New Home Designs Are Saying Goodbye to Dining Rooms

The once-standard formal dining room is quietly vanishing from many new homes, pushed aside by tighter budgets and shifting priorities, Axios reports. Almost 80% of designers working on new housing developments say separate dining rooms have slipped down buyers' wish lists 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. In their place: flexible rooms that can double as a home office, guest bedroom, or playroom, plus kitchens stretched to add storage or a larger island where families actually eat.

Things have been headed this way for a while: US News & World Report wondered in 2023, "Is the dining room dead?" and the following year, the Atlantic mourned "the death of the dining room." Behind the change is a financial squeeze on both sides of the blueprint. Builders face rising costs for labor and materials and warn that tariffs could add more pressure. Buyers, meanwhile, are contending with elevated mortgage rates. A typical new home—the current median price is around $460,000—remains outside the budget of roughly three-quarters of US households, according to the National Association of Home Builders.

"Designers are trying to figure out how to fit the same amount of function into a smaller footprint," says Maegan Sherlock of the New Home Trends Institute, who adds that buyers are "thinking really practically," favoring storage and work surfaces over seldom-used rooms. The pandemic briefly reversed a yearslong downsizing trend as people sought more space, but affordability concerns have since reasserted themselves. Specialty areas such as workshops, prep kitchens, and home gyms are also getting trimmed as builders and buyers focus on what they consider essential.