For most of the last decade, the dining room was considered a room in decline. The argument was that nobody uses it. Families eat in the kitchen or at the island. Formal dining is an artifact of a previous generation’s entertaining habits. In the open-plan revolution, the dining room was often the first casualty, absorbed into a combined living-dining space or eliminated entirely in favor of more kitchen square footage.
The conversation has shifted. High-end residential clients in Los Angeles are asking for dedicated dining rooms again, and they are asking for them to be designed seriously. The logic is not that formal entertaining has returned in the way it existed generations ago. It is that a dedicated room creates a kind of occasion that a corner of an open-plan kitchen simply cannot.
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