Designing Our Way Out of Loneliness
What does home design have to do with loneliness?
This week, I came across an article about the disappearance of the dining room in American homes. While many of us would struggle to imagine our childhood homes without a dining room, most new homes are being built without them.
There are myriad reasons for this shift. In large, suburban spaces, the trend toward informal eating (usually in the kitchen) and the desire for a large “great room” has squeezed the dining room out of floor plans. In cities, thanks in part to the housing crisis and tight zoning laws, apartments are shrinking, leaving no room for a dedicated place to eat.
Times change, tastes change. The original separation between kitchen and dining area was designed to sequester labor (and the servants and women who performed it) from enjoyment. I remember the first time I moved into a pre-war apartment with a closed kitchen and a man who didn’t cook (not my husband). I felt like a servant, long before I realized that was what the architecture was designed to do.
As the article points out, a more open architecture makes women’s labor more obvious, and increases the likelihood that others will help. In this case, design nudged life in a more egalitarian direction, though admittedly in many cases only marginally so.
On first hearing of it, the eradication of the dining room might feel like a victory of ease over stuffiness. But it’s hard to design an entire room out of our homes without there being some consequences.
Places to gather are disappearing from modern life. Coffee shops are increasingly designed to deter lingering. Even malls no longer welcome teens. So losing the room devoted to gathering and hosting feels a bit like cutting out the social heart of the home.
We might not miss this at first. We follow the inertia and eat in front of the TV. We don’t have space to entertain, but we figure we have restaurants for that.
But over time the conversations and parties we never had adds up to a diminished sense of connection. We wonder why everyone flees the table as soon as family dinner is over, or why we never seem to have parties like our parents did. We wonder if people are too busy to connect deeply anymore, and if this loneliness is just a feature of the time we’re living in.
Right now, we’re an epidemic of loneliness. Almost half of Americans report having fewer than three close friends, and twelve percent say they have no close friends at all. People are spending less time in face-to-face social interactions, and participating in fewer community activities.
Maybe dining rooms represent an outmoded way of connecting with people. Or maybe their quiet disappearance should be seen as a red flag that our sense of disconnection is becoming entrenched in ways that will be hard to reverse.
The design of our homes shape our lives. So what would it mean to reimagine our homes for more connection, more welcoming, more belonging? How do we want to host now, and what kind of spaces do we need to do that?
I’d love to hear your thoughts in the comments.
Discussion (18 Comments)
I like the idea of a game table in the dining room. Lower than a dining table, round or roundish, comfy club chairs. Great for cards, boardgames, etc, and even eating!
We use our dining room more than any room in the house — so it’s also the focus of my upcoming biggest renovation project to date. We’re opening a wall into the kitchen to create a peninsula, and then also creating a huge banquette seating area around the dining table. Our kids are 3 & 6 and we eat all our meals and do all our arts and crafts projects there. I can’t wait to make it even more inviting and joyful! For our family, and for gatherings with friends.
Totally agree! Having a dedicated dining table ( even if not in a separate room) is key to my feeling like I have a home. I don’t have kids, but love to have people over to dinner, brunch. So much more relaxed than going to a restaurant. Friends tell me that nobody invites people to dinner anymore, but it’s my favorite way to socialize and a great way to connect. Doesn’t have to be fancy!
A phenomenal piece. I’d love to hear a conversation between you and Priya Parker (The Art of Gathering)!!
I have a lovely dining room, but it has been years since I last had friends over for dinner. I miss doing it, so plan to start again with inviting friends for lunch. Nothing elaborate, just a chance to get together and have a good conversation
Although we have a dining nook which is open to our kitchen, we have our dining table in a section of the living room which is easy to access thanks to an open floor plan. I would find it difficult to imagine not having a dedicated place to eat and gather. Friends tend to gather at my table even while we are not eating!
I have in the past had homes in which the table sat centrally within the kitchen itself, which felt quite cozy. Either way, the gathering table has always felt like the heart of my home.
In regard to shrinking apartments in urban spaces, I have seen some interesting ideas, such a telescoping tables and chairs that stack mounted upon a wall. There are certainly ways in which we can create space to gather!
I believe this is one of those discussions that I have to say it depends. I lived 30 years in the Northeast and I used my dining room at holidays or dinners with friends. I loved it but now I’ve move to south Florida and I just finished a renovation and i eliminated the dining room in favor of a larger kitchen & great room. I have a huge counter with seating and a large dining table in the kitchen. We live a very casual life and I don’t think we’ve sacrificed any of the social aspect of eliminating the dining room. In fact our friends love having gatherings & dinner at our place. I see both side but believe it depends on your lifestyle.
During the pandemic, two friends and I formed a pod and met for weekly dinners at our homes, taking turns (this was allowed in the country where we lived and each of us saw few other people). We were all young, living alone in studio or small one-bedroom apartments. It was wonderful — no large home or dining room required.
We got rid of the dining table we had and converted that space into another family room. We use it so much more now! We do have a table in the kitchen where we eat meals as a family and when we have guests we bust out the folding tables. I love to cook and entertain so we have people over pretty regularly. I don’t see not having a dining room as a deterrent to that.
Back in the day I hosted big family dinners – Christmas, Thanksgiving, birthdays – in the dining room. Now I use it for boob club, small gatherings , whatever – sitting around a table with snacks, dinner, tapas / but mostly people. A great way to converse.
I love my dining room for entertaining and for family dinners. As long as you use it, it’s worthwhile having! That said, I think it’s so funny that when I host parties, everyone crams into the kitchen.
I think you are mis-interpreting the situation. The vast majority of homes in the past few decades had two separate eating areas. One in or adjacent to the kitchen, and a separate “formal” dining room. It has always bugged me to have 2 tables (just like it bugs me to have a living room and a family room adjacent to and not sound isolated from one another). Both just make a home larger than it needs to be, and I’d rather have different kinds of spaces (ie private spaces for hobbies.)
The only time I would ever buy a house with a formal dining room is if it is in a location/designed such a way as I can put my grand piano there, or if it is enclosed enough to be my art studio. If not, it is wasted space to me. (Or maybe someone could turn it into a library or play room, it depends on the family and the house configuration.)
But I still always have a big table for a lot of people to gather. I just don’t have two.
And I’m sure they just mean that the second formal dining room is going away.
And frankly the formal dining room is often far from the kitchen and just makes it more difficult for the host (the whole servant thing you mentioned.)
We used our dining room a LOT while our kids were growing up. We have 4 kids and the eat-in portion of the kitchen wasn’t really big enough for us to all sit down for a meal, especially when a grandparent or two came over. So when our youngest was about 4 we did a minor kitchen tweak that gave us a big breakfast bar with room for 4 comfortable stools. We kept a smaller round table for projects, homework or monopoly games. It was so much nicer to eat in the dining room and we still linger at the table after dinner is finished. Sadly the kids are all grown and moved out and the dining room is just a pretty place in the house that only gets used on special occasions and holidays. I will always be grateful that I had it while our kids were growing up and I miss those days terribly! I can’t really bring myself to convert it to another type of space yet.
I disagree. We redesigned our rarely used formal dining room to provide a second sitting room and extended our kitchen to provide a much larger eating area. The kitchen is truly the heart of our home. Friends and family gather round the large farmhouse kitchen table and linger long after dinner to chat, read etc.
I love our dining room so much even though it occasionally feels like a less practical use of space. For a while certain family members lobbied for it to be converted into a TV room but I love having a place to gather around a table. We don’t use it everyday but we use it for dinner parties and holidays and birthdays and it’s great. It’s such a joy to host people in that way. This last Christmas we cozied up at home as I’d just had my second child and we spent almost the entire day in the dining room, eating and playing games. I even bought a puzzle board and we set it up on the table in there – every now and again if I’m waiting for something to cook in the kitchen or trying to shush my kid to sleep, instead of scrolling I get a few pieces of the family puzzle in. It’s so great! Bonus, it’s actually the darkest room in the house so I painted it a bonkers colour (Farrow and Ball Stone Blue) and everything you put against it just sings.
We built a large sunroom so we could have more room to entertain. We now have a kitchen banquette with comfy cushions so friends hang around during pre dinner apps. We have two tables for eating. Tray tables at the banquette. We believe meals are a time to share, eat,live, laugh, and love.
Great article, and I was able to read some of the Atlantic article you referenced. It’s disturbing to read that apartments are being designed without table space! Our house is small and for a few years we used a bedroom as a dining room, but then we renovated and made our living room/kitchen open-plan space big enough to include a dining table. Now reading your article and the comments I wish that I had a dining room – if it was a tidy welcoming space away from the kitchen clutter that adult children living at home bring. (Also chuckling at the typo by the lady above who presumably uses her dining room for *book* club 😉
Hi Ingrid! I discovered your blog today and wow — you’re writing is so thought provoking. This article really resonated with me. I hadn’t ever thought about home design in this way. How a dining space, it’s location in a home or even it’s very existence reflects the times that we live in is fascinating. And, a little sad for me. I am busy mom of 2 kids now 18 and 16…we’ve used our dining table to gather for meals maybe a dozen times in the last 10 years. More so during the pandemic than at any other time. We’re usually flying in different directions and so, we’re often eating on the go and eating apart. But, we could have found time to be together to dine if we were intentional about it. Considering that we still have a dining room, I take solace in the fact that we still can make that happen! Thank you very much for your work.