Are dining rooms making a comeback?
Amanda Pollard
4 years ago
Separate dining room
Open-plan kitchen-diner
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Comments (6)
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dining room and sitting room in one
Comments (1)Photos and a floor plan would be helpful....See MoreHow to make this dining room and kitchen into open plan?
Comments (3)I would suggest that the living room remains seperate and that perhaps internal doors are replaced with half glass doors so that they are more welcoming - as we have dogs with wet noses! we tend to keep glass on the upper half of the door only! Keeping the living room seperate will give you and your wife an adult area that you can disappear to when children have friends round in later years.... And also means you will have an area that is free from cooking smells etc for guests to walk into. I would move the door from the hall back into line with the existing wall of the kitchen to dinning room so as to get rid of that small little entrance from hall to kitchen. I would then knock down the dinning room to kitchen wall to have this as open plan with an island in the middle - with islands I would not recommend having it as your kitchen 'wet area' - I see this a lot in magazines but does after all mean that the main focal point of the kitchen becomes the kitchen sink and its dirty dishes!!! Instead I would have a hob etc on the island so that you can cook on that and eat on the other side of the island perhaps on a curved top. I would keep the toilet where it is but just loose a small corridor area between it and the kitchen for boots coats etc... thus separating toilet from kitchen. I have done similar to this in my home and it works a treat - love the fact that we have a seperate lounge (our sanctuary!) and a regular living space as well....See MoreDo you think closed kitchens are making a comeback?
Comments (33)Not sure whether they are making a comeback, but we have recent experience of both and think it just depends on the house. Our old house was a 1960s build, split level (built into the hill) with a kitchen off the dining room, and the sitting room up three steps from the opposite side of the dining room. From the sitting room one could look down onto the dining room and through to the kitchen. When we refitted the kitchen about fifteen years ago we knocked out the units which divided the kitchen from the dining room and put an island in the space. It worked fantastically well for us; a great place to sit and catch up with the kids when they came in from school, and many times their friends joined us in chat and banter around the island. The house was perfect for entertaining and for our family, even though there was no separate (able to be closed off) sitting room. Although now both adults and left home, our kids were very sad when we moved away and sold the house, as were many of their friends. (Maybe because it was party-central at times...!) We now have an Edwardian semi with a fairly large kitchen at the back, accessed through the dining room, and we have a kitchen table and chairs plus the computer in there. The dining room is for when we have guests, and Sunday lunch when I do a roast, even if it's just the two of us. The kitchen gets the rising sun and is lovely first thing in the morning. Our sitting room is at the front of the house and is smaller and cosy, ideal for snuggling up in front of the log burner at this time of year. And it gets the setting sun which is nice in the afternoon/evening. We can still seat plenty of people though. We thought we had to have open plan as that's what we'd had for so long, in fact what we have now is working perfectly for us. We still have plenty of entertaining space and have pre dinner nibbles in the kitchen before eating in the dining room. In the summer we mostly eat outside as we had the garden landscaped this year and we love it out there. A well designed garden with comfortable seating has proved to be the best thing we've done with a house! Angie...See MoreVictorian House Extension - making better use of the dining room
Comments (10)I think if you moved the toilet over to the fireplace wall in the dining room then the dining room becomes basically a corridor between sitting room and kitchen. Having it tucked under the stairs is prob best use of space. Could you not use the dining room as a dining room still, with the kitchen (I assume it's a one wall set up) and island in the kitchen as that is the largest space. If you have pocket doors or barn style doors leading to the sitting room you will save a lot of space for the dining table. Agree with Rinked that more light would be a good thing. If no scope to put in a rooflight could you break a window(s) either side of the fireplace?...See More
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