Center Parlor as Dining Room?
Is there anyone out there with a center parlor brownstone (see floor plan) who uses the center parlor as a dining room? I’m wondering if that arrangement is feasible. It would allow for a formal front parlor and a more casual rear parlor that could be used for watching TV or for larger groups of…
Is there anyone out there with a center parlor brownstone (see floor plan) who uses the center parlor as a dining room? I’m wondering if that arrangement is feasible. It would allow for a formal front parlor and a more casual rear parlor that could be used for watching TV or for larger groups of people (as the rear parlor is the biggest room on the floor). Although the dining table would be bit of a hike from the kitchen, that may not matter so much if you don’t use it that often because, e.g., you have an eat-in kitchen or a small table suitable for dining in the rear parlor. On the other hand, a dining table might really clutter up the middle parlor, which isn’t all that big and is really intended for circulation throughout the house. Any thoughts?
Mopar, I have an unfair advantage — I know the house to which the floor plan relates. It’s in Park Slope on the south side of 3rd Street between 7th and 8th Avenues, and it has a round bay out front. We’ve been looking for a house for a while, and in that time I’ve come across a number of real estate listings with floor plans that show V-shaped bays or 3-sided bays when in fact the bays are rounded on the outside (although, in fairness, they are V-shaped or 3-sided on the inside). I think it’s because a lot of the floor plans are generated using very basic CAD programs. Having used them myself, I know that it’s pretty easy to draw straight walls and then drop in windows, and once you’ve done that, it’s kind of a pain to then round off the outside of the wall in the drawing.
Tybur — yes, overhoused. As I mentioned, we don’t own this place. We’re considering one that’s very similar (same layout, and all the room dimensions are within roughly 6 inches of the ones in the floor plan). Earlier this year I posted a question relating to our prospective move from an apartment into a house, and noted that we feel pretty guilty about occupying so much space. I recall that a number of commenters told us to ditch the guilt. Not easy. In any event, we’re a little preoccupied about how the parlor floor would work for us because we don’t want to end up with a house that has a fantastic, high-ceilinged parlor floor only to end up spending most of our time in the less grand upper or lower floors. I realize that’s a compromise that lots of people make, but we’re trying to find a way to maximize our use of the best part of the house (if we ever pull the trigger).
LowerUWSider, fascinating! Thanks for all the information.
But…how can you tell from the floor plan that the bay is rounded? It looks v-shaped. Also, the bedrooms have fireplaces which I would think would be somewhat unusual in the 20th century. But very interesting regardless of what this particular floor plan represents.
tybur, you commie.
4 bedroom, 3 floor house (+ ground floor) for 2 adults with no kids… and questions about how to use the 3 rooms on the 1st floor. I’m just throwing this out there — with only a little judgement — Do you think you might be a little “overhoused” here?
I’m getting extra long-winded here, but to eliminate one potential source of confusion – the house in the floor plan above looks like a V-fronted neo-grec brownstone from the 1880s, but it’s not. The bay in the front of the house is actually rounded on the outside, and V-shaped on the inside, which is typical for a rounded bay with only two windows. Whoever rendered the floor plan didn’t bother rounding off the outside of the V. So, despite the seemingly 1880s facade, it is in fact a “white city,†limestone, renaissance revival house from the early 1900s.
Boerumbiddy, thanks for the reminder about Merchant’s House. I saw it on TV a while back (maybe on This Old House?) and thought it would be fun to visit, but completely forgot about it. I’ll have to check it out.
Mopar, this house is actually one of the later “city beautiful†or “white city†era houses from the first decade of the 20th century, which had kitchens on the parlor level from the start. These homes, which appear in large rows on many park blocks in Park Slope, including the south side of 1st Street, north side of 2nd and 3rd streets, both sides of 4th street and the north side of 5th, have garden levels that are more like basements – they are generally more than halfway below street level in the front and, at the rear, are below the level of the garden (i.e., you have to walk up some stairs to get to the garden). The basement has no cellar below, and it originally housed only the furnace and laundry room, and maybe one extra room in front. The parlor level had three rooms — a front parlor, a middle parlor with a staircase, and a rear dining room. The center stair layout allowed for narrower entry hall and therefore a wider front parlor, as the entry hall did not have to be wide enough to accommodate both a staircase and space to walk alongside it. The two-story extension at the back of the house is original and was designed with a kitchen above and laundry room below. The emergence of this layout coincides with a movement away from Victorian formalities, which required food preparation to be hidden from view so that meals appeared out of nowhere as if by magic, and the advent of modern conveniences that eliminated the need for a large staff and the extra rooms to accommodate them. A smaller staff and more casual lifestyle made basement kitchens less desirable (too much schlepping up and down for the heads of the household), so builders started moving kitchens up to the parlor level. The upside is having all of the most-used rooms on one floor – it works better for the way people live today. The downside is that, with a rear extension, the back parlor has less natural light and constricted views of the garden, and the kitchen is relatively small. Although I’m a fairly new reader, I think there are many kitchen-in-the-basement debates all over this blog, and I still wrestling with the question myself.
We chose to add a 1/2 bath and closet storage along one wall of our middle parlor, and our formal dining table is a drop-leaf rectangle that sits against the opposite wall. 99% of the time we eat at a breakfast table in the kitchen. When we have a dinner party we open the big table and bring in chairs from the kitchen and basement. A tiny bit of a hassle to set up, so if you have tons of dinner parties maybe doesn’t work, but for us it’s a great layout.
Round dining table with the leaf out is a good suggestion. I’ve looked at a lot of photos of turn of the century and teens interiors, obviously later than your house, but these round tables were very common. The dining rooms often looked quite large compared to the size of the table, I assume because the tables were in their unexpanded form. This would be a nice room to walk through for the two parlors.
Then again, the rear parlor was very likely the informal family living room originally. (With family dining room downstairs next to the kitchen.)
I like your idea of the round dining/library table in the middle room. That sounds very attractive.