How often do you eat a meal in your dining room? If you don't have a dining room, do you wish you had one (or do you realize that if you had one, you wouldn't use it much)?
Have you ever thought of converting your dining room into some other function room (or have you already done that)? To what specific function for which you don't currently have a room would you devote the room that is now your dining room if you decided to abolish the dining room in your house?
Did you know that the dining room is a fairly recent thing? From Bill Bryson's wonderful book "At Home: A Short History of Private Life":
Dining room didn’t acquire its modern meaning until the late seventeenth century and didn’t become general in houses until even later. In fact, it only just made it into Samuel Johnson’s dictionary of 1755. When Thomas Jefferson put a dining room in Monticello, it was quite a dashing thing to do.
Previously, meals had been served at little tables in any convenient room. What caused dining rooms to come into being wasn’t a sudden universal urge to dine in a space exclusively dedicated to the purpose, but rather, by and large, a simple desire on the part of the mistress of the house to save her lovely new upholstered furniture from greasy desecration. Upholstered furniture, as we have lately seen, was expensive, and the last thing a proud owner wanted was to have anyone wiping fingers on it.
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I love my dining room and use it once a month as a dining room and use the big table for other purposes more often than that. The best part of a dining room is that your guests can't see the mess in the kitchen while they are enjoying the meal.
A friend's wife asked the architect to eliminate the kitchen from their new house in Santa Barbara. She doesn't cook. He talked her out of it on the argument that the house would be unsellable without a kitchen.
It is the least used room in the house, a nice big modern home with an ocean view.
Last year, when my separated wife and I were still living in our now sold home, we had a formal dining room that was only used during holidays. Based on that, the dining room was only used 2 or 3 times per year. At some point I will get another house or townhouse, and I will not need a formal dining room at all.
I once had a dining room with book shelves. Saw it recommended in a decorating book decades ago, so nothing new there. I love giving dinner parties, so yes, dining rooms are important to me. I love giving big parties, so yes, dining rooms are important for staging food. (Kitchens are for staging beverages.)
My favorite dining room ever was in an old Victorian big enough for a round table sitting ten. To me nothing is better than wonderful conversations over good food at a round table were everyone has equal access to the topic.
the mistress of the house to save her lovely new upholstered furniture from greasy desecration.
That's what I'm missing!! A mistress!
Of course, the wife would probably take a dim view of that.
We live in a 1920s bungalow with an eat-in kitchen and a large dining room. We've made the dining room into a schoolroom/office.
However, the parental units find this positively barbaric and are always trying to convince us to eat in the dining room.
I have kids. They are slobs. Mess is easier when it's on the linoleum. I really can't see why you'd waste an entire room just so things looked more formal at Thanksgiving dinner.
The dinning room is for Thanksgiving Dinner, birthday parties, and open house parties when it rains.
The other 340 days a year it is not used at all.
But like the Guest Bedroom/s who wants to give up on the idea of hosting social family fun?
We have a bkfst nook where we eat most meals as a family. For company, the dining room is used, because the nook seats only 4.
How do you entertain guests comfortably if you don't have a place for them to sit and converse with others while they eat?
Every Sunday my Wife and I eat dinner in the Dining Room, with good china (we have 2 sets0 and crystal wine glasses. Yes we can see the TV, but so what. We have good things and enjoy them. We also have dinner guests about every other month and we use the dining room.
Since we only used our dining room 2 or 3 times a year, 5 years ago we tore out a wall and expanded our kitchen. It became the Mancave. This is now the most used part of our home.
I blogged the saga here: http://expandingkitchen.blogspot.com/
My wife and I eat in the breakfast room. Whenever we have even one guest, we eat in the dining room.
David in Cal
The dining room's often the best place for the litter boxes.
My apartment is essentially a large rectangular box with a thin wall separating my bedroom from the rest of the main living space. That living space is basically divided into two zones, one where the TV and couch reside and the other where the dining table and chairs reside. There's also a kitchen and a bathroom, of course.
Way too much space is devoted to the dining "room" part of the living space, given how rarely we eat at the table. The table itself is quite large, seating 6-8 rather comfortably. It's a ridiculous waste of space in a NYC apartment, but my wife loves the table.
We eat at the table maybe 5 times a year.
We turned our formal dining room into a study as soon as we moved into our house in 1987. I don't know what the builders expected the space next to the kitchen to be used for; it's no good for anything except very slightly less formal dining.
I've long dreamed of converting my dining room into a bowling alley. Oh, except I don't bowl. And it's 75 feet too short.
Our home does not have a formal dining room. I miss it for two reasons: First, holiday feasts (Thanksgiving, Christmas, New Years, Easter) are still formal events in our home and would benefit from being held in a dining room. We make do with our kitchen table or we set up a larger table in our sun room if we have guests.
Second, I miss having the dining room available for holding meetings in my home. A formal dining room makes a good conference room and is perfect for holding committee meetings, whether for work, school, club, or church. With our home's modern open floor plan, there's no place private to hold such meetings in our home.
And, no, I wouldn't worry that we would only use the dinning room for the occasional meeting or holiday. We hardly ever use our living room (as opposed to our family room). I'm still glad we have a living room for when we have guests.
We all sat in front of the TV, with our plates on our laps. So we used the dining room as a place to set up our desktop computers.
Then we all got laptops, which we now use in front of the TV, so the dining room contains our exercise equipment.
At some point I assume we will get exercise equipment that we can use on our laps in front of the TV, and we will have to find another use for the dining room.
I would lump the formal Dining Room in with the formal Living Room. The latter's function has been replaced first by the Family Room followed by the more pretentious Great Room. The former's function replaced by the Dinette.
Our newer current home plays lip service to both rooms. The formal Dining Room and Living Room are mere vestiges of earlier incarnations. The formal Dining Room is roughly the same size as our Dinette, and the Living Room would be more accurately described as a den. They are sort of the architectural version of homo sapiens' appendix or tail bone.
Nonetheless, I love them both. The Living Room is my perfect Winter start a fire, grab a book, escape from the Great Room place. And you can happily linger over a good meal with close friends in the Dining Room in a way the Dinette doesn't support.
As to how often its used, I'd wager in most cases Dining Rooms are used at least as often as the "Jacuzzi" tubs that every new home seems obligated to provide.
We try to eat Sunday dinner in the dining room, but don't always make it. More often than not, the huge table in the dining room, a large solid wood affair that seats eight comfortably, is used for arts and crafts. My wife and I usually have our laptops there because the chairs are comfy.
Quite often, actually. The breakfast table is always covered up with the "stuff of the day," and in front of the TV is inconvenient because we have dogs...
In my experience, those who eat in front of the TV tend to be boring conversationalists. Has anyone else observed this? OK, just me then.
Now that we are but two, the dining room gets used only when we have guests. We have no kitchen eat in area but a nice porch, which also has a dining table. We will eat at a table on the porch, with trays in the living room or in front of the tv.
Our dining room is not large but it still seems like a cavern for just two people.
If we had an actual cavern, that might be fun though.
We rarely use the dining room, but it's definitely nice when entertaining. One good thing about having a separate room where that we don't use constantly is that it doesn't pick up the clutter that accumulates and re-accumulates in the kitchen and breakfast area (we eat at the coffee table 95% of the time). It's nice to know that there's a usable surface somewhere in the house.
We don't have an "eat-in kitchen." For some time, we ate dinner in the living room, in front of the television.
About five years ago, we decided to return to sit-down dinners, so we eat at the dining room table every night.
There also is another use here for the dining room. I like sometimes to knit at a table, so there are many afternoons when I spend time in the dining room.
We live in an open floor plan California ranch. Surprisingly, we do eat in the dining room if the dining room is defined by where we placed the dining room table. That is a spot halfway between the kitchen island and the section of the room that has bookshelves on the walls.
When we bought the house we planned to buy stools for informal meals around the kitchen island, but haven't really felt the need since.
Our last house was a 1920s four square in which the dining room doubled as a library.
I have an eat in kitchen with a table and an island. I also have a large dining room. When I had a dining room table I found I used it mostly for folding my laundry so I got rid of the table and converted the room into a home office. When I hosted thanksgiving I rented a table, removed all the office furniture and had eight people over for dinner.
"How often do you eat a meal in your dining room?"
Twice a day: breakfast by myself, before everyone else gets up, and then dinner together as a family. Wife and I have been having dinner together at the table more or less every night for the entire >13 years of our marriage, and daughter has been joining us since she was big enough to sit up. No TV, no phones, no eating on the run. It's a really important time for us to review the day past and plan the day to come.
I'm a big believer in "do what works for you", but this works well enough for us that I'd recommend that anyone try it.
We eat in it every night. It's also the piano room and the block building room. We can't eat in the kitchen because we converted that eating area into an art area. (Better that art supplies are used in a tiled room than elsewhere.)
MadAsHell,
"Of course, the wife would probably take a dim view of that. "
Rule #1: don't tell her. (Seriously, did you never watch Master and Commander?)
We live in a 1925 rowhouse that features a dining room the size of the living room, separated from the kitchen by a wall. There's no breakfast room, so we eat all our meals there, and we leverage the excess space as our 1,000-volume library. When we renovate our kitchen, the wall will come out to provide more cooking space, and on the opposite wall we'll build in floor-to-ceiling bookcases and a china hutch. The books help fill unused space and make the dining room feel much cozier!
Enh. I have to excavate the dining room table soon, because my parents are visiting in a week. Actually, it's not precisely a "dining room," just a space next to the kitchen, occupied currently by the aforementioned table, a rug, four chairs, and a row of bookcases containing most of our musicological books.
Like (so far as I can see) everyone here, we hardly ever use it for dining. Dining goes on in the living room, or in our respective office spaces.
Which, come to think of it, is a bit odd. Eating off the coffee table is potentially risky, potentially messy. We do it anyway.
We make a point of eating in our dining room at least once a week.
Am I the only one who uses the dining room daily, because the house has no eat-in kitchen? Likewise, we live in the living room because we have no family room. (Or, rather, the room that was built as a "family room" addition we use as the computer/piano room, and the finished basement is the kids' playrom.)
Our house was built in 1960. My parents' house was built in 1977 and has both a never-used living room and a never-used dining room (well, in both cases, used only on holidays).
We have a dining room and we use it every day, certainly for dinner in the summertime when we come inside because it's too hot to work, and almost always for supper. Most breakfasts, too. Besides, we don't have a TV.
The table can easily seat ten, and there's no better fun than having it surrounded by good friends delighting in a meal fresh from the field.
Our dogs use the dining room 2x a day.
Our humans use it 2x a year.
My God, I haven't eaten at a table anywhere in my house in a very long time.
Jane t. A.:
"Am I the only one who uses the dining room daily, because the house has no eat-in kitchen? "
No.
I think you're part of the Silent Majority in this respect.
When we bought our house (built in the 50's) we knocked down the wall between the kitchen and dining room and put a countertop there that could hold 6 nice tall chairs. That is our dining room. Since there is a patio door on our dining room, it made access to the deck easier by not having a table blocking the area. We don't watch TV, although sometimes the sound is still on in the other room. Given that we went from a 3500 sq ft house to a 2200 sq ft house, anything we could do to open up space was a plus.
Incidentally, in that old house we split time eating in the dining room or the kitchen about 50/50.
Our dining room is too small. It only just accomodates the dining room table and chairs, but it allows us to seat ten people at the table instead of our usual six so we use it for holidays and extended family visits. The rest of the time, it serves as a depository for the junk of the day/week/month whatever.
My wife and I moved from a place with no dining room to a house that had one. With no dining room table among our move in items, I suggested that we get a pool table and stick in the dining room. Right under the chandelier. It was a joke, people. We loved to play, met while playing, and I thought: hey, we'd use a pool table more than we would a dining room table. So, yeah, I said it. And you know what? She said, do you think it would fit??? That's when I knew I'd be married forever. 21 years next week...
And we had many years of fun and missed it about 2 days per year. Guys would come in and say, you've got a pool table in your dining room? And look at me like I was a king. Which I am, so that worked out nicely.
Rule #1: don't tell her. (Seriously, did you never watch Master and Commander?)
Have you never been trapped by the statement "Whose ear rings are these?".
I've also been cornered by the errant panties under the bed. What I really want to know is......How did the second woman know to look under the bed??
So, it's not just a matter of keeping my mouth shut. WOMEN MARK THEIR TERRITORY!!!
Sorry, I have friends who did this 20 years ago. Not a new trend. Personally I like having a nice room where the dog and clutter are not allowed - even if we only use it every other Christmas.
We started with an eat-in kitchen and a dining room. Then, about 1 years ago we redecorated the kitchen, moved the dining room furniture in there and changed the dining room to an office. It fits the way we live and the way we entertain. I like it a lot.
My dining room.
Not shown, 8 and 16 channel audio mixer boards, Kiwa AM loop.
My home doesn't have a dining room. One day my wife declared our living room to be a dining room and moved all the furniture out and table and chairs in. It is weird having a dining room so far removed from the kitchen.
We don't have a "formal" dining room, because I decided it was superfluous to have two kitchen tables in one house 10 feet away from each other. So most of the houses we looked when looking to buy didn't have dining rooms. Our kitchen does have a very large area for eating in though. We can pull the leaf out of our kitchen table and fit 8-10 comfortably in the area.
I can't remember the last time we didn't eat a meal at the table....
When I started quilting seven years ago, I perched a borrowed sewing machine on one corner of my dining room table. As time progressed, I sold the Italian chairs to get them out of the way, rolled up the carpet so I would have a hardwood floor, replaced the heavy drapes with simple "noren-style" valence coverings, and added spot lights. Now I have a quilting studio where we sometimes dine.
Can we define diningroom? I have a room with a table at which my family has meals twice a day, and most snacks are taken there as well.
However, we don't have seperate formal and informal dining areas and many of these responses seem aimed at formal diningrooms, with more pedestrian meals taken at the breakfast nook or some such. If that were the case in my house, we would use the diningroom about once a month, and we would never waste a room like that.
In my old home we always ate in the dining room making more room in the small kitchen. In my new home where the kitchen accommodates a large table overlooking our lovely yard, we put bookshelves and our exercise equipment in the dining room.
Since a full size pool table requires an 18' by 20' room without a pillar or post, I would be in favor of knocking down the walls in the dining room if that would make a large enough space for it.
I love my dining room; it's the center of the house. I work there every day I work from home, we eat all our meals there - it's a wonderful room. Frequently it looks like a bomb went off, but it's still my favorite.
Our house is oldish (1940) and very traditionally configured - no eat-in kitchen or anything like that. I am really not an "open concept" person, so I don't mind at all. Give me good natural light, beautiful oak floors, and you've sold me.
The kitchen is where you eat from day to day. The dining room is where you feed guests. A luxury house that doesn't contain a dining room is one that is not hospitable to guests.
If you have a 5 bedroom house and don't have a big family I would convert a bedroom or two into offices or studios before I would convert a dining room. Even if its not used the idea of not having one diminishes the value of the house.
My friends and I get together once a month or so to play various boardgames and euro games. The dining room table is perfect for those bigger games.
We have a dining room with a large, heavy, lovely table that we use on holidays and for Sunday dinners. When we're on the sports off-season and our evenings are more leisurely we eat our weekday family dinners in there, but when we're busy with practices and so on I just plate up meals directly from the stove and we take our plates to the breakfast bar with stools and the small kitchen table in the nook.
I would never get rid of my dining room or dining room table because I want my kids to know the pleasure of a leisurely meal in a dedicated space without distractions or electronics, where we're all facing each other and interaction is easily faciliated.
The room I can't wait to repurpose is the kids' playroom. Now it has their computer and toy shelves, but someday it will be my office/craft room. It's a the top of the stairs and has an enormous window looking out into the boughs of my prized huge oak trees. It's a wonderful space.
Tari,
"Our house is oldish (1940) ..."
Don't say that where any Brits can hear you!
Growing up in the 50s Mid-West but living most of my adult life in the South I've found southerners are MUCH more prone to formalities and having guests over for the sit-down dinner in the dining room is quite common. My parents 50s Frank Loyd Wright ranch-style in Illinois had a small area in the kitchen for a table and chairs where we usually ate the Sunday meal, otherwise, we ate off of TV trays in the living room while watching TV (yes, I know, HOW plebiean..) For occasions like Christmas and Thanksgiving with relatives over we utilized a custom-made FLW designed "50s modern" blond-wood (all the furniture was blond-wood "modern") "sideboard" in the living room in which the front facing could be pulled out accordion or sectional extended ladder-style into the width of the living room and covered with accompanying table leafs that were stored in the base. We rarely "entertained" at home otherwise.
Contrary-wise, all of our homes in either Louisville or New Orleans--almost all of which pre-dated the Civil War--contain(ed) large formal dining rooms which my wife and I used/use for extensive entertaining. Our condo in Marina del Rey, by contrast is strictly SoCal informal..
A lot of luxury houses have a family room and also a living room. If a room had to go I'd dump the living room and turn thst into a room for a pool table. Or an office. Or a library. But the dining room would stay.
Even though I could count the number of times we have a lot of guests over for dinner, not having it would feel weird.
The kitchen area is where the family can eat.The dining room is for guests. if you have a luxury house, you need a place for the guests to eat.
No luxury house is complete without a man cave that preferably has a pool table or at least a ping pong table. And ideally a small bar and tv. Most likely in the basement. Men need that place away from their wives/girl friends where they can be guys.
It's a good place to store the empties before driving them to Michigan for the 10 cent refund. You need to save a week's worth to make the trip worthwhile.
Reading all the comments, I thought one could develop an entire and very illuminating course on domestic life in America based on how people use their dining rooms, and the factors that influence their decisions.
My brother recently converted his dining room into a bedroom for his 96-year-old mother-in-law. Not that they didn't use their dining room, but right now they need the space for something more urgent.
A really common rehab for older houses is to knock down the wall between the kitchen and the dining room and to sort of blend the spaces. I think that for some kinds of houses, like Victorians or center-hall Colonials, it doesn't look very good.
I have lusted after a dining room all of my life. I grew up in a little ranch house with an eat in kitchen, and I live in one just like it as an adult. You folks surrendering your dining rooms... trade me houses! I live in hope of closing the door on the heat and the dirty dishes, and sitting down to dinner in a cool, pleasant dining room. Once the kids leave home, I'm planning to steal the smaller 3rd bedroom, closest to the kitchen, and repurpose it.
madAsHell,
Actually, I think the bit I referenced (the toast "To our wives and lovers! May they never meet!") works a lot better in a movie than in real life. At the very least I have very little interest in introducing that kind of chaos into mine...
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