Love that room.
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We never used our former dining rooms more than twice a year. In our new house, weâve been using it a lot! Our breakfast room table only seats 4, so any time we have more, we move into the dining room, which I really love.
We use all but one room in our House2. In House1, with the exactly same sft, we did not use 4 rooms/spaces and only occasionally used our formal dining room. House2 also has a large finished basement which gets a lot of use!
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Lol, when we remodeled our new house, we converted a library just inside the front entry into a dining room. 
I think the point of this discussion is to understand what works for you and what you want, and then plan to build, buy, or remodel that home. There is no one-size-fits-all.
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A lot of the home plans I am looking at (for retirees) are like this. But I like some separation. I like when some of us are watching football in the FR, some of us can chit chat in the LR, for example (and talk about those in the FR 
.)
And I donât want to be trying to watch TV while someone is banging around the kitchen cleaning up. Or eat while looking at a dirty kitchen.
I suppose if space is big enough, being open to each other would work, but I do like 2 living spaces. (Maybe a sitting area in the BR or a sunporch, etc would work.)
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LOL - Hubby seems to have no problem watching TV while I am banging around the adjacent kitchen during cooking or cleaning. Of course for the more involved dinners he is often the cook (with me helping or hanging out on my laptop at the breakfast bar).
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I think what is important is knowing the configuration you like and need. One can still downsize and not have the open concept, living/dining/kitchen. We have that, and I love it. We do have a TV and sleeper sofa in our small third bedroom that dh uses as an office. So dh can watch TV in there. I can also play my guitar in there if he is watching TV in the main living area. So, if either of us needs to, âretreat,â we can. But it wouldnât work as a gathering spot for a group like you are envisioning. I get it. I can think of many parties at a friendâs home where the men congregate in one space and the women in another.
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Count me in here. I now live in a 2-bedroom apartment, walking distance to my office where I work two days a week (wfh 2 days), and to the subway. I rent cars as needed, a huge savings in Brooklyn, NY over owning, and minus the headache of parking.
I have one child who is in med school and engaged. Her fiance just closed on a house in the town where her school is and convenient to his job. Their plan is for her to do a residency in the same general area (where sheâll be doing rotations next year, so I guess it seems feasible) but plan to move to a different community nearby when they have kids.
They are around an hour and a half from me in a car. I may move to Staten Island (10 minutes from me in a car, and an easy bus ride to work) for a slightly more suburban lifestyle without the headache of parking in Brooklyn, putting me 15-20 minutes closer to daughter. I will again look for two bedrooms, so I can host grandchild(ren) if they arrive before I am too feeble to do so! But I will likely keep renting. Ultimately I will move closer to her to make the burden of caring for dear old mom a little easier. I did so for my dad and the hour between where we lived and where he lived was burdensome. I adopted my daughter when I was almost 50 and she was almost 2 and I am 73 now, so although I need no assistance whatsoever now, I have to think about these things! And my daughter has long volunteered that she wants to do for me what I did for her grandpa.
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Susan Susanka of The Not So Small House says that even small houses need an âAway Roomâ - that a place where you can shut the door and either put the noisy thing in there (TV) or the quiet thing so you can get away from the TV. Our 1920s house has large openings between all the rooms and the TV in the living room, but we nearly always watch TV together. I have an office on the ground floor which would be ideal for an Away Room, but it doesnât have doors either and if we installed doors theyâd be in the way unless I shrank the opening and put in a pocket door. Since the pandemic the 2nd floor bedrooms have been repurposed - one as an art studio the other as DHâs home office and it works quite well - at least when he closes the door! Iâm hearing muffled annoying zoom noises from it right now!
When I renovated our house I enlarged the kitchen so it runs across the entire back of the house. The eat-in area is adjacent to the Living room and the messy part of the kitchen is separated from the dining room by a short corridor with pantry on one side and powder room on the other. It works really well. We still have a formal dining room and living room, but the kitchen is not completely isolated in a dead-end off the dining room like it used to be.
I would love to turn my dining room into a library with the dining table in the center. But my table is huge (great grandmotherâs Victorian monstrosity, but I love it) and the room is not huge. Still could be doable though.
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My parentsâ contemporary house was so open that my practicing piano for hours a day in high school got annoying. So they moved the piano to their bedroom which could be closed off.
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I love house talk!
An old bf told me that I use TV the way other people chew gum â omnipresent. Thatâs one reason I could never do an open concept. I want to be able to carry on a conversation in the kitchen while others are watching TV in the living room. Or watch my own TV in the kitchen while cooking and dh can watch his own thing in the other room. A house on my street just sold for about 15% more than any other house in the neighborhood, in part IMO, because it had the lovely redone open concept for the kitchen/LR/DR combo but then an extra room on the back that could be used as the TV space. In fact, the Realtor who was showing it said how much his parents regretted going open concept because of the noise issue. DH really wants to knock down the wall between our kitchen and living room, but, thankfully, that trend is waning, at least around here.
I am so intrigued by @oldmom4896 living in an apt in NY. I have considered a condo if we relocate to be near only-in-my-dreams grandkids. 
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I like our happy medium - open entry/living room/dining room and a kitchen behind it, separated by a doorway, but with no door. The kitchen has a small breakfast nook. While there is no second family room, we have a separate office.
The floor plan serves all purposes- hides the kitchen mess, but the cook is not cut out of the social scene. If people want to join in cooking, they can, even though the kitchen isnât big. The whole house is about 1550 sq feet (plus the separate office out back), but the space is very efficiently laid out. It was built in 1952, and has a post-war practicality to it, with great storage. If you want a fancy master suite, this isnât the house for you. But it is an excellent small family home, if your family wants to hang out together.
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Iâm glad to see someone on here with a not-huge house like ours! I love the layout of our house at 1659 sf. Back in the day, it was called a MIL plan. We also have a separate office, carved out of part of the garage. We never upsized so never downsized. 
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Most of our first floor is open-ish (including an upstairs balcony that overlooks the family room ,with is open to the kitchen). Evidentially it does not bother us much because there is a closed off den/guestroom that we donât use much.
Around here most homes have basements, many of them finished. (Not ours, since ours if half crawl space and the other part is great for shop and assorted junk and storage.) Itâs pretty common to have another big space (family room or TV room or âman caveâ) to act as extra entertaining space.
We all should take comfort in our wildly varying floor plan likes, needs, and dislikes. It means there is a buyer for every type of house no matter current trends.
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Amen to that. I always wish CC would be more vocal on the âmiddleâ ground - home is home!!!
I do have to say though that those of you who love open concept must not have a H or other family member who likes to listen to tv as loud as my HâŠâŠ.thank God for separate areas! Iâm sort of noise sensitive- I feel like I get overstimulated and testy if itâs too noisy or loud.
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I agree that TV (and music) habits need to be taken into consideration when planning living spaces. In our case, neither of us watches TV alone, only a few times a week at night together before bedtime, so competing TV noise is not a big concern for us.
On a slightly different note, how many of you hate seeing a TV (in any room) and look for ways to hide or minimize it? I hate the look of a TV mounted on a wall hanging there like a big black rectangle. Our main TV is recessed in a dark console. When itâs off, it blends into the dark wood. The one in our casita is enclosed in a shuttered âwindowâ box that you have to open to use. Iâd get rid of all TVs if I could. DH is hoping for the day when an entire wall becomes a floor-to-ceiling TV. Sigh.
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Bill Gates pioneered that concept back in the day he built his compound. 
I hate the look of giant black holes on the walls, too. LG came out with a rollable TV⊠$100K. Iâm not kidding. There are mirror TVs (we have one in our bathroom ), and some makers offer framed TV.
ETA: mirror TV! For people who want their morning news while they are shaving or brushing their teeth.
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Yeah, thatâs where the dream came from. Just waiting for the day he can be Bill Gates. Ugh.
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