Dining room or no dining room

[Pichee]

Dh and I have decided to build - only way we can really afford to stay in our area and increase sq footage with kids who need more space.

Anyway, we are about to finalise our plans with architects and I’m really conflicted! Right now our plans do not have a separate dining room as we’ve opted to go for a home office for me instead. But I think on occasions like Christmas, birthdays etc a dining room is nice to have. Our plans currently include a spacious kitchen diner with nice French windows looking out to the garden but I’m worried on days when we’ve been messy cooking ie Christmas it won’t be pleasant to sit in a humid, messy kitchen. It’s nice to have that separation imo.

We could make my office slightly bigger by reducing our family room. I would just have my computer set up on the dining table and put away for when we want to use the dining room. But that would mean the family room is slightly tighter than I would like - I’m really want at least 2 sofas and an armchair as the fights we have over who sits where is so very grating or he’s on my side of the cushion blah blah.

We use our dining room most nights as the table in the kitchen is a bit of a squeeze these days.

Any input would be amazing if you have kitchen/diners, or if you miss or don’t miss having a dining room.

Thanks

Depending on space available and what the added expense/compromise would be, I would always choose to have a dining room. We had one growing up, our first home didn’t have one and I really missed it. Although we did have a dining table in the kitchen we do quite a lot of cooking and so I found the kitchen got hot & stuffy and then sitting at the table looking at pans etc that needed washed while eating wasn’t amazing! It was fine still but I really missed having a dining room so we made sure to find a house with one when we bought our second house x

i think because this dining room is further from the kitchen it would be less used - dining room will be front of house whilst kitchen diner is width of the back. More so because the kitchen dining table should be plenty big enough to accommodate us (which our current one is not hence why we do tend to use the dining room in current house)

If you have a large kitchen diner open plan I wouldn't lose family room space for the design.

You would be making a decision based on not modifying behaviour. We have open plan, state of the art extractor, lots of storage, huge dishwasher and a utility room that hides a multiple of sins.

What is your full set up like as smaller less costly tweaks may make more sense. Will your office take a fold out bed ? Handy for guests.

Dining room is probably a luxury We have a living room and a dining room, and it does impart a sense of occasion to go in there for a meal. We use it for family birthdays and Christmas, and just for the two of us if I want to create a sense of occasion, but for every day we eat in the kitchen, or in the conservatory or outside depending on weather. The dining room was the children's play room when they were young, and then a sitting room for them when they were teenage, so for Christmas we'd have to do some furniture moving and erect a table in whatever space we could create. So it's lovely to have a dedicated space (I can lay the Christmas table on Christmas Eve, for example), but enough space for every day is more important.

So for basically 1 or 2 days in the year you want to have less desirable living / working space?

working at a dining table is terrible for your back, posture, eye sight etc. and just generally not recommended.
plus your lovely Christmas use dining room will look terrible and messy most of the year.

as long as your current plans have a table big enough for your every day use then I’d prioritise having a nice living space with enough chairs and a comfortable and beneficial office space that you’re likely to be using most days.

as for hiding the mess of the kitchen etc. are you having an island or peninsula?
if look at rejigging your work surface so that any island or peninsula has a sort of bar like raised edge / shelf / high on the living space side so that when you’re sat at the table you can’t see the work surface.

not sure I’m really explaining it well and I can’t find a picture. But like how when you go to a bar, the non public side is lower so front the customer side you don’t see drip trays and stuff. Does that make sense?

Can you make the layout of your kitchen diner so the table is not in the middle of kitchen debris? If so, I think you'll use this dining space and find it a faff and waste of space to have another separate room unless you entertain a lot fairly formally. The family room is likely to be used everyday so more space here will be beneficial.

I would much rather have a decent sized home office than a dining room, a dining room is nice, but you will be spending far more time in an office if you wfh, as pp said, I'd go with a good extractor, make sure you open your windows to stop it being too humid after cooking.

Yes they have this in The Sopranos!

Our current plan has a large island

I would always have a separate dining room as well as a dining table in the kitchen. I've lived in my house for 30 years and the dining room has been used in various different ways. At first for a couple of years it was a playroom when the children were very small, then went into use as an actual dining room.

We have weekend meals in there when extra people come, birthdays, Christmases, dinner parties etc, so much nicer not to be surrounded by the mess of cooking. The piano is in there so it was used for music practice( great that you can shut the noise off). It was also used for doing homework as one child had a small desk in their bedroom and needed more room. I use it for sewing( don't want kitchen smells on fabric) and I also do various crafts in there. I'd never be without a separate dining room.

Why would you want to sacrifice an office (presumably used several times a week) for a dining room that you'll use a couple of times a year?

Maybe just get a collapsible table and eat in the office at Christmas if it bothers you?

It really depends on your lifestyle. We have a dining room and we use it occasionally; I find for birthdays we tend to go celebrate out. However we do use it for Christmas and Thanksgiving dinners. I also find we use it more when we have play dates- DC is at an age where the parents come too and it’s easier to sit everyone for lunch/ snacks etc. we also use it if we have people staying with us as the table we have in the kitchen can sit 4 people only.
Also for Christmas I only decorate the dining room- tree, decoration etc instead of having all that stuff in the areas used every day (especially since I don’t remove the decoration until late Jan/ early Feb 🤣)

I have a biggish kitchen diner. I don't miss a dining room. I think it's a bit of a dated concept...unless you have an absolute huge house, I wouldn't bother.

If dining room is front of house and kitchen at the back, this means you ( and others) will be carrying food and drinks through the house. Cold food, splashes on the walls and sticky floors. Good extractor, sink with two basins, utility with basin and dishwasher. Train everyone to wash up as they go.

I have a lovely kitchen diner, been in my house 8 years and never wished I had a dining room. I do technically have a room that should be a dining room,but I gave it over to a kids snug / playroom.

Just design your kitchen diner cleverly so there's a good divide of space.

Depends on your kitchen diner. Can you post plans? If it’s got a proper table that you can all readily fit around, I would focus on making sure it can be a nice space for family meals as well as cooking.

If your office could be big enough to double up - not by working off the dining table, that’s a terrible idea, but by having an extendable folded large table at the side of the room which you can get out for occasions, and having your desk set up properly in there for normal times, AND you can do that without compromising your family room space, then I’d do that. But you need family room space to be big enough especially as kids grow and start taking up even more room on sofas.

FWIW we have a kitchen diner, no room at all for a separate dining room. In an ideal world I’d prefer it, but it works great, we take extra care to clear up as we go so the kitchen isn’t a state when we’re having nice meals. We squeezed 10 of us around at Xmas - far too crowded but that’s the space we have! And it’s good to have kitchen surface space for extra serving dishes / wine etc. It’s easier for the people cooking and running in and out with stuff too.

We built our house too. There's a kitchen/diner, a sitting room and a snug, and a room that was intended to be the 'nice' dining room.

It didn't get used as a dining room ever, it got taken over by teenagers and turned into their den... Twenty years on I'm still waiting to reclaim it, but have decided it'll be a library/office instead of a dining room. That's what we really need, but didn't occur to us when we built the house and we are currently using an unused bedroom as an office.

So I vote, don't bother with a dining room.

We have a kitchen diner. I love it both for daily use and parties . There is an island for congregating round at parties . The table has extension pieces so the room feels spacious with a family table but still acocomodates up to 14 for a celebration.
We have separate offices and turned the dining room into a bootility. I can’t see the value of a separate dining room at all.

We have a dining room, and we usually eat in it, but we have one of those stretchy tables that fold down to console size and go up to seating 12. We keep it with one leaf in so it can be used for up to four but has a small footprint in the room, which also has easy chairs, a spare TV and bookcases so it doubles as another sitting room. It works for us, as it means we can watch different things, one listen to music while the other works or whatever. It was good when the children were at home too, as it gave them somewhere else to be, which suited both them and us.

At Christmas or if we need to put the table up bigger, we just move a chair or two into another room while we eat.

I think a dining room is more than a space to have family meals on big occasions. We use ours all the time with the kids, for to eat meals at the weekend, arts and craft, playing etc. Its so nice to have the big table and space to spread our stuff around!
It's semi-open onto the living room, so it's connected but still a separate room is we want to do different things (we are planning to add glass french doors for a bit more sound proofing).
I don't think we would do all those things in the kitchen much, unless one of us of cooking.

I miss my office to WFH, but got used to it in the end. We work on the dining room table, and have a big sideboard to put all our work stuff at the end of the day. It works well for us!

Could you squeeze in a smaller office elsewhere? Maybe upstairs?

Also, we've been thinking about going the self-build route but worry it would work out more than buying a similar house here. Can I ask how much you're looking at spending on the build itself?

I find it strange to hide away the Christmas decorations in a room you don’t use everyday. I want to be able to see the tree every day without having to go and sit ina room which isn’t normally used. So a separate dining room means decorating that in addition to living room and hall. But that’s a lot easier than making a festive table in the kitchen

I have a big kitchen table in my kitchen extension. I don’t see the point of a dining room. It means if someone’s cooking the kids are at the table playing and I’m sitting chatting. It’s much more sociable.

You could always have a pair of curtains to draw to cut off the prep space from the eating space when you want to be posher

Or a collapsible table to go up in the sitting room for special meals? Covered with a nice floor length linen cloth it would do fine

I managed to think of the right thing to google. This was what I meant. I’d go with this to give more feeling of separating the spaces and hiding the kitchen work surfaces from view when sat at dining table