New Home Designs Are Saying Goodbye to Dining Rooms

The traditional formal dining room is quietly disappearing from many new homes, replaced by more versatile spaces, Axios reports. Nearly 80% of designers working on new housing developments say separate dining rooms have become less of a priority for buyers over the past year, according to research from John Burns Research and Consulting and Pro Builder magazine.

“Formal dining rooms have almost been eliminated from our design vocabulary,” says Kelly A. Scibona of Stanley Martin Homes. Instead, homes now feature flexible rooms that can serve as a home office, guest bedroom, or playroom, along with expanded kitchens that offer more storage and larger islands—spaces where families actually eat.

This trend has been building for years. In 2023, US News & World Report asked, “Is the dining room dead?” and in 2024, The Atlantic declared the “death of the dining room.” The shift is largely driven by financial pressures. Builders are grappling with higher labor and material costs, and tariffs threaten to add more strain. Buyers face elevated mortgage rates, with the median price of a new home around $460,000—beyond the reach of roughly three-quarters of U.S. households, according to the National Association of Home Builders.

“Designers are trying to fit the same amount of function into a smaller footprint,” says Maegan Sherlock of the New Home Trends Institute. Buyers, she adds, are “thinking really practically,” prioritizing storage and work surfaces over rooms they rarely use. While the pandemic briefly reversed the downsizing trend as people sought more space, affordability concerns have returned. Even specialty spaces like workshops, prep kitchens, and home gyms are being cut as builders and buyers focus on essentials.

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