Interior designer Marilyn Morgan offers this: Lime green suggests both serenity and good humor, and although it is a cool color, lime's closeness to yellow adds warmth and vitality. It's popular, so accessories and complementary linens are plentiful. If you want to project a calm atmosphere, add gray to the lime and combine it with soft beige or yellow-tan. Drapes (on a maple pole) could be gentle blue tinted with gray to the same intensity as the lime. Use gray-blue in the area rug. Mix with lots of dark green leaf plants. This cool, harmonious scheme is an especially good choice if your dining room faces west.

More difficult to execute (but so interesting) is to combine a clear shade of lime for the walls and draperies and do the chairs in subtle tones of red-orange and blue-violet. Depending on the saturation of these colors, the mood can be energetic and lively or sophisticated and elegant.

Finally, for a fresh young look, combine the lime green walls with white drapes on white wood poles. White chair fabric with a good deal of texture works. A dark green area rug anchors the scheme. Do the ceiling and trim white, to which you'll add a little yellow. Using different whites gives you a subtle play of color. Add more texture with white raffia, grass, matchstick or natural gauze shades. When painting the ceiling and trim the same color as the wall, tint two shades lighter than the walls.