18 
House & 
Garden 
THE DOOM of the DINING ROOM 
“TY THAT'S become of the old-fashioned dining room?” asks a cor- 
VV respondent in a recent letter. 
To which we answer, “What’s become of the old-fashioned dinner?” 
For the rooms of the house which were created by custom, are in 
time done away by custom, and the custom of the day is to Hooverize. 
Go back to the time when one spoke of “the groaning board.” A 
virile age doubtless, an age in which eating was a great function, 
accompanied by ceremony and display. The table was loaded down 
with all manner of food, the sideboard was piled high, like an altar, 
with the accumulation of several generations of silver plate. Guests 
went into a meal as into a coronation, two by two in procession, with 
a nice regard for priority and seniority. There was a brilliance about 
this age. Men did not deny themselves petty pleasures nor did they 
know the devastating inhibitions of “eat and grow thin” and “drink 
and be sober.” For the purpose then was just the opposite. Men ate 
to wax fat and drank to be drunken. This was a good age. It accom¬ 
plished many great and noble things. But as the vigor of the age 
declined so the custom grew stale. 
Then came a dark age, a transitional period, when actual eating 
was less but ceremony and vulgarity of display lingered on like bad 
habits. It gave us the dining room with the ostentatious china closet, 
it gave us the plate rail on which the otherwise careful housewife con¬ 
signed her precious china to a precarious ridge, it gave us beer stein 
decorations and ponderous Flemish oak furniture. In this time men 
discovered new and strange diseases, and the center of all evil was 
laid in the stomach. Gradually eating and drinking became less sacra¬ 
mental and more commonplace. The solemn family breakfast dwindled 
down to a hasty meal of coffee and rolls. Ritualistic dinners ceased 
to be served. We no longer went into them as into a great orgy, but 
came in casually, as though it were an ordinary affair. 
This was the period the war found us in. Today we stand on the 
threshold of a new order, the beginning of the second mystic thousandth 
year. The war has obliged us to Hooverize. We are forced to change 
our customs. And in that change we can read the impending doom 
of the dining room. 
T HERE are four good reasons why the dining room should be 
doomed: First, as is shown above, eating has ceased to be a 
ceremony and hence has ceased to require the setting for ceremony 
which a separate room furnishes. 
Second, we are making our homes more efficient. We are making 
every part of the house contribute to the ease and comfort of living, 
and contribute not a small part of this time, but all the time. Set 
down in actual figures, the average dining room “works” not more 
than two hours a day. The rest of the time it is unoccupied and no 
one enters it save servants to clean or arrange the table. Entering a 
dining room between meals is like walking into a deserted theatre at 
nine in the morning. It has ghostly remembrances of good times and 
happy folk. In short the dining room is a pleasant and efficient place 
only when we are dining. At other times it might just as well not 
exist, for all the importance it holds for us. 
The third reason for the passing of the dining room is the de¬ 
mand for the small house. This demand has increased as the distribu¬ 
tion of wealth has been made more equal. The rise of a high waged 
proletariat has brought about the desire to own a house. The small 
house satisfies this desire, for the measure of the desire is not the size 
of the house but the sense of ownership. Now in a small house every 
possible cubic inch of space must function and contribute to the well¬ 
being of the occupants. A room that is occupied only two or three 
hours a day is waste space; it must be eliminated. In its stead the 
breakfast porch or comer can serve for the first meal and at the same 
time add interest to the meals and increase the habit of living out of 
doors. I he other two meals can be served at one end of the living 
room, that part being screened off while the table is being prepared. 
Instead of having a cramped living room and a cramped dining room, 
the small house will have one large living room to serve both purposes. 
T HIS principle, of course, cannot be said to apply to the large 
house where space is unlimited, where ceremony still characterizes 
the manner of living, the architecture of the house is influenced and 
the separate dining room must remain. In the mansion one is obliged 
to live up to his house; in the cottage one’s house adapts itself to his 
life. But the nature of both these houses depends upon a problem that 
is gradually increasing, one that in no far future time will become 
acute—the servant problem. 
T FIE large house was made possible by a multitude of servants and 
retainers who could be hired at a low wage or no wage at all. 
I he small house eliminates the servant altogether or reduces the list 
to a minimum.. During the progress of the war, when women have been 
finding work in munition factories and taking the place of men gone 
to the front, the available number of servants has been decreased. 
Immigration is practically at a standstill and will be for several years 
after the war. The doing of men’s work by women has also taught 
women the value of regular working hours, of regular recreation hours, 
the advantage of standardized wages and the necessity for organiza¬ 
tion. Already Finnish servants have their unions and social centers, 
the Russians their artels, and the time will come when the Irish, Pole 
and negro will do the same. In short, the servant problem will gradu¬ 
ally settle itself into a matter of the housewife’s hiring a member of a 
union, paying union wages for an allotted number of hours of work, 
and permitting the servant to do as she pleases with the remainder of 
her time. 
Such a situation will naturally increase the number of small houses 
where no servant is required, and the number of apartments that are 
served on a cooperative basis, and leave the larger houses to the very 
rich. The dining room will even more nearly vanish. 
However radical this may seem to us now, it is all part and parcel 
ot modern social evolution. As manufacturing and the growth of cities 
stripped the English manor houses of their hordes of dependents, so 
by this great upheaval is being brought about a democratization that 
will radically affect the manner of our home life. The ceremonial din¬ 
ner of a past era was possible because there was an abundance of serv¬ 
ants. As the number of servants has decreased and the custom of cere¬ 
monial eating has passed, so has passed the necessity for the formal 
dining room. And, in turn, so has come about the demand for the small 
house from which is eliminated a room that has ceased to be a necessity 
for living. 
