There’s A New Room Replacing The Kitchen. It’s A Borðstofa!
Have you heard? If you haven’t, you’ll soon be hearing about a new room replacing the kitchen. Say what? It’s the new hub of the home, and it’s been playing second fiddle in Australian homes for far too long. That ends now!
The Borðstofa is an Icelandic concept where the dining room — not the kitchen — becomes the true gathering heart of the home. As Australian open-plan living evolves, the dining room is reclaiming this role: a dedicated space for meals, conversation, homework, entertaining and the kind of unhurried connection that a busy kitchen rarely allows. Designing for the Borðstofa means treating your dining room as your home's most important social room — investing in a table worth gathering around, lighting that creates atmosphere rather than just illumination, and a layout that invites people to stay rather than eat and leave.
In Iceland, the word Borðstofa refers to the dining area of a home — specifically, the idea that this space is where the household truly gathers. Not the kitchen, with its noise and heat and perpetual motion. The dining room: slower, more deliberate, designed for the pleasure of being together rather than the efficiency of getting food on the table.
Australian homes have been obsessed with the kitchen for thirty years. Open-plan living gave us kitchen islands the size of aircraft carriers and benchtops that cost more than the family car. But something is shifting. The dining room — properly designed, properly considered — is reclaiming its place as the room where life actually happens.
The Evolution of Home Design: From Kitchens to Dining Rooms
The kitchen's dominance made sense when cooking was a solo activity — one person, separated from the household, producing meals for everyone else. But the open-plan revolution changed that. Suddenly cooking became social, the kitchen island became the bar, the homework desk and the drinks station simultaneously, and the poor dining room got relegated to "that table we eat on when we have guests."
The Borðstofa concept flips this. It asks: what if the dining room was the room you designed first, furnished best and lit most beautifully? What if it was the room that set the tone for the whole house — generous, warm, considered — rather than a slightly awkward afterthought between the kitchen and the living room?
The Allure of the Dining Room
Why the dining room deserves to be your home's most important room:
It's the only room designed purely for being together. The kitchen is about production. The living room is about consumption — screens, devices, individual retreat. The dining room is the one room in the house whose entire purpose is gathering. That's worth investing in.
It sets the social tone of your home. The dining room is where guests spend the most concentrated time with you. A dining room that's beautiful, generous and well-lit communicates something powerful about how you live and who you are as hosts.
It's the most versatile room in the house. Homework. Board games. Late-night conversations. Saturday morning breakfast. Birthday dinners. Work-from-home meetings with a real table to spread things across. The dining room can do all of it — if it's designed to.
It ages the best. A well-chosen dining table, properly made, can last fifty years. A good set of chairs, properly upholstered, can be recovered twice and last a lifetime. The dining room is where quality investment genuinely pays off over time.
Designing the Perfect Dining Room
How to design a Borðstofa-worthy dining room:
Start with the table. Everything else follows from the table. Get the size right first — allow 90cm clearance on all sides for comfortable movement, and 60cm of table width per person seated. Choose a material that rewards the life you actually live rather than the one you think you should have: solid timber for warmth and repairability, stone for drama and permanence, extending tables for households that oscillate between four and fourteen.
Get the lighting right. A dining room without a pendant over the table is a dining room that will never feel finished. The pendant should hang 75-90cm above the table surface, be wide enough to relate to the table's width, and be on a dimmer. Warm globes only. This is non-negotiable.
Invest in comfort. People stay at tables where the chairs are comfortable. Upholstered seats and backs, proper seat heights, chairs with a slight backward rake — these are the details that turn a thirty-minute meal into a three-hour conversation.
Design for atmosphere, not just function. A sideboard for storage and display. A rug to anchor the space and absorb sound. A piece of art that earns its wall. These aren't luxuries — they're the difference between a room people pass through and a room people choose to be in.
Embracing the Borðstofa Concept
The Borðstofa in an Adelaide Hills home:
The Adelaide Hills is arguably the perfect location for the Borðstofa concept. Stone farmhouses with generous proportions. Verandahs that blur the line between inside and out. The kind of light — cool, filtered through gum trees — that makes a well-lit dining room feel extraordinary at dusk.
Define the space. In open-plan homes, use a generous rug, a statement pendant and a considered furniture arrangement to give the dining area its own identity within the larger space. It shouldn't compete with the kitchen — it should feel like a destination in its own right.
Connect to outdoors. Adelaide Hills living is outdoor living — so consider how your dining room relates to the alfresco area. French doors, a continuous floor level, a table that can be pushed toward the opening on warm evenings. The indoor-outdoor dining experience is where Adelaide Hills homes genuinely sing.
Make it work for real life. A dining room in a family home needs to survive homework, craft projects, Christmas Day and Tuesday night dinner simultaneously. Choose durable materials, a table with enough surface area to spread out, and storage that keeps dining essentials accessible rather than locked away.
The Room That Changes Everything
The Borðstofa isn't a trend. It's a recognition of something we've always known — that the best moments in a home happen around a table, not in front of a screen or at a kitchen bench.
Give your dining room the investment it deserves. Design it like it matters. Light it like it's the stage for the best parts of your life — because it is.
Beige dining rooms, beige conversations. Design it bold.
— Love, Penelope xx - Interior Architect and Interior Designer - Adelaide East, Inner South and Adelaide Hills
Want to design a dining room — or a whole home — worth gathering in?
A Design Power Session is two focused hours on your space, your brief and your specific home. We'll work through what's possible, what's worth investing in and what your dining room actually needs to become the heart of your home.
