That's a lot of knees all squished in with the table supports! Also, I used to have an octagonal table like that, and you really couldn't seat people comfortably for meals on the corners.

If you think of the banquette as kid seating, you can squeeze more of them in, but they're going to grow. Given the size of the bow, however, you're probably occupying the least amount of floor space that way. One thing you can do to maximize it is to have the banquette curved, rather than following the angles of the bow. You can squeeze more kids in that way. :) You could do a combo too, with the cushion support and cushion curved but the base angled. That might get you four on the banquette, or even five if they're little and don't have HE TOUCHED ME problems.

Also, you could extend the end of the banquette all the way to the door on the left, even though it wouldn't be symmetrical.

So...how formal is your dining room? Is it a proper room, or one of those little ones that hold six people that they throw in to be able to advertise that it's a dining room? Because, especially when your folks are over, it might be a lot easier just serving in there.

Perhaps a better alternative (though I'm not in a position to figure out the exact measures and angles) would be to put in an oval table with leaves and be willing to block the doorways when you put one in for extra seats. You could push it more toward the window if you had chairs there, and pull it out for seating.

That seems like a very make-do kind of solution, though.

As to the rest of the kitchen, you have a basic L with island, which almost always works. Things are arranged efficiently enough to work fine. For optimum use, I'd shift the sink over toward the fridge, with some room on the end for landing. That would make fridge to sink easier, and get you away from tush to tush between the sink and stove. That's not crucial, and you might prefer the visual symmetry of having them lined up.

There's only one thing bugging me about your plan (barring the problem of trying to make eight people comfortable in your window bow): Those supports, or whatever you call them, on either side of a gas stove. That's very confining. I know it's a popular look, but you have to cook in a cave that way, and you can't just set something down by a pot. If you're straining soup, you have to pull a heavy pot around those and over to your bowl. If you have a ladle, you have to put it down on the other side of the uprights. There's no room, except over the heat, to reach the pots in the back to stir, season, etc. But most important, if you have a boil over, a fire, or some similar mishap, you can't just grab the pot and push it off the stove. You have to reach--potentially across another burner--and LIFT the pot out while something bad is happening. Similarly, you don't have side access with a lid, fire extinguisher or box of baking soda.

Be really sure that's something you want to live with and cook with, and you've felt what's it's like moving big heavy pots (which I assume you have with regularly feeding eight at a time), and stirring them.

plllog - Thanks for the detailed feedback. Our formal dining room is a proper sized room - about 16' by 14' - and is part of one large room with the formal living area. Right now we use the entire space as what we like to call our "formal play area." We don't have formal living or dining room furniture. in that room right now we have a large trampoline, which used to be in the basement in our old house, a kids kitchen, some toys, a buffet table, and my old abused kitchen table from my college days which seats four people. That table is our source for extra chairs when we need to squeeze more people around our kitchen table.

Unfortunately there is carpet in our formal living/dining room, and eating in there with my kids, who are messy, would be a nightmare. We plan on getting dining room furniture someday and probably replacing the carpet but we are thinking of waiting a while. That's one reason why we were hoping to be able to fit more people in the kitchen.

In regards to the banquette, I am sure that one day we will have the HE TOUCHED ME problems. I like the idea of extending the banquette along the rest of the wall. How hard is it to make a curved banquette? We were planning on using our cabinetmaker to make the banquette if we go that route.

In regards to the sink, I kind of like the visual symmetry of the sink being somewhat lined up with the sink. We also really can't move the sink over to the right because to the right is the dishwasher and then a 24" cabinet which is only 12" deep because the microwave drawer is on the other side of the island facing the refrigerator. Here is the cabinet overview.

When you are talking about the supports by the gas stove, are you talking about the spice pull outs near the upper cabinets or the bump out that's part of the lower cabinets? Here is the elevation drawing for the stove wall.

Thanks again for all of your feedback.

I like the idea of a banquette in your space but am not fond of octagon tables. It also seems like a lot of corners for those sitting on the edges and trying to get in and out. Can you use an oval table instead?

juddgirl2 - I think we could use an oval table instead depending on the radius of the table. I do like that idea better than the octagon table. I will have to look into that option.

An oval table with a pedestal. No legs.

Never mind about the supports. That whole thing was because of the expanded overhead view. From the elevation it's clear that that's not what you have. It looked like the little pillars framing your hood went down to the counter. As they are in the elevation is fine.

I see a different problem in the closer detail: The island isn't lined up with the cookwall and the sink is slightly off center with the stove. That's going to always show as tension that people want to fix in their minds. The island will probably work that way because the aisles make sense and by pushing it back toward the fridge you're also getting kind of a circular space in your breakfast area. But the sink just a bit off center and the island very off center is going to look odd.

You, who live there, might grow used to it, but it's the kind of thing that smacks one as one tries to make sense of a visual landscape. I would swap the dishwasher to the other side of the sink and make it very off center. That would help remove the island, visually, from being positioned in relation to the cook wall, the way they usually are, to being its own entity in the middle of the room. This would also be helped if the island were different colors than the perimeter. I know that's a trend that's dying, but it would serve you well.

Is there any open space in the family room? If there is, perhaps you can use a folding banquet table there with all your spare chairs if there's company?

Curving the banquette will definitely help your short term kid storage. When they're older, you may have reclaimed your dining room, and in the meantime, they'll have grown up being cozy on the banquette, and might be more used to each others' elbows and knees.

It shouldn't be that hard to curve just the seat part. the only way to curve the cabinet part is if your cabinetmaker has the right equipment (big machines) and is more likely to need to use MDF than plywood. Cutting the seat support in a curve is fairly easy (i.e., I could do it, and I haven't done much woodwork). Trimming the edge would be a little harder, but trim isn't so hard to bend--it requires some tools but not necessarily big machines. But it would be more comfy if there were a rolled edge that had padding all down the front, and sewing that isn't a big deal. It could attach with heavy snaps or velcro on the underside of the support to make cleaning and replacement easier.