THE DEATH OF THE DINING ROOM
OPEN FLOOR PLANS HAVE REPLACED THESE FORMAL SPACES, AND IT’S TIME TO THINK ABOUT WHAT WE’RE GIVING UP
Perhaps the most maligned room in 21stcentury living, the dining room has a bizarre life in most homes. The formal dining room is often eliminated in contemporary home design in favor of an open place with a table set in it for eating — a hallmark of modernist design — the “open plan.”
But many, if not most of the homes we live in have the separate dining room. Almost everyone reading this will have just eaten or will eat in one of these perfectly dedicated rooms in the last or next weeks. Almost all of us in this season expect to invade our dining rooms and the dining rooms of others as part of annual rituals. Most of these are cultural, but many are personal, and not seasonal: birthdays, anniversaries, celebrations where sober and joyous connections are planned, to the point of seating diagrams.
But for a few times a year, almost all around the year’s end — Rosh Hashanah, Thanksgiving, Christmas, New Year’s — this space’s single function, dining, is the focal, central, place of preparation. How many other times are people sorted, seated and expected to enjoy themselves?
How many rooms have a single, central source of light that is intended to bath a table in a lustrous glow?
How many places are fully decorated for just a night, used once, then stripped and left bare?
How many rooms force people to look at each other and sit next to each other?
How many rooms have their center completely filled with furniture, and their perimeter left for access and storage for things that are limited, mostly, to use in that room?
The dining room may be the only place left in our culture where watching screens of any kind is completely frowned upon (except by the addicted).
Those who have dining rooms have made an isolated place of memory and history — and a stage for spectacles and performance. The great conversational rages of this time play themselves out on these chairs, often fueled by wine and our adjacency, with no distracting screens.
Unless you prefer a “traditional” floor plan, the idea of buying or renting a home that has a segregated space, with four walls around it, that is directly next to the virtual hearth of the modern era: the kitchen, is, well, crazy for the way we live our lives today.
Like the fires in the hearths of traditional homes, the home of the 21st century has people living in it that substitute the act of cooking for the fireplace. Constant activity in food becoming a meal is a shared act, as is cleaning up. The staged presentation of food (that many of us are experiencing right now) has a room dedicated to that drama: the dining room.
And more and more of us do not want it.
But at this time of year, we have it. And, for me, as someone who does not have one, and seldom designs one for others, I do miss the dining room.