It’s Time to (Officially) Cancel the Dining Room

PSA: You don’t have to use your dining room to dine.

In theory, we know this. Most of us aren’t living in sprawling mansions with square footage to spare. Every inch counts when you’re living in—and working from—a typical single-family home, and those inches should be functional. But despite all the multipurpose furniture and strategically placed storage baskets I’ve employed to make the most of the 700-square-foot cottage I share with my partner, our dining room table sat unused for years, collecting dust and taking up a third of the living area.

I kept it solely out of obligation. Even though my fiancé and I are happily among the 30 percent of American adults who mostly take their dinners from the couch, I held strong to the belief that every home needed a place where its residents could dissect their days over a home-cooked meal—ideally by candlelight, and with an accompanying playlist drowned out by laughter and the sounds of cozy camaraderie (a totally reasonable expectation for someone who microwaves most of her meals). 

In reality, however, a formal dining room is a luxury disguised as tradition. I grew up in a home that had one, and so did many of my friends. My family barely used it, but that wasn’t the point. A big, long table we’d only belly up to for Thanksgiving dinner was a given in my eyes.

We can trace this misguided necessity back to middle- and upper-class homes in ancient Greece, which were often built with an andron, a private room designated for men and used primarily for entertaining guests during a symposium (an elite men’s drinking party held after dinner at banquets). Ancient Romans also hosted their dinner parties in a special room called a triclinium, which had evolved to accommodate "respectable" women. By the 16th century, dining rooms were widely embraced in European homes, becoming grander and more lavishly decorated during the Victorian era. That’s when affluent Americans took note, with Thomas Jefferson’s 18th-century Monticello estate credited as one of the first American homes to have a separate space for sharing meals. As the years passed and the middle class continued to grow, so did the idea that a dining room was integral to any happy, family-oriented household, a signal of both financial stability and a commitment to moralistic values.

Formal dining rooms have been drilled into our minds for so long that it’s hard to let them go. But letting go it seems we are. A 2022 analysis of U.K. homes found that listings mentioning dining rooms have gone down by 28 percent over the last decade. Americans have also largely stopped gathering around a traditional table: Houzz released a 2024 report showing that 73 percent of U.S. homeowners are eating their meals in the kitchen, and 43 percent have renovated those kitchens to be more open-concept—yet another sign that closed-off formal spaces are a thing of the past.

Maybe it’s because we have less time to put together a full-blown dinner with sides and rolls. Maybe it’s because we can’t afford the grand table and fancy plates. Or maybe it’s because we now need our homes to serve multiple purposes—becoming our offices, even gyms, as well as our private spaces—so having a part of the house that we barely use is an option that, for most of us, is no longer on the table, so to speak.

At the end of 2023, I kissed our dusty dining table goodbye and moved my home office setup in its place. I tucked my desk into the cozy corner next to a window and added a small entryway table for the daily knickknacks that never had a place to land. Our small home feels bigger, my cleaning routine is shorter, and, most importantly, we use the space almost every single day. It was an act I wish I had done years ago, and one I’ve been seeing more and more examples of online—among them Lorri Tucker, who posted a TikTok of her dining room transformation in her Wisconsin home in response to a similar clip from content creator Morgan Crook.

As a kid, Tucker had dinner in her family’s eat-in kitchen. She always assumed that upgrading to a table that didn’t share space with the fridge would feel like a major adulting milestone. "I just thought: If I can get a house with a dining room, I’ll know I’ve arrived," she says. "But once I got the chance to have one, I was like: No. This is dumb."

Rather than keep the formal dining room as such, her husband moved the chandelier to the kitchen, took out the built-in cabinets, and put up a wall of bookshelves to create their own library. What would have been a "walk-through room," she says, is now a regularly used space for her family to read and hang out. When Tucker shared her TikTok, she received comments from people who also reimagined their dining spaces as dog kennels, puzzle rooms, art studios, play areas, and even aquariums.

And that’s the hope, right? Everyone should feel entitled to use their space in whatever way suits them, but I don’t think we realize the silent stress that unused physical items can create. A idle dining table is a constant reminder of yet another thing we’re not doing. It’s a guilt trip surrounded by upholstered chairs. Our homes should reflect who we are, not who we think we should be. So if your dining room is gathering dust and there’s another way the space could better serve you, let Tucker’s rule of thumb be your permission slip: "If you’re dusting it more than you’re using it, it’s time to let it go."

Letting go of my formal dining room doesn’t mean I’m giving up on my dinner party dreams forever. Ideally, our homes will shift and evolve over time, as we do. It’s just that at this moment, I’m someone who happily eats dinner from my couch.

Related Reading:

Why I Returned to Renting After a Few Years of Home Ownership

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