The dining room is the closest thing the American home has to an appendix—a dispensable feature that served some more important function at an earli

America’s Loneliness Has a Concrete Explanation

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2024-06-11 01:30:04

The dining room is the closest thing the American home has to an appendix—a dispensable feature that served some more important function at an earlier stage of architectural evolution. Many of them sit gathering dust, patiently awaiting the next “dinner holiday” on Easter or Thanksgiving.

That’s why the classic, walled-off dining room is getting harder to find in new single-family houses. It won’t be missed by many. Americans now tend to eat in spaces that double as kitchens or living rooms—a small price to pay for making the most of their square footage.

But in many new apartments, even a space to put a table and chairs is absent. Eating is relegated to couches and bedrooms, and hosting a meal has become virtually impossible. This isn’t simply a response to consumer preferences. The housing crisis—and the arbitrary regulations that fuel it—is killing off places to eat whether we like it or not, designing loneliness into American floor plans. If dining space keeps dying, the U.S. might not have a chance to get it back.

The apex predator of the dining room is the “great room”—a combined living room and kitchen, bridged by an open dining space. “It’s not that Americans don’t want dining rooms. It’s that they want something else, and that takes up space,” explains Stephen Smith, the executive director of the Center for Building in North America, a nonprofit that advocates for building-code reform. “In a single-family home, that’s a great room. And so that’s what developers build.”