple found the new community of Quarry Lake, northwest of the city off Greenspring Avenue. "It was a great compromise," Kathy Stone remembered. "[Quarry Lake] has shops, restaurants and a drugstore for me and greenery and open spaces for Ed."

Courtney's is now Piv's Pub. Kind of. When Courtney's restaurant was in Timonium, where Christopher Daniel is now, Piv's Pub was the name of its sidekick bar. A few years ago, Courtney's - and Piv's Pub - moved to its current location in Cockeysville, where the old Bare Bones used to be. The whole establishment has recently been renovated and all of it is now known as Piv's Pub. The overhaul, which includes a new party room, looks sharp, like someone put...

Peering into the front window of their future home, all that AMY Grace and Karen Blood could see was a center spiral staircase. They were hooked. The couple's friends thought they were crazy to leave their lush, suburban environs north of the city for a building that was broken up into office space and needed a total rehab. But the two women wanted both the Federal Hill neighborhood and the challenge of renovation. They purchased the 16-foot-wide by 70-foot-deep two-story rowhouse on a 120-foot deep lot for $72,000.

Here is a smidgen of information Barry Werner shares with visitors to his home, which doubles as a business: As a child, he used to play a game of "bed and breakfast" with his grandmother. "I have always wanted to be an innkeeper," he said with the matter-of-fact tone of a man who achieved his lifelong aspiration. Werner and his partner (in business and life), Jeff Finlay, happened upon Scarborough Fair in the heart of Federal Hill. A historic property, it had been on the market for three years, its owners having turned three separate, brick Colonial rowhouse dwellings, circa 1801, into an inn. Very much a turn-key operation, all the inn needed was innkeepers.

Would the industrial hum of refrigeration in a dining room bother you enough to keep you from fully enjoying your evening? Maybe it's nothing you'd ever notice, and when Fazzini's is crowded with diners, you might not hear it even if you tried to. But it was the hum from Fazzini's big takeout case and, more generally, the pervasive drabness about its storefront dining room that I think colored my appreciation of this long-popular Cockeysville restaurant....

A traditional floor plan? Almost. Lots of light? Absolutely. Convenient storage? Everywhere. Those were among the key points in discussions with an architect when Mary Ellen and Leon Kaplan sought to have a home built in Cockeysville 15 years ago. They wanted a traditional house with substantial areas open not only for guests, but also so they could watch their four children. "We've had parties with up to 100 people, and you can do more in the summer when you use the patios," Mary Ellen Kaplan said.