Would you rather have a big living room or a small living and dining room?

[pinkponie]

Planning on looking at properties next year. We currently have a small living room and a dining room separately. We previously had a big living room ( 7.3m by 4.5m iirc) but no dining room. Assume you don’t have space in the kitchen for a dining table. What works better for families as ours have grown?

Dining rooms are pretty redundant I think.
i think an open space where you can watch kids while you’re making dinner is nicer ?

I prefer a separate dining room if an eat-in kitchen is not possible, because it's nice being able to close doors for quiet and cosiness rather than living in one big space. But that is not the fashion at the moment, it's all open plan and 'flow'.

I would prefer two smaller rooms

I like a dining room because we eat at the table every day and our kitchen is an odd shape so nowhere sensible for a table to go. Our dining room also gets used for homework and we have bookshelves and cupboards built in either side of the chimney breast/fireplace so contains lots of DS' toys too

Well, will you use a dining room? (Some people seem to eat on the sofa a lot.) Will you carry food from the kitchen in there to eat it? Will it have other functions other than eating?

ETA. Probably depends on its position in relation to the kitchen too. We’ve just done a renovation that gave us a kitchen with space for a table, after years of a kitchen with nowhere to eat and where you had to carry food out through a small door and down a passage (house with Victorian layout unaltered).

Two small rooms is better than one room, an eat in kitchen as well is great.

I think open plan is rapidly falling out of fashion.The only time I'd knock two rooms together is kitchen-diner if its only a galley kitchen.

I don’t think open plan is out of fashion at all. Many parents like talking to dc whilst cooking. Many people I know like a large kitchen diner with a sofa in it. Separate lounge suits some - not others. We have partial open plan. No doors - wide openings but some walls in situ. We have a good sized house though. I’d always prefer not to be shut away in a kitchen though. Being with family is preferable.

Big living room.

I don't want to spend the majority of my waking hours in a tiny room just so I have somewhere to eat food for a few minutes.

I'd rather stick a fold out table in a large living room and quickly pull it out when needed.

I also have a huge living room, with many different things in each corner. One corner has our PCS, a corner has our holidays memories shelves with cupboards. Other has my business inventory. Other is my work station.

But in the heart of the living room, sofas. Dining table and TV on chimney wall with rectangle kitchen next door. It works so well for us and im expecting our first child, hell have so much room to play in living room. :)

So id go for one big room, it saves hassle on floor plans imo.

Dining rooms are only redundant if your kitchen is big enough for a table and chairs.
You need somewhere to sit and eat!

If the room is big enough as yours was it's combined living space. Dining in part, living room in the rest. My favourite tbh. That's how we had it

Two smaller rooms!

I have autistic kids who wind each other up so the more rooms we can speed into the better

its also annoying watching tv with the washing machine running and with multiple kids the machine runs more

It really depends on your lifestyle. When DC were young I liked open plan. Now I want them to leave me alone so I’d like two rooms. But personally I’d always prefer to have the table in a large kitchen: I feel like a maid when the kitchen is away from everyone else having a nice time together!

Depends on the size of your family, and your stage of life, and also how big the rooms actually are.

When we had dc at home, I was SO glad to have two living rooms. Unless you have an unusual family, I venture to suggest that families with more than one child, will have a lot of times when one child is needing to watch TV just as another finds it imperative they have to do their piano practice. Or one needs to be watching a film/ match with the friend they invited round just as another needs to concentrate on some homework they need to do on the computer. Etc., etc. etc.
That's before you get into the times when you, as adults might have friends round, or people for a meeting, but the dc need space elsewhere to do their thing.

The more separate spaces you have, the better.

However
Now my dc have grown, and have partners, then a smaller living room can be difficult to fit everyone in at the same time when you want to all get together.

If you can't have a table in the kitchen, then definitely two separate rooms. I suppose it depends on whether you eat at the table or not... Also depends on how big the living room is. I like having separate spaces, but we have an open plan kitchen-diner and an OK sized separate living room.

Depends how much smaller. I would definitely need to have a permanent table and chairs as we eat at it every day. It could work as part of a larger living room depending on the layout. Ours is rather open plan but more or less separate spaces. I would like to be able to close it off sometimes, but I’d rather the lighter space with more flexibility than more cramped smaller rooms.

How old are the DC? Do they need supervising whilst you’re cooking, or just to be in earshot (or old enough to preferably not in earshot at all!)

I initially wanted a big kitchen-dining room and separate living room, but in London on our budget it was difficult to find that without compromising elsewhere - e.g. garden made small because of an extension to create the kitchen-diner. In our place we have a small kitchen directly across the hallway from our big living-dining room, and took the kitchen and living room doors out so the dining table is in clear view and talking range for when we have friends over for dinner. It actually suits us well now, people gravitate from the dining table to the sofas as the evening goes on, and the chaos in the kitchen gets to stay out of sight, without the living space feeling closed in.

I recently sold my house. The regular feedback from those who didn’t like the house was that the living room was too small for a family of five. I had a beautiful large open plan kitchen space but the living room was tiny. If I’d have stayed there I’d have knocked the dining room and living room together to make it bigger.

@PreggieMama Dc don’t play on their own in a separate lounge though and yours sounds more like an office too. Who will supervise whilst someone is cooking?

We're lucky. In our Edwardian terrace the sitting room and dining room ( which we use as a music room) are divided by the original large pocket sliding, very solid, wooden doors. Closed, you have two separate rooms, that really feel separate. Open, one large through room.

We also have a 22' kitchen diner.

We had 1 big room- found it really annoying, so when we moved we wanted 2 smaller rooms- works much better when you have a few kids, we can have the switch on in 1 room and adults watching telly in other for example. Or when dh wants to watch footie at night, I go watch something else.

Definitely separate rooms, I don't like any to be combined.

I always choose 2 separate rooms, hate open plan living with a passion. We have a living room and play room for the kids though, we only use a full dining table a few times a year so not worth a whole room (ours is drop leaf and folds down quite small).

That said I want 2 decent sized rooms not little rooms like new builds. In Victorian terraces they all pretty much have 2 large rooms but mid century (1960 onwards) type with 1 room is not for me or the tiny tiny couldn't swing a hamster new builds round here.

The trade of is usually how space is used, most the mid century type houses are semi-detached with gardens and driveways and most the Victorian ones are much bigger inside but terraces with just little concrete yards and on street parking here.

No DC here but we have small cosy lounge- just bookshelves, sofa and TV. It’s a room for chilling out and relaxing. It stays pretty pristine for this reason.

Then large open plan kitchen diner- enough space for DH desk, dining table and chairs, another sofa and obviously kitchen. This is our “doing” room- cooking, working, eating, household chores. It’s also plenty of space for hosting and entertaining. i do eventually want to re work the layout to box off a small “lootility” so we can box off the washing machine for the noise. But largely the combo of “chilling room” vs “doing room” works really well.

Considering current cost of energy and heating I’d rather have a smaller cosy living space and a kitchen- diner as opposed to heating a larger living dining space

but I think I just prefer kitchen diners anyway tbh