Our homes are a lot about fantasy.
Maybe we can afford only a studio condo, but the counters might be granite. Maybe our family room is 12 by 12, but it has 16-foot ceilings.
Holidays are also a lot about fantasy. Hollywood and Currier & Ives have gone a long way toward determining what Christmas and Thanksgiving are “supposed” to be like — and indirectly what our homes are “supposed” to be like.
Today, a couple of rooms once found in every house are really about fantasy. First is the living room, or the front room, as it is often known hereabouts. It’s where you have your best furniture, the kind no one but Father, Reverend or Rabbi is supposed to sit on.
Then there’s the dining room, where the family gathers formally around a long, shiny table handed down for generations, with grandma’s English silver and crystal and china gleaming among starched napkins.
That last one is really a fantasy for most of us, though many of us trot out some of those things this time of year.
But the dining room is a thing of the past, right? What we want now is the “open floor plan” with a great room where the TV watching, reading, eating and cooking blend into one space.
Not according to the National Association of Home Builders. In its 2003 consumer preference survey, only the laundry room ranked above the dining room among specialty areas or items desired by consumers expecting to pay from $250,000 to $1 million for a new house.
A quick survey of area real estate agents found views are mixed about the need or desirability of dining rooms.
“More than a formal living room, they would prefer to have a dining room,” Orland Park Coldwell Banker agent Renate Meyer says of her clients. “They are willing to pay more [for a dining room], but not an exorbitant amount.
“Most people are going back to family-type events, more stay-at-home entertaining,” she says. “Because of those reasons, they are making more use of their dining rooms than in previous years.
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“If [a home doesn’t] have that dining room, they want a really big eat-in kitchen. With the way homes are laid out, the open space between kitchen and family room, it limits the size of the kitchen table.”
Things are different for Christine Erickson’s clients in the Fox Valley.
“I’m finding that in the $300,000 to $400,000 range, people are rehabbing and knocking out dining room walls to [create] a great room. They want that open feeling,” says the agent for Coldwell Banker Primus in Geneva, whose territory ranges from Lake Geneva, Wis., to Oswego.
“Many of the higher-end homes [$500,000 and $600,000 and above] will have a great room and a dining room.”
“Many times in the bigger homes, the entry way will have a dining room on one side. [The buyers] will use the space as a library or office,” Erickson says. “The dining room is kind of ending up to be dead space.”
“If you pass through the dining room in the smaller homes, it ends up being a gathering place for the mail.”
Rather than dining rooms, homeowners are trying to make things more open. That’s the concept of people adding on these four-seasons rooms, Erickson says. It’s another living space.
Many people are expanding their kitchen eating areas into the four-season room, she says.
“It’s all about space out by us,” Erickson says. “We have it, and people like to utilize it.”
Swinging closer in to the city, Sharon E. McCauley (the name as published has been corrected in this text) of Brush Hill Realtors, Hinsdale, says “dining rooms in all price ranges are still important — certainly not in a townhouse, but in a single-family residence.”
That’s especially true when you get to homes of $500,000 and up. “If you don’t have one, you’ll get less [for your home] or it will be shown less,” she says.
“So if you have a big living room, I would allocate a small area with a small round table with four chairs. Put your six leaves away” and get them out when you need them, McCauley advises.
In the upper price ranges, dining rooms are expected, she says. They’re necessary for entertaining and for holidays. “In the real high end, where they entertain to the hilt, they can use a home that really flows. The large dining room flows right into a huge family room/kitchen” arrangement.
Though it may seem that Chicago is not of one mind about dining rooms, there are some things that are true throughout the ages:
There’s no better place for a dog than on the rug under the dining room table, the better to reach handouts from all sides. And, as for cats, they’ve been known to hop up on the table.
But I’m sure that never happens in your house.
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Wayne Faulkner is editor Real Estate. You may e-mail him at [email protected] or write c/o baiduhai, 435 N. Michigan Ave., Chicago, IL 60611.