The dining room has quietly moved from afterthought to anchor. Across renovations in Los Angeles, Singapore, Germany and beyond, designers are making a consistent argument: the room where people gather to eat deserves the same design rigour as a living room or primary bedroom. What was once resolved with a table, four chairs and an overhead light is now being shaped by questions of flow, material, light and the boundary between indoors and out.
The Trend: Dining Rooms That Work Harder and Feel More Deliberate
Several directions are converging in contemporary dining room design. Open-plan layouts continue to dissolve the barrier between kitchen and dining area. Indoor-outdoor connections — through floor-to-ceiling glass, accordion doors or louvred screens — are appearing in climates as different as tropical Indonesia and coastal Spain. At the same time, heritage materials such as exposed brick, reclaimed stone and board-and-batten timber are being brought forward rather than erased, giving renovated spaces a sense of continuity with the structure they inhabit.
What links these directions is intention. Each of the sixteen homes documented by Dwell (published 18 September 2023) treats the dining room as a space with its own design logic, not simply a corridor between the kitchen and the rest of the house.
Where It Appears: Real Homes Across a Wide Range of Climates and Scales
The cases span continents and building types, which is precisely what makes the pattern readable. A few examples from the Dwell documentation illustrate how the trend plays out at a room level.
In Los Angeles, Dan Brunn Architecture added a skylight to a midcentury-modern renovation, amplifying natural light and deepening the blue tones in the dining room. The curvy tabletop and warm-hued chairs were chosen to give the room character rather than neutrality.
In Greenwich, Connecticut, architect Paul Rudolph positioned a two-sided fireplace at the boundary between dining area and living room in an open-plan home. The stones framing the steel fireplace were salvaged from the initial remodel, so the material carries a direct memory of the building’s earlier life.
In Semarang, Indonesia, architect Tamara Wibowo placed floor-to-ceiling glass doors at both ends of the dining room, drawing a cross-breeze through the space. Geometric Tegel Kunci tiles were chosen as the room’s primary decorative element against an otherwise warm, neutral palette.
In Singapore, Goy Architects introduced a new brick wall during a heritage remodel of a shophouse on Moh Guan Terrace. The brick reads as an accent wall, its warm tone matched to the timber floor. Accordion doors at one end open the dining room directly onto the patio, giving the room two distinct modes — contained and open.
In Waldenburg, Germany, architect Philipp Architekten treated the landscape outside as the room’s centrepiece. Floor-to-ceiling windows were kept unobstructed; the dining set and pendant lights were kept deliberately neutral so nothing competed with the view.
In Uzès, France, homeowners Lone and Chris updated a 13th-century limestone townhouse without an architect. They worked with the existing stone fireplace as the room’s focal point, adding vintage chairs, an oak dining table and 1960s pendant lamps — a combination that acknowledges the building’s age rather than fighting it.
How to Use These Ideas: Practical Starting Points for Each Approach
The cases above point to a handful of moves that transfer across different budgets and building types.
- Use light as the primary tool. A skylight (as in the LA renovation) or oversized windows (West Yorkshire, Germany) changes a room’s character more fundamentally than any furniture choice. If structural openings are not possible, layering sconces with a single statement pendant — the approach used in the Hudson Valley farmhouse renovation by Heide Hendricks and Rafe Churchill — adds warmth without demanding structural work.
- Remove, then decide what to add. The Hudson Valley renovation demonstrates this clearly: raising the ceiling, stripping decorative beams and replacing the fireplace mantle with Bolection moulding came before the Noguchi lantern and sconces were introduced. Subtraction creates room for the remaining elements to breathe.
- Align the dining table with the kitchen rather than treating it as a separate object. In the Ibiza villa designed by Belgian architect Bruno Erpicum, a dining table the same length as the kitchen counter — and finished in the same wood tone — dissolves the boundary between cooking and eating spaces. The same logic appears in the Costa Rica prefab by A-01, where the table attaches directly to the kitchen unit.
- Open the room to the outside where the climate allows. Glass doors, louvres and accordion panels appear repeatedly: Raphael Soriano’s glass-wrapped atrium in Los Angeles, Tamara Wibowo’s cross-ventilated room in Indonesia, and the Goy Architects shophouse in Singapore all use different mechanisms to put the outdoors within reach of the dining table.
- Let heritage material become the accent. New brick in Singapore, salvaged stone in Connecticut, board-and-batten timber in Texas — in each case the material was retained or reintroduced because it connects the room to the building’s history, not because it was the cheapest option.
Materials and Design: What These Rooms Are Actually Made Of
Reading across the sixteen cases, a consistent material vocabulary emerges — though it is applied in different registers depending on climate and building age.
Wood appears in almost every room, usually as the table surface, the floor, or both. In the Singapore shophouse the table, floor and wall tones were matched deliberately. In the Ibiza villa, wood runs continuously from kitchen counter to dining table. In the 1954 Peter Womersley house in West Yorkshire, wood and stone sit alongside each other as an acknowledgement of the landscape visible through the oversized window; the table was manufactured by Carlick Furniture, with chairs from Fritz Hansen.
Glass is the dominant structural material in the outdoor-connection cases. Corrugated metal paired with glass in Raphael Soriano’s Los Angeles prefab; full-height glazing in Germany and Indonesia. Where full glazing is not possible, louvres — as in the Costa Rica prefab — admit daylight while blocking direct solar heat gain.
Tile features as a floor element in the tropical cases. The Tegel Kunci tiles in Tamara Wibowo’s Indonesian home are geometric and locally rooted, providing a point of visual interest that the neutral wall and furniture palette intentionally leaves room for.
Stone — limestone, fieldstone, brick — appears where the building’s history demands it. The Uzès townhouse keeps its original stone fireplace. The Connecticut home reuses stone from its own demolition. The Singapore renovation introduces new brick as a heritage reference rather than a literal preservation.
At the eccentric end of the range, the sustainable luxury home by Stillwater Dwellings pairs a colourful rug with quirky chairs and an artsy chandelier — a reminder that the material vocabulary above is a tendency, not a rule.
What to Consider Before Changing a Dining Room
The cases above are instructive precisely because they were guided by architects or experienced design teams working with specific buildings and budgets. A few points follow from that honestly.
Structural changes carry costs that surfaces do not. Raising a ceiling, adding a skylight, repositioning a fireplace or removing walls all require structural assessment and, in many jurisdictions, planning consent. The Hudson Valley renovation and the Connecticut open-plan project were both architect-led for this reason. Knowing which moves are cosmetic and which are structural before budgeting matters.
Traffic flow shapes how a dining room actually feels. An open-plan room that is beautiful in photographs can become uncomfortable when movement through the kitchen interrupts a dinner. The Plum Projects renovation in Mercer Island, Washington — where Daisy and Kenta removed unnecessary doors to open the dining room to the rest of the house — worked because the firm modelled how the household moved through the space, not simply how it looked.
Outdoor-connection features suit specific climates. Floor-to-ceiling glass performs differently in tropical Indonesia and central Germany. The Costa Rica prefab’s louvre system exists specifically to allow light without overheating — a passive cooling decision tied to the local climate. Glass-heavy dining rooms in hot, sun-exposed orientations can become uncomfortable without solar-control glazing or external shading.
Heritage material requires a clear intention. New brick introduced into a Singapore shophouse reads as confident and coherent. The same material introduced without reference to the building’s existing palette could read as arbitrary. The cases where heritage material works are the ones where the designer or homeowner understood what the building already contained before deciding what to add.
The dining room is gaining design attention because households are asking more of it — conversation, remote work, entertaining, everyday meals. The spaces documented here suggest that the room works best when its design decisions are made in that order: first the way people move through and use the space, then the light, then the materials, and finally the furniture. Getting that sequence right tends to produce a room that holds up beyond the renovation moment.
