The kitchen diner is dead, long live the dining room design. This is an unpopular opinion, I know, I do speak to people in life. But hear me out…. The size and space of homes in the UK rarely naturally lends itself to this huge open plan family living style and somehow we have been ushered into believing this is wrong…I did, I spent a fortune on knocking walls down to create this trend in our last two houses. But as I become older and more comfortable with my own style and life I come to understand that the kitchen isn’t the heart of the home…the dining room is.
I don’t enjoy cooking, there I said it. Gasp in horror, but there it is, I don’t. I love baking…that’s a different set of skills and you get cake at the end…its much better. My husband does the lions share of cooking in our house, we play to our skill sets. Whenever we host get togethers with friends or family I can count the number of times we’ve cooked in front of them in the kitchen whilst they’ve sat at the island, whereas the number of times the food is bought out to people comfortably sat chatting at the dining table is beyond measure. I tried to force it so we fit in with the accepted norm…we changed the type of food we’d cook so it would bring people into the kitchen and create an atmosphere, think Asian inspired stir fry to show off the new extractor fan. Ahh, Suburban bliss.
But actually, when we have people visiting, I like chatting to them, drinking great wine and enjoying our time together, I like to prep the food and have something that takes minimal effort to actually cook, a nice slow cooked lamb shank or similar, tastes great and just sits in the oven doing its thing without me faffing around it and ignoring my guests.
What I do like doing though is decorating my dining table with beautiful pieces and setting the scene for my guests for them to relax too. I get far more compliments on my tablescaping than my food (but the guests come back so the food really can’t be that bad?).
And when the guests leave and the dishwasher is working its magic, the table gets cleaned and my children use it, as a play space, as a homework desk, as an art studio, as a chill space, because it’s the heart of their home too. The kitchen is a place to prepare nutritious and delicious food, and it is important. But I will never again knock a wall down to join the two, the dining room deserves the limelight now, the most useful room in the home and it deserves its own identity and design.
