Possibly OT: Great extension idea but losing formal dining room?

We are starting with a 5 bedroom detached house. The existing dining room is quite small and the kitchen has so many doors that its space is not especially usable.

We have had an architect in for an initial discussion and she suggested combining the existing dining room and kitchen (i.e. knocking down the wall between), siting the kitchen in the existing dining room and turning the existing kitchen into the dining part of a modern kitchen.

This suits our lifestyle great, would allow the creation of quite a 'wow' kitchen-diner, but I'm concerned about the effect of no dining room on the value of the house.

What do you think? Worth doing?

TIA,

Pete

Reply to
Peter Boulton
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How many other 'reception' rooms does that leave? If you still have a living room and a 'study' then I'd say go ahead. If there is just a 'living' room then I'd be carefully ingenious to make the kitchen more than just a single large room. How you do that is where your architect earns his/her money.

Reply to
John Cartmell

A kitchen-diner will definately appeal to families and sounds like an improvement on your current setup.

While a separate dining room for more formal entertaining would be nice I think it's a luxury; a reasonably usable kitchen-diner is a necessity and one that your house currently lacks.

The cost of knocking down the wall is probably fairly minor in relation to the job of fitting-out a good quality kitchen, so you will probably gain more value overall than the marginal cost of knocking through.

The separate dining room is less necessary if the living room is large enough to also be a living-dining room if needs be. If you were considering extending, a downstairs bedroom[1] / home study / 2nd sitting room might be more desirable than a dining room anyway.

Owain

[1] if a downstairs shower/WC is also provided, for elderly relatives.
Reply to
Owain

Or teeny-tiny relatives.

My friend is selling her 5 bedroom house ( 2 reception and large dining/kitchen) for a 5 bed 4 reception house. She will have 2 living rooms, a study, a conservatory and she is asking the builders to change from the original plans and knock the kitchen and dining room into one. She cooks and entertains a good bit and likes to be able to have guests sitting at the table chatting to her whiles she cooks. She also likes being able to keep an eye on the kids doing the homework while she gets on with whatever.

A downstairs loo comes on every family's wishlist, and a 5 bed house is bound to be a family house.

She is looking for appliances for the new house and asked me to post here for opinions, I start a new thread for that.

Reply to
Suz

Given that the sizes of the existing rooms are too small, I suspect it would increase value to have a much bigger combined room.

Christian.

Reply to
Christian McArdle

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