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The Death of the American Dining Room
July 28th, 2009 categories: Bexley, Clintonville, For Home Buyers, For Home Sellers, German Village, Grandview, Olde Towne East, Short North, westgate
The kids have 2 sport practices and a music lesson tonight. Are you eating round the table?
This is a post I’ve been thinking about for a long time. Over the last few years, Buyers have fallen on both sides of the dining room fence.
The bottom line-Dining Rooms are like Fireplaces, everybody wants one but few use one. Americans love the idea of a dining room but how many families do you know that eat dinner together every night gathered around the dining room table? I do maybe 3 nights a week and I think that’s high. I also don’t have a formal dining room, rather a spot to fit a formal dining room table between the kitchen and living room, all of it open space.
When staging a home to sell, the dining room better look like a dining room. If it exists, show it off.
If you live in Bexley or Upper Arlington or parts of Worthington and have a 4 bedroom house then buyers are looking for dining rooms and you’d better have one. If you have an $850,000 contemporary home in Upper Arlington though, it’s OK to NOT have a dining room but instead have a large open space.
Grandview buyers like traditional floor plans and, obviously, so do Olde Towne East buyers – but those homes are so large that there’s plenty of space for everything. Clintonville buyers are always looking to maxamize space and I’ve seen many homes that live without a dining room but always “re-install” it when it’s time to sell.
Eating space is important in German Village and so is historical accuracy. Space, however, is often at a premium and a dining room just isn’t as important as it used to be. When those same German Village couples start their families and move to Bexley, though, it becomes more important, at least in theory.
Dining rooms are a hold over to pre-television, pre computers, pre-this-family-has-3-practices-and-a-music-lesson-tonight households. They just aren’t as important as they used to be. Eating dinner together as a family is a romantic notion that isn’t always feasible to follow-through on.
