One of the traditional spaces in U.S. homes is becoming outdated. Hello,
great room.
By Lucie L. Snodgrass Special To The
Sun
June 8, 2003
THE TRADITIONAL living room, one of the last
bastions of formality in American homes, is headed for extinction, industry
experts say, the victim of changing demographics and lifestyles.
Whereas
30 years ago most homes had a formal living room set aside for entertaining,
that space has yielded to light-filled great rooms, larger kitchens and other
spaces that are more informal and conducive to entertaining, or which better fit
the modern homeowners' needs.
"People think the living room is too formal
and a waste of space," says Gopal Ahluwalia, vice president for research with
the National Association of Home Builders in Washington.
A survey in 2001
by the builders group found that a third of homes built that year had no
designated living room. A consumer survey that year by the group showed that 40
percent of prospective homebuyers were willing to purchase a home without a
formal living room.
One reason for the change is the increasingly casual
- and hectic - lifestyle of the American homeowner. With a majority of American
women working outside the home, the days of leisurely preparation for a dinner
party - if they ever existed - have gone the way of Ozzie and Harriet
Nelson.
Now, partly out of necessity and partly by choice, the kitchen -
once off limits to guests - has become the central gathering place for family
and friends alike.
Susan Phipps, an office manager, student and mother of
three in Harford County, says that when she and her husband, Joe, built a home
in Street in 1994, they designed a great room in which they could combine
several activities.
"The house that we moved out of had a traditional
living room, den and kitchen," Susan Phipps says. "My kids were little at the
time, and I spent all my time in the kitchen, so I was always walking around the
door to see what they doing. I just felt cut off from them. I always knew that
if we built a house, it would have one large room where we could watch TV,
prepare a meal and be together."
Phipps said they chose their custom
builder, David Stearns of Jarrettsville, after admiring a great room they had
seen in one of his homes.
"That room sold me on the house," Phipps says.
"And it's worked out nicely for us here, especially when we have people
over."
Architect David Robbins, founder of the Ellicott
City firm Architecture Collaborative, which designs up to 5,000 homes a year
for residential developers, says that his new designs often feature combined
kitchens and great rooms.
"Kitchens have become not only bigger, but also
more show worthy, with center islands where people can sit around and talk while
food is being prepared," he says.
Robbins adds that upscale decorative
features, such as trim molding and window treatments, increasingly are common in
kitchens, adding to their appeal as entertainment areas.
The living
room's demise, some architects say, began in the 1950s with the advent of
television. As televisions in the home became commonplace and then ubiquitous,
homeowners sought a comfortable space away from the formal living room, where
they could relax and put up their feet. They sought out casual furniture and
reclining chairs, furniture more suited for daily use than the typical living
room sofa and side chairs.
"The introduction of the family room ... meant
that the living room never again got much use," says Karen Harris, president of
Architecture Matters, a Denver architectural firm specializing in residential
home design and renovation.
She views the evolution of the kitchen/great
room as the next step in the continuum toward larger, more casual homes that
cushion families from the pressures of the outside world. That's not to say
homes have lost all sense of formality, Harris asserts, just that the darkened
parlor with plastic sofa coverings isn't in vogue anymore and never will be
again.
"What I see on the higher end is that people are still clinging to
a place that's more formal and neat and clean, but it's usually the dining
room," she says. And by far the most popular addition to older homes, Harris
says, is a great room off the kitchen, sometimes with a new master bedroom above
it.
That assessment is shared by Realtors such as Eric Pakulla, an agent
with ReMax in Columbia, who says his clients are buying existing homes with an
eye toward renovating them.
"Large dining rooms aren't popular anymore,"
Pakulla says. "And many of my customers are phasing out the living room in
existing homes. Instead, they want the kitchen and family room combined. They
want to see what their family is doing while they're in the kitchen."
On
the design side for new homes, the trend is toward designing flexible space that
can accommodate the increasingly diverse construct of American families and
homeowners.
"We're seeing a lot of niche markets," Robbins says. "In the
past there was a nuclear family, like the Leave it to Beaver model."
Now,
however, homeowners are just as likely to be single parents with children,
families made up of several generations, same-sex couples without children or
aging empty-nesters. Some owners work at home, either part time or full time.
All of them, Robbins says, have different needs, ranging from two studies on the
first floor to first-floor bedrooms for parents or returning adult children to
hobby rooms that showcase personal collections.
"We're calling the room
[where living rooms used to be] a lifestyle space," Robbins says. "We're trying
to infuse it with a new meaning that reflects the lifestyles of people buying
houses. For example, we may put in French doors and call it a
library."
One difference that Harris and Robbins note is that the space
set aside for entertaining in homes today is less likely to be off the front
entrance to the house, where the traditional living room was.
"All of the
family rooms and great rooms tend to be in the back of the house," Harris says.
People today tend to enter the house at the back, through the
garage."
That, she says, imparts a more relaxed and inviting feel to the
house, although she notes that it may have the unintended result of creating
more pressure to maintain a clean and tidy kitchen and family
room.
Perhaps surprisingly, what hasn't changed in all of this is the
consumers' desire for more space.
Despite working longer hours, cooking
fewer meals and having smaller families, Americans are buying and building
larger homes. Thus, the desire to do away with the living room had little or
nothing to do with space consideration. In fact, during the past 30 years,
Ahluwalia of the national builders' group says, square footage in new homes
increased several percentage points each year, with the current average
flattening out at about 2,000 square feet last year.
Ultimately, then,
changing tastes and lifestyles bear the responsibility for the demise of the
living room. While myriad variables make it otherwise difficult to pinpoint
exact housing trends, architects, industry experts and brokers are agreed on
one: The living room is passe.
