Dining room’s days are numbered says survey

Family meals in the dining room are becoming a distant memory as British homeowners shun the room in favour of the kitchen.

According to a new survey of 2,500 people across the UK conducted by kitchen supplier Sigma 3, almost half of British homeowners are choosing to socialise in the informal surroundings of the kitchen instead of the dining room.

When it comes to formal dining, one in four homeowners now completely by-pass the dining room and host dinner parties in the kitchen. Half of 25-to-34-year-olds use their kitchen for social gatherings, making them the most likely to get more out of their kitchens.

Sigma 3 marketing manager Bethan Barnfield says that the findings confirm what many experts in the property industry have believed for the past few years.

“The dining room has simply lost its appeal,” she says. “It’s a room associated with formal dining and special occasions rather than everyday use, and now those dinner parties and celebrations are slowly migrating into the kitchen.

“Modern families have busy lifestyles and different schedules, so finding time to sit down together for a meal is a rarity increasingly reserved for big occasions such as Christmas day.”

She added that the kitchen was also becoming an increasingly popular place to relax in other ways: two in five people surveyed now prefer to watch television in their kitchen.”