It's always better to have something you don't need than to need something you don't have....just sayin.

It would not be a deal breaker for me. I would much rather have a well laid out kitchen than an extra dining area. Would the single dining area accommodate a descent size table?

What is the norm in your neighborhood?

In the last house we sold we had a kitchen with a dining room next to it. We added a small peninsular which had room for 2 (or 3 at close quarters) to eat at. When we went to sell the house, the biggest complaint we received was that there was no breakfast room. Basically, people wanted the dining room and wanted a breakfast room in addition to the seating at the peninsula.

Our current house has a breakfast room, an island with seating and a formal dining room (which we use as an office).

I think the minimum acceptable is probable a kitchen with a bar or peninsula + a breakfast room (or dining room) but that having that plus a dining room is more acceptable.

I'm not a big fan of formal dining rooms, the one I have currently has an elliptical sitting in the middle of it. I'll be house shopping next year and wouldn't think twice about buying a house without one.

Of course I don't seem to like most of the "popular" stuff for houses, like open floor plans, fireplaces, and cathedral ceiling, so I'm probably not a good survey subject :)

I also do not like open floor plans and fireplaces, but I'm fine with cathedral ceilings. However, I would definitely NOT buy a house without a dining room, and I would NOT buy a house that has a fireplace. Fireplaces are very much wasted space for the climate where I am.

My current dining room is part of a larger room, the remainder of which we use as an art studio, and it has a skylight and northern windows. A lowered ceiling defines the dining space, and there is a dining table fixture hanging above the dining table. We use the dining table every day, and I cannot imagine not having a place to put it. I never eat in the kitchen, but I do like breakfast rooms. Incidentally, we also have an outdoor dining table in our covered pergola (photo from last January), and I generally eat lunch there. We could eat all our meals there, since we have lighting for it, but we prefer to eat in the dining room, since it is close to the kitchen. We eat outside more often when we have guests, although even when we cook ourdoors (which is all year), we still bring the food in to eat in the dining room.

Some people will not require a dining room, but I imagine that most would. Best to talk with a real estate agent. If you have an outdoor dining area, that may make up for not having a formal dining room.

Lars

From the point of view of someone who hasn't really hesitated in moving, building, and removing walls in my house, if planned carefully enough you can always make a dining room by adding a wall or two later with minimal collateral damage to the house. A wide open plan works for an enormous number of people.

A second way of putting it: I don't give a fig about reselling. It's my house, not some future unknown buyer's house, and I'm not going to live in it subsequent to the opinion of a real estate agent. Life is too short to live in a product.

I once rented a house with a formal dining room that made a wonderful office.

Dining rooms are so-so. I would never have a kitchen without a kitchen table. Table yes, island, NO.

A home would not have to have a formal dining room for me to buy it. In fact, I have sold several homes that just had one place to put a dining table and they sold with no problem whatsoever. You are talking an OLD home too so the buyer for that property is not going to expect the same thing as a new home buyer. I think as long as there's a nice sized place for a table then you should be just fine.

OP, what are your plans for the area, and long do you expect to live in the house? If you plan to live in it for the foreseeable future, design your home the way you want. You need to be comfortable in your own home, regardless of what others might think.

On the other hand, if you expect to be there for a period of maybe 5-7 years, you might want to re-think your design. You don't want to eliminate a whole pool of buyers. There are many people who will buy a house that doesn't have a dining room, and there are many people who will only buy homes that have dining rooms. But I don't know anyone who would refuse to buy a house just because it had a dining room.

I live in a 1950s colonial. The original design had a wall between kitchen and dining, with a set of saloon doors. I'd say that 75% of the people have taken down the wall between kitchen and dining room. (And everyone has removed the saloon doors!). The typical layout is an L counter with small island. The top of the L and island are on the dining room side. And you keep the table in the dining room. It gives the open layout, the dining room remains dining room but it's now a room people use daily.

I would much rather have a larger kitchen with eating space than a smaller kitchen with a separate dining room. I think the pool of home buyers today eats more casually than those of older buyers. People rarely eat formal meals on a daily basis anymore. Even big holiday meals tend to be more casual than they used to be. I built a house 5 yrs ago with a formal dining room, but I also have a very large kitchen with eating space for a table that seats 10. We spend way more time in that eating space than we do in the dining room, so I would now elininate that space and use it for something else.

I would not buy a home without a dining room. We absolutely use ours when we entertain family and friends, and I frequently set up food and drinks on the table in there when I host PTA and church meetings and such. My dining room is a decent size, and frankly, I really love the way it looks. It makes me happy to have such a dressy room!

I think that this question is entirely dependant on where in the country you live. If you are in a traditional area, the East Coast or the South, then yes, people will want traditional homes with dining rooms.

But if you are i the West, traditional floor plans are far less common.

So, it depends on the competition in the market.

It's very much a regional thing--if you know of a realtor you trust, their input would be valuable. However, I think there are many people that see their dining room as "wasted space" that they only use for holidays.

I did but I wish the house had a kitchen layout that was truly eat-in. As it stands I can only put a very small table in there. The house had everything else I wanted with a great location and yard so it was a trade-off.

I remember my old house and thinking of how to integrate the large dining room into living space or extension of the kitchen and I just could not do it. Load bearing walls got in the way and it was truly wasted space after the kids were grown. That always bugged me to have a large room that really did not add to our quality of living.

Generally in Northern Virginia people really like their dining rooms. If you are renovating in a young, trendy part (like North Arlington), you might get away with it, but it's still a stretch. I work in Northern Virginia and am in people's homes (young families) all day long because of the type of therapy I provide. In the last four years I can only recall seeing two families who repurposed their dining rooms, and in both cases it was temporary. Everyone else has had dining room furniture and for the vast majority, the dining room was formally decorated. Open plan, closed plan, apartments, condos, townhouses, new construction, historic, high end, starter homes... All with dining room furniture in a dining room. The same was true when I lived and worked in a close-in Maryland suburb of Washington, DC.

YMMV. How long will you be in your home?

I guess I'll add to the chorus...

I'm sure this is somewhat regional. It's funny, last night I was watching a House Hunters episode from a couple years ago. A professional couple in probably their mid-30s was looking at higher-end colonials, but the wife kept complaining about the formal dining rooms, which she considered a huge waste of space, even though they had a kid and planned to have more. (I mention kids because to me they conjure up ideas of large holiday gatherings now or in the future.)

I personally would far prefer a house without a dining room. (FWIW I am also in my mid-30s and in New England, like the couple on the show.) If it had a dining room, I would repurpose it. I like our eat-in kitchen which comfortably seats 4, which is all we need, and could probably fit 6 or 8 with different furniture. Plus it's open to the living room, allowing for "satellite" tables if need be. Then again, I'm a weirdo who really doesn't like built-in islands. We do have a nice outdoor dining space, but it's useless at least 7 months out of the year, and definitely useless at major holidays.

(*If I were selling a house with a dining room I might "stage" it as a dining room with an instruction to my agent to comment on the versatility of the space, if it seemed that some buyers wouldn't want a dining room while some might. We have successfully sold a home quickly, at asking price, with one bedroom used as a TV room. But, it was tastefully and somewhat sparsely furnished to ensure that people could still imagine it as a bedroom. The other bedroom we didn't use was shown as a bedroom. But that's different since at least we did have SOME bedrooms, whereas if you show a dining room as something other than a dining room, it appears there is no dining room. But, if you just don't have a dining room, I'm not sure I would worry.)

One other comment, which I'm sure has been said on here many times... even given a particular region and dominant demographic, it's hard to predict what sort of person will but your house. I have always been wrong and things I thought might be a problem weren't.

Re: Awareness of resale... I cannot WAIT to get to the point of not having to care about it. The next house we buy will be purchased carefully, with the idea that we will be in it a long time, but even if we end up having to move, we'll choose the location carefully. We've been extremely conscious of resale with every change because our location has gone downhill since neighbors on either side of us moved and new people moved in, the general market in our town dropped more than nearby towns (tax issues) etc.. I think sometimes not thinking about resale is somewhat of a luxury.

This post was edited by lizzie_nh on Mon, Jun 16, 14 at 15:14

We are, right now, building a house without a dining room. We specifically requested that our architect not design a formal dining room in our plan. We had one in our last home and it was used maybe 2-3 times a year. I decided to allocate that space to a room we would use year-round. So we have a larger kitchen with an island and an eat-in area. Plenty of room for us on a daily basis, plus guest.

So no formal dining room would not be a turn-off for me at all :)

All my opinions -

Unless the formal dining room can be converted into something useful (like an office with doors) we generally consider them to be a huge waste of space and a big negative item for purchase consideration except in a very large home. A kitchen without a DR needs a table area in it's place of course.

The combined kitchen, family room, nook etc. areas for a GREAT ROOM are the home layout trend for this century. It's the way people live - all together and able to interact with one another regardless if they are cooking, reading, eating, online, cleaning or watching video.

Unless - you have unlimited funds w/high square footage (i.e.. mansion or McMansion) - then - a formal dining room is required in a design.

Sub 2500 sqft - no
2500 - 4000 - optional
4000 sqft & up - do it!

We are from California so we may Think Different than people from the east. :-)

This post was edited by karyn on Mon, Jun 23, 14 at 22:42

My husband and I were just talking about this yesterday. We're planning on selling out house, and we don't have a dining room.

I don't think people use formal dining rooms so much any more. All the newer town houses we've looked at to buy have open concept, with no formal dining room.

I think kitchen eating is usually done at an eating bar now, with the dining table nearby. I much prefer this, as dedicated dining rooms are barely used and are a waste of space.

Unless you are thinking of doing something entirely outside the box (which you are not) - like boarding up all the windows on one side of your house - I think you will just drive yourself crazy trying to guess what a potential buyer down the line might like or not like. If you plan to be there a while, do what will enhance your time there and enjoy it. My first house had no basement and I was told repeatedly that it would turn buyers away. Instead, the person who bought it said the fact it had no basement sealed the deal for them. Apparently the wife was scarred by watching too many creepy "don't go down to the basement" horror movies and refused to buy a house with a basement. Perhaps your perfect buyer down the road will have suffered a childhood trauma involving sitting around the dining room table!

I am in MD and would love a house with a big kitchen and no dining room. 11 years ago, I really wanted a dining room. However, after having one I find it is a total waste of space for us. We never host formal dinners. In 11 years it has been used for dinner 4 times. It makes a good landing spot for things I don't have a place for yet.

Being that this question was posted more than 8 years ago, I am very late to the game. Consider my input as a reply from the future.

As a member of a large family crammed into a small house, I grew up in the Northeast. We had a kitchen with very little counter space and no island, a large table that seats 8, and a small formal dining room off to the side, which was extremely tight when trying to fit the entire family around the table. It was worse when we had additional guests. Imagine being a small, skinny child having to suck in your stomach in an effort to squeeze between someone's chair and the wall to get to your own chair. That was us. We also had a small deck with a sizable patio table that proved even more challenging to seat everyone. But we managed.

We used the dining room for every major holiday that called for something formal (Christmas, Thanksgiving, New Year's day, and Easter) and the deck for meals in warmer weather (4th of July, Memorial Day, Labor day, summer birthdays, etc.). The kitchen table was used for everything else (breakfast, lunch, most dinners, birthdays in colder months/on rainy days, homework, "time outs", baking, tea time with company, etc.). That was the norm in my parents' house. Since leaving home, I have lived all over the US (Midwest, West coast, Southwest, Southeast, East coast, Gulf coast), and several places abroad. In every place I've lived before buying a house, I employed a dining room only once. When eating, I would sit at the kitchen table, at the island, or on the couch.

When I bought my first house, I felt it was important to have a dining room as well as an eat-in kitchen because it's what I was accustomed to growing up. I imagined utilizing my house in much of the same way my parents used theirs. The only difference is that my house is huge compared to what they had (and for a lot less people to live), so it is far more comfortable. After living in my house for a few years, however, it occurred to me that, even when I'd have guests over, we didn't all sit around any specific table. Instead we would spread ourselves out around the kitchen, the great room, and the patio outside. In 17 years, the dining room was never used for dining. Not even once. I realized I spent a ridiculous amount of money on dining room furniture I never use, on heating and air conditioning a space I never use, and on purchasing square footage I never use. It was just another room that I'd have to dust, vacuum, and occasionally paint. I've come to understand that times have really changed, our culture has changed, and the way we celebrate has changed.

Someone previously said, "it's always better to have something you don't need than to need something you don't have." In most cases I would agree, but not in this case. I've wasted thousands of dollars that I can never get back, and for what? The reality is that it's very easy to get creative when in need of dining space; you don't need a whole dedicated room for something that you might only use a few times a year (if at all).

With plans to downsize and move, I recently began designing a house more suitable for a family of four, but that can easily accommodate several guests. The first thing I considered is how a house is actually used; not necessarily how I fantasize using it. Kids spend most of their time in their rooms, outside, at school, or with their friends. Visiting guests sit at the island or dinner table, or on the couch in the great room. Dinnertime at the kitchen table is really the only time the entire family is together. So it became apparent to me that I need to design my new house around making these areas more comfortable and inviting, and cut out the places that are simply wasteful and uselessly excessive.

As I drew up the plans, I kept asking: why do we all feel the need to have a dining room, a breakfast nook, a kitchen island, a kitchen table, and a patio table? Seriously, how many places to eat a meal does a house need to come with?! Let's face it: with the exception of those families with young children, most of you probably eat your dinner on the couch in front of the t.v.! I can see it now: your little foldable nesting tables, sectional couches and reclining chairs with built-in cup holders, coasters all over the place, and rogue dirty dishes or mugs you forgot to take back to the kitchen. Yeah, yeah, I get it; I've been there, too. With all the places designated for food, it seems to me like we all put way too much time and attention on eating rather than living. I have decided the dining room is out. In fact, so is the breakfast nook! The patio stays because who doesn't enjoy taking advantage of being outdoors on a beautiful day? That leaves me with one final decision: how do I want to design my kitchen?

What's most important to me is that I enjoy every piece of square footage in my house. Every room will be fully utilized, and as such they will be liveable, breatheable areas that are a pleasure to be seated in and look around. Symmetrical lines that create balance, clean angles that soothe the mind, elements that inspire the imagination, and lots of warm lighting to keep me from feeling like I'm living in a cold, dank cave. As the design took shape, I kept facing one major dilemma: do I need both an island and a kitchen table? No, I don't. Would both be nice to have? Not if I'm trying to downsize. So I have to choose one. But which one?

As I've said previously, the house in which I grew up did not have an island. We used the table for everything. But I love the versatility of an island with a quartz top! After looking at countless styles (thanks pinterest and houzz!), I have discovered I can have an island (with legs) that looks like a kitchen table, except better: I don't have to worry about scratches, water marks, or anything else my parents would freak out about when I was a kid using their kitchen table. A table cloth, a centerpiece, place mats, and a properly set "table" looks no different whether it's on a quartz surface or a wood surface.

What is the deal with a need for more? Why are people so gluttonous? And especially in a day and time where income has not kept up with the cost of living? Don't even get me started on the carbon footprint we all leave behind. I want to thoroughly use and appreciate the things I have without paying for things I almost never use.

All of this to say, no; a dining room is not necessary. It's excessive to the point of being ridiculous. I would prefer efficiency over gluttony. Appreciate what you have by using it. If you find you need a formal dining space for that rare (or not so rare) occasion, create one out of what you already have. It's not difficult!