Connectedness. Where to eat and commune.
The house I’m staying in over Christmas has a dining room adjacent to the kitchen. The dining room is small, just big enough for a six-seating dining table and a cabinet for the fineries, and it opens on to the lounge room.
The dining room is never used. I’m writing from it, and my partner has a sewing machine and patterns strewn over the remainder of the table.
The house I grew up in had a similarly placed dining room, connected to the kitchen and lounge room, presumably this also allowed the flow of women back to the kitchen and men to the lounge room. But the main purpose was to cocoon conversation in a space safe from interruptions.
I remember it’s use getting phased out over the years when I was growing up. In fact, it eventually became the TV room. In my upbringing, the television set was marginalised: concealed by cloths, often unplugged to make us think twice about watching it, or put out of sight in the dining room.
So it seems to me that back in the day it was an important ritual to commune with the family in a dedicated room – possibly intentionally disconnected from the day-to-day infrastructure of the house. There children could be interrogated by parents about what they learnt at school that day etc. and parents could conduct coded conversations that protected the children from knowing they couldn’t afford the school fees. Or variations thereof.
This was, in my experience, a space intended to foster connectedness. Our family revived it for visits from my grandmother for a while, but we eventually migrated into the living room.
The living room permits differently to the dining room; it is multi-purpose and can contain technology. Most obviously this is a television, but it can also be a stereo, or a laptop, or in our case a sewing machine. Living rooms can double as workspaces in small houses.
So the potential interruptions are numerous, and the sanctity of the communal eat and converse is threatened. That’s why we need the connected house, where the dining table is brought to you by Microsoft Surface and there are desirous distractions from the mundanity of family first life.
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