The Disappearance of the American Dining Room

This piece is based on an article written by M. Nolan Gray for the Atlantic titled “America’s Loneliness Has a Concrete Explanation: Dining space is dying”.

As the American dining room disappears from new residential construction, we are faced with a question, can our need for connection outweigh years of societal and economic shifts to preserve space for gathering?

As M. Nolan Gray writes in a recent piece in the Atlantic:

"As households and dining spaces have contracted, the number of people eating alone has grown... nearly half the time we spend eating is spent in isolation, a central factor in America’s loneliness epidemic and a correlate to a range of physical- and mental-health problems."

Whether by choice or by accident, the new homes we are creating often don't leave space for more than a couple of people to sit down to eat together. What does it say about us as that we have deprioritized space for shared meals? As we face a loneliness epidemic, this shift in design away from larger dining spaces seems, at best, shortsighted and, at worst, harmful to our collective well-being.

Pressures in the American housing market such as increased land and material prices, zoning regulations that discourage family-size apartments, societal shifts in shared dining, and a culture that often values independence over community have all contributed to the emergence of the great room and the disappearance of dedicated dining spaces in homes.

So what can we do to encourage social connection and gatherings through residential housing design? Firstly, we can embrace the great room without limiting its adaptability. Built-in bars and islands, for example, dictate how a great room can be laid out. If instead we leave that space open for a table or movable island we can allow units to flex with the needs of the residents.

Additionally, great rooms are often the result of building layouts with limited access to natural light. If our code were more supportive of multi-family housing design that didn't limit access to windows (such as single-loaded corridors), we could reduce the need and demand for great rooms and make homes feel more welcoming.

Another solution is often employed in cohousing: having a community dining space. In a typical cohousing community, each unit can be designed to be smaller and more efficient, while still providing private kitchens, dining spaces, living rooms, bedrooms, and bathrooms for each unit. This is because cohousing community designs often include shared features such as a common dining room, kitchen, guest room, laundry room, and more. So, each household has what they need while saving on space that might otherwise be dedicated to items and functions that aren't needed day-to-day and can be better utilized as a shared resource.

We need to be more mindful of our choices and how they shape housing, to avoid further isolating the people who call our buildings home. We should be creating housing that recognizes and embraces the value that shared gathering spaces, such as dining rooms, bring to not just a home, but to a community, and to our culture.