Bringing down the house

Well, the walls. Since a guy contacted us wanting to buy the double doors from our dining room that we had listed for sale on a website, and he wanted the doorframe also, that was the impetus we needed to start taking down the dining room wall. (And "we" of course means "Frédéric".) We haven't decided yet what to do with the remaining section of wall, at left in the photo. We're leaning towards removing the top half of it (leaving the bottom half for the sofa to be up against so it isn't just in the middle of the entryway), so the question is more to whether to leave it open, or to put some kind of spindles / shelving / something in the top half.