Review : Hotel Chelsea Dinner Set from Dunelm

Can you believe it’s almost Tuesday already? I really do not know where the time goes. But I hope you all had a relaxing and restorative weekend and made it through Monday without the blues. Today I have a review for you. Now I’ve not long been doing reviews and until now I’ve mainly focused on book reviews, but I am expanding into reviewing items of homeware that I think you might like. I guess I am assuming that if you like my blog, then you like my style so chances are you will also like the items I choose to review. Fingers crossed hey? And the good news is that the items I’ll be reviewing will be things that most of us can actually afford…hurrah!! I’m starting off with this great dinnerware set from Dunelm. 

Now firstly, I have a really super embarrassing confession to make. The crockery that I have been using up until now was the most basic of basic ranges from Woolworths!! I know, I know!! When I first moved in with my husband (before we got married) we had nothing for our house, no furniture, no kitchen equipment, nothing. As we had so much to buy we had to buy cheap. And I guess we never got round to upgrading. It wasn’t that I didn’t want new crockery because I did, but I just always thought I’d invest in something really nice once we owned our own home. It was also partly because I couldn’t find anything I really liked and could afford. I guess I’m just really picky. So I was really surprised when I was contacted by Dunelm asking if I’d like to review one of their dinner sets as I wasn’t expecting to find a dinnerset that I would like quite so much.

But the Hotel Chelsea dinner set from Dunelm is totally my style. I’ve always had a thing for the asymmetric and the unusual and this set is both of those things. It has a modern, minimal design featuring a contemporary square shape with two round corners giving it a very appealing and interesting look. But it’s not only the look of it that impressed me. For some reason I thought from looking at it that it would be quite fragile but that is not the case at all. In fact it is a very robust set and the porcelain is thick enough to ensure that it is not too fragile.

Included in the dinner set are four dinner plates, four side plates, four bowls and four mugs. However, the range also has other items that can be bought separately such as: pasta bowl, serving bowl, platter, dip dish, tea pot, sugar bowl, gravy boat, butter dish and a creamer. Additional dinner plates, side plates, bowls and mugs can also be purchased should you need more than four place settings.

We’ve been using the set for a couple of weeks now and it’s really impressed me. One of the best things about it is that when stacked the plates fit into my cupboards far better than my round plates ever did. I must have quite shallow kitchen cupboards as they would never shut fully when my round plates were stored inside. But now that we have square plates we no longer have this annoying issue.

There are a few things to bear in mind though. When washing up and stacking the plates in a dish drainer you do have to be slightly careful in making sure that they are stable. The unusual shape does make them slightly prone to instability especially if your dish drainer is designer for round plates. But this isn’t really a downside, more of a consideration. And whilst the crockery is dishwasher and microwave safe we did find that when inside our microwave the square shape of the plates did prevent the turntable from rotating. But then we do have quite a compact microwave so this may not be an issue with larger machines.

As you can see from the photos, the collection really does look very impressive and I will now be proud to have people come over for dinner.

Disclosure: This is a collaborative post. Dunelm kindly supplied the products for the purpose of this review on the understanding that if we did not like them we would return them and wouldn’t feature them on the blog. All the opinions in this review are our own and we stress that we only collaborate with brands and companies that we genuinely like and believe that our readers will like too.