New ways to serve -Dining room can find fresh purpose
By JACKIE LOOHAUIS-BENNETT
jloohauis@journalsentinel.com
Posted: March 22, 2008
There is a room in the house that hardly anyone visits anymore. Except for limited use on some major holidays, it is lonely. Oh, so lonely.
The dining room.
"It's a room that's disappearing. It's almost extinct," says Gail Hammernik, interior designer at Bartelt. The Remodeling Resource, a design-build firm in Menomonee Falls.
The trouble is that the formal dining room is The Space That Time Forgot. Once it reigned as a home's crowning jewel, where Norman Rockwell set his classic illustrations of Thanksgiving dinners being served to glowing traditional American families.
But that was more than a half century ago.
"The old formal dining room space is inadequate. When you get together only a few times a year, you all want to fit into a space and eat together and just find out what's going on in each other's lives," says Ann Rodrigues, owner of David & Goliath Builders and DB Remodeling in Pewaukee. "It's not formal. None of us gets dressed up to go to Grandma's anymore. We come in jeans and a nice sweater, and we've simplified our lives."
Turkeys and roasts are among the least likely items to be found in today's dining rooms. Instead, the dining room table can take on all the characteristics of an archaeological dig, piled with mounds of homework, bills and long-lost sets of keys.
"You use the dining room table as a vertical file," says Sandy Borkovetz, marketing director of Bartelt. "People want their dining rooms to look elegant, but they wind up filling them up with stuff."
There are some people who love - and regularly use - their dining rooms. But for many (perhaps most) others, the space tends to serve as a clutter catcher, requiring a major cleaning project before each use.
"I don't think today's lifestyle is conducive to what dining rooms were once designed to do," says Matthew Retzak, an architectural designer at Bartelt. The Remodeling Resource.
The solution? Many homeowners are finding new ways to get more use out of that square footage and bring that space into 21st-century lifestyles.
Major and minor projects
As always, a dining room remodeling or "repurposing" project starts with a realistic budget plan. Many big-budget dining room makeovers in southeastern Wisconsin start with knocking down existing walls and expanding that area into a kitchen/living room space.
Retzak recently worked on one such major remodeling in a 1930s east side house that had became home to a blended family. The homeowners decided to open up the old dining room into an informal, family-friendly space that included a dinette area and kitchen. Cost of this kind of project: between $60,000 and $100,000, says Retzak.
But the dining room can be reborn for a lot less money.
Dave Morrow of Waukesha needed to bring his old basement office into the light of the real world. "My son used to say, 'I'll be in the cave, Dad.' My wife would say 'I don't like being down there; I don't know what's going on.' "
So the Morrow family took the old, underused dining room and turned it into a home office with a computer area, a desk and cabinets. The family kept costs down by opting out of custom built-ins.
"Now it's a bright new area that's more cozy, and I can get a lot accomplished," Morrow says.
But offices aren't the only options for the loneliest room. In Menomonee Falls, Diane Knight, a music professor at Alverno College, was stuck trying to decide where to put the family's grand piano in the home she had recently bought. "We were never big on formal entertaining, so when we moved in, we put the piano there. Now when someone plays, it's a wonderful place for people to walk in and you can hear the music through the whole house."
Even if your home lacks a grand piano, a dining room can become an entertainment room if you gather your stereo and TV on or in an attractive case that faces a strategically placed sofa.
Or a dining room can morph into a wine room. Mary D'Agostino, owner of D'Agostino Designs in New Berlin, recently shepherded such a project by finding a wine armoire with iron front that could be lit up as the cheery centerpiece to a relaxing room. "We put in leather chairs, and it's a nice room to sit in, put music on and have a 'Calgon moment' without the fuzz."
A home library doesn't have to be expensive or stuffy. Joline Steigerwald, owner of Design Resource Center in Elm Grove, has done dining room-into-library makeovers, and she suggests that homeowners try tackling the job with a minimum of new furniture.
"Get two chairs with a table. Put them close together because this is where you want to be in the evening-a cozy spot. Bookcases can come in any price range. If you want to do a built-in, do a window seat. It's a place to escape to when the guys are watching football."
Or a dining room can become an escape area for cigaristas. Add French doors to set the area off from the rest of the house, buy an air purifier and, Steigerwald suggests, bring in a leather sofa with brass nailheads for the proper "cigar room" atmosphere.
Kids can also help bring a dining room back to life as a playroom. Put mats down for fun or for naps, set up an easel or a toy refrigerator and stove and quickly switch the area from formal space into a playroom.
However you decide to use your dining room, don't be afraid to think beyond the formal linens and silver.
"There are so many things you can do with these rooms these days," says D'Agostino. "Just be creative."
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