I know kitchens with small breakfast tables aren’t unusual. usually the table seats two and is meant for cereal or a snack.
My grandmother had a very large kitchen. I’d guess 12x16 or maybe even 14x16. very large for a small 2 bedroom shotgun house. Her kitchen was an add on to the house and by far the biggest room. They didn’t design it. It was an old house they bought and had moved to an empty lot they had previously purchased.
as you walked through from the den there was a dividing wall with a large base cabinet with the freezer in the corner. The far end wall had cabinets, sink and fridge. the long side wall to the left had a window, the stove and more cabinets. There were two doors on wall to the right , one for a walk in pantry and the other went out to the back porch.
A large rectangular dining table sat in the middle of the room. I think it seated six? perhaps 8 with the extension installed. It wasn’t crowded. There was three to four feet of space behind the chairs. You never worried about sliding the chair back and hitting the hot stove or cabinets.
She held Wonderful Sunday dinners in that kitchen. Always had ham or roast and fried chicken. Three or or 4 sides like corn, field peas, sweet potatoes and turnip greens. Cornbread and biscuits. There was always a cake and a pie. Two big pitchers of sweet tea. She’d have ten or more people over for Sunday dinner. We kids spilled out into the den to eat. Wonderful memories. People rarely fix meals like that anymore.
I’ve never seen another home with the kitchen and dining room combined. Have you?
In both of the houses in which my family lived when I was a kid, we had bigger kitchens, with a kitchen table around which we ate nearly all of our meals. There were four of us, though the table (round, or oval if we put in the leaf) could have easily seated five or six.
We had separate dining rooms in both houses, and a dining room table. We ate in the dining room on holidays, or when we had guests over for dinner, but generally, the dining room was the least-used room in the house.
Where I grew up the main eating area was in the kitchen with a full sized table (seating for 8 + room for a separate children’s table if needed). The counters/ appliances were lining 1/2 of the room (top half of the vertical rectangle), while the table was in the bottom half with views out the window there. There was plenty of floor space so no bumping into the countertops or appliances while eating. There was a separate dining room. Some similar designed homes added a peninsula counter to separate the eating/cooking section.
My current home is a open design with the den, dining room, kitchen, and eating area all in the same large area. The kitchen cooking area itself is set apart with cabinets/counters. The kitchen eating area I made the one and only dinning/eating area, it is bright and big and has the views, I could perhaps have 2 full sized dining room tables in there if I had to. The dining room was small and not needed as a dining room so that was remolded as a home office and the den stayed the den.
So both are not kitchen/eating areas where cooking and eating can interfere with each other, but both are large eating areas in the kitchen room.
I guess … most people? It seems like a pretty normal configuration to me. Having a completely separate dining room strikes me as a rather old-fashioned special-for-Christmas kind of thing.
Most houses that I’m familiar with would either be of the older working-class model - the kitchen is where you always eat, you would naturally want to fit a family-sized table - or the more modern kitchen-dining room model - one huge room with the cooking and eating areas a little separate, but no actual walls in between them.
So basically you’re saying the large dining table sat right in the middle of the kitchen?
No, I’ve never seen that.
The houses I grew up in had a dining room on one side of the kitchen (with a six to eight seat table) and a four seat table on the other side of the kitchen. The area with the smaller table was a more seamless area with the kitchen. The dining room was more of a separate room with carpeting as opposed to linoleum that was in the kitchen and smaller dining area.
The informal kitchen dining area in my parents’ bog-standard suburban house can seat six without anyone bumping into anything.
The formal dining room can seat eight, but it’s there that the chairs are right up against the china cabinet and there isn’t a lot of room to push back.
looking through google image. I see a lot of very rich people’s kitchens with combined dining. I don’t know any rich people well enough to visit their homes.
Both grandparents had large eat-in kitchens and no dining rooms. The house where I grew up was built with a small kitchen and slightly bigger dining room, but my folks had the wall between them removed to make one big room, and the seven of us ate on a big table there.
The second house I bought (1983) had a large kitchen and no dining room. The second house my husband and I bought together had a combined kitchen/dining area. Our present house has a breakfast bar in the kitchen/family room area and a separate dining room. We usually eat on the coffee table in the living room.
My grandparents’ house was the house where my grandma was born, when her family was still Amish. Her family was Amish until she was 18.
Anyway, the kitchen was about 30’x30’ with the cabinets around the outside and a table in the middle. No separate dining room, just two sitting rooms (one was an add-on).
I knew a farm-family who repeatedly outgrew their house as child after child was born. They had a large kitchen with a big table where all meals were eaten. The kitchen also had a crudely constructed room in one corner that housed a toilet. I always found an excuse to not eat with them.
Yup - me. But I live in a 1902 Victorian. The kitchen is the largest room, was the focal point of the house and at one point also had a fireplace ( long since bricked up and walled over with a cabinet ). So big kitchen, but essentially no original closets because the stupid Victorians kept everything in chests ;).
I’m one of eight kids. We didn’t have a lot of money. We had no dining room, just a crowded, happy kitchen. I think my baby sister and thought I was a chair/car seat/horse till she was 10.
Our kitchen table seats 8 to 12, depending on the number of leafs we add. We have no dining room. We had one when we moved in, but we remodeled and turned it into a den/TV room.
A 900 sq ft kitchen? Wow! Our house has a rather small kitchen. I do almost all of the cooking, so I kind of like it that way. Our dining table is in the first room you come into upon entering the house. The room next to the kitchen, that would normally be the dining room, is where the television is, our comfy chairs, couch are and where we spend the most time. We eat there most often though, so it is still used as a dining room. The table in the front room is only used on special occasions such as Thanksgiving Day, Bastille Day, French Royalists Day, etc.
We have a table that seats six in our kitchen, but it is pushed under the window so it usually seat four. We have a dining room but that is only used for Christmas and Thanksgiving - and the writing workshop we host.
The house I grew up with had a separate dining area isolated from the kitchen by a counter about three feet high.
My wife grew up in a house from the 1880s where the kitchen was isolated from the dining room by a swinging door. It was a big enough house so I wouldn’t be surprised if the original owners had servants.
I have relatives in Texas whose house originally belonged to an oil baron. Six can eat at the kitchen table. They also have a formal dining room for Thanksgiving, Christmas, and various parties.
The house I grew up in had a dining room separated from the kitchen by a big hole in the wall for passing serving dishes. We didn’t really use the dining room for eating after I was born. We had a kitchen table which seated up to eight and Dad put a pool table in the dining room.
