Separate vs. Open Dining Room

Separate Dining Room

• A separate dining room in a house is one that resides in its own room with four walls and a doorway. Since it is in an enclosed space, a separate dining room provides privacy that an open dining room doesn’t. The problem with a closed dining room, however, is that the limited space restricts the number of people that you can have in the dining area at one time, which makes it difficult to have large dinner parties.

Open Dining Room

• The term “open dining room” generally indicates a dining room that has direct access to the kitchen, without a wall separating the two rooms, though an open dining room may also be open to the living room or a den instead of the kitchen. Since an open dining room brings several rooms together, it provides considerable space for entertaining guests. When the dining room is open to the kitchen, it also allows those family members working in the kitchen to communicate with the people in the dining room.

Splitting the Difference

• If you have a dining room that is separate from your kitchen, and the two rooms share a wall, you may be able to remove the entire wall to create an open dining room. If the wall is a load-bearing wall, you cannot remove it entirely, but you can still join the two rooms together by cutting a window, known as a pass-through, into the wall. This pass-through can be used to talk from room to room or to pass food from the kitchen to the dining room.

Which One is Right for Me?

• In many instances, you may not get the opportunity to decide whether you have a separate or an open dining room in your home. Generally speaking, older homes built in the 1950s or earlier have separate dining rooms, while modern homes are more likely to have open plans. If you do a lot of entertaining in your home, an open dining room does provide some advantages over the closed dining room, so it may be worth knocking down a wall or two, if possible.