Spaces for Life: Designing a Great Dining Room – Retouch Design-Build

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Spaces for Life: Designing a Great Dining Room

By Lance McCarthy

As we all collectively unbutton our pants to make room for all the food we took in over the last few days, I thought it might be fun to ask our resident architect/expert Joel Perry of Indwell Architecture and Design about secrets to a good “eatin’ room”.

Hi Joel! Tell me something I don’t know about dining rooms.

I think a dining room needs the opposite of what people usually think they need. Our tendency is to make them grand–vaulted ceilings, over-scaled spaces, cold formal finishes. But if you think about the purpose of a dining room, it is really about sharing a meal together; sharing a conversation. It is a more intimate time in a more connected space.

Aren’t dining rooms supposed to be big tall rooms that we don’t use?

There is a place in the home for “grand”, but that it isn’t in the dining room–unless you are the Queen. Think about the places you have had the best meals with friends or the best conversations over dinner. Chances are it was actually in a smaller space, fairly enclosed, the ceiling and lighting was probably lower. That closer proximity and lower light creates a lot of the feeling of safety, connection and intimacy that you really want in the place you “break bread”.

How do you make it feel right?

The way that I approach that is to understand what you need it to do, and how many people it needs to accomodate. You want just enough, but not too much room. The room needs to be “human scale”.

Remember, we aren’t standing or walking around in this room, we are sitting. The room should feel appropriate for that.

Do you have any rules of thumb on size?

You build this room around the table. There should be 36-42” between the table and the wall to allow walking behind. 9’x12’ is usually the minimum size I allot for a dining room, but it may be bigger depending on how many people it will hold.

Beware designing it big enough for an event that only happens once or twice a year. This can make the space dysfunctional for the other 354 days of the year. This is a big reason many people end up eating in other rooms most of the time!

Try finding ways to allow it to expand when needed–for example leaving a wide doorway that allows the table to extend out on those special occasions.

How open should I make it?

People often make the mistake of forcing a strong dining room connection to both the kitchen and the living room. For some people this may make sense. The reality is that you want a strong connection from the kitchen to the dining room for functionality, and from the kitchen to the living room for line of sight, but the dining room to living room connection is not as important as it seems. The sacrifice by making that three-way connection is that you lose all your walls, and with them any sort of connected/safe feeling to the dining room.

How about you? Tell us where your best dinner conversation occurred. I am looking forward to hearing some of your memories!

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