No Comments »

Design Dilemma: Dining in the Living Room

• Tweet

• Tweet

In today’s condensed homes, a room set aside as a dedicated dining room is a rare, rare thing. Instead, those of us living in more recently built homes are often living in spaces with a combined living room/ dining room. A typical configuration is something like the dining rooms below:

If you have that amount of space for a dining area, it’s great, but there are also a group of us (those in small condos and apartments) who don’t even have that. In that case, carving out a comfortable dining niche that allows for dinner parties while not taking too much space away from real life can be a challenge. So here are a few ideas:

Banquette as Dining Area

Sometimes, the most space efficient way to incorporate dining right into the living room can be to build a banquette that can function as both dining seating but also regular seating just for talking or working at the computer. For instance:

Or this:

Or this:

 

In the examples above, sofa-like seating or occasional chairs have been utilized as dining seating. The brilliant thing is that most of the time they serve as seating in the living room, so no space is wasted.

A Dining Room Height Cafe-Style Table

Sometimes, the solution lies in using a dining room height table as a “coffee table.” It allows the living room to also serve as a dining space in great style:

Or this:

Or this:

Finally, there’s a third way to handle this problem:

A Convertible Coffee Table

This is one of our favorite ways to handle the lack of a dining room. Most of the time, a living room functions as a normal living room with a conversation that includes a couch and occasional seating.

This Calligaris Magic-J table can go from coffee table to dining table in just a few seconds. The mechanism lifts the table to dining height, and the extensions allow 6-8 people to sit around it comfortably. You can even leave the extensions open at coffee table height for more surface area.

Here’s what it looks like as a dining table:

So you see, if you love to entertain, the lack of a dining room does not have to become an insurmountable problem.  A little creative thinking will allow you to enjoy your living space to the fullest!