Tips on how to make the best of your dining space.
Let's get real about the dining room. If you don't like to cook and almost never entertain, why give over valuable space to a large table and six or eight empty chairs?
If your style tilts totally casual — dinners at the kitchen counter, in front of the TV or out by the grill — a ceremonial dining room seems utterly extraneous.
If you live in tight quarters where every inch counts, a rarely used space makes no sense at all.
"It's a room that needs to metamorphose," says architect Sarah Susanka, author of six books about living in small, well-designed homes.
For John Straub and his wife, Harriet Adams, that means sleek floor-to-ceiling doors that, when closed, look like minimalist white walls behind a gleaming black table that seats six. With a slight push, the six three-foot panels pivot open to reveal shelves, drawers, a sound system, a desk and a work chair.
"I'm used to an executive desk, so when I have a lot of paperwork, all I have to do is swivel around and spread out on the dining table," Straub says.
The design by Washington architect Simon Jacobsen functions so well that Straub gave up the downtown office he used for his work as president of the Future of Russia Foundation. "People come over for dinner and unless we open the doors, they have no idea what's back there."
Susanka has watched this trend grow. "When I started writing in 1996, I observed that most people were building dining rooms because they were supposed to; all the real estate agents and appraisers told them they had to for resale. There are certainly people who still use them, and they should have one. But I would guess that close to 80 or 85 per cent of people use them only once a year, for Thanksgiving."
The key, says Susanka, is to make the old dining room serve a new function.
Interior designer Jane Mitchell missed her greenhouse in Connecticut after moving to Loudoun County, Virginia. So she claimed the neglected dining room in her Round Hill home — with its nine-foot-wide bay window — as a garden staging area.
Architect Robert Bell wanted no part of "the vestigial room used for Thanksgiving, Christmas and weddings" in his Washington home.
Instead, he anchored a two-storey, skylighted octagonal foyer with a $56 flea market table upon which mail and keys are tossed. It expands to seat 12 at formal meals or is replaced by rows of chairs for periodic concerts performed around the grand piano in the living room.
Books are the issue for Mike Johnson, owner of Sixteen Fifty Nine, a Washington store specialising in 20th-century furniture. He has 1,000 modern first editions, and "I didn't know where to put them all. The dining room was a great space to do built-in bookcases: 10 sections, floor to ceiling."
The square room also contains a round dining table that seats 10. "Aesthetically, it just looks fantastic," Johnson says.
McLean, Virginia, interior designer Marlies Venute gave one client a rather exotic option in a guesthouse with an antique Victorian billiard table that flips over for dining. "After a lovely meal, the dishes are cleared, cognac is served, the table is turned over and the game commences."
