Roger Collier

I walk by it several times a day, and during the moments I pause to look at it, the only thought that comes to mind is: "What a waste." No, I'm not talking about a mirror, which brings about a different thought: "My love handles might look smaller if I untuck." I'm talking about my home's formal living/dining room.

As in most modern suburban dwellings, the first thing you see when you enter my house is a large, sparsely furnished room, which my family uses approximately zero times a day. We have to walk by or through this for-show rectangle to get to the back of the house, the functional part, where we relax and talk and watch television and cook and force our children to eat vegetables.

If all the major builders in Ottawa asked me to design their family homes, two things would happen. First, tens of thousands of people would be crushed under piles of lumber and brick during windstorms due to poor building design. Second, formal living rooms and formal dining rooms and formal living/dining rooms would disappear.

I have been in many open-concept houses and I can't recall one where the front room was put to good use. I have been in houses where the room was completely empty for many years. I have been in houses where the room was littered with toys and colouring books and other little-kid detritus. I have been in houses where the room contained a computer surrounded by a rat's nest of wires.

Most often, the room contains pristine furniture that was purchased only to fill space. The parents of my girlfriend in university had such a room. It was preserved like a museum display of an old-timey living room belonging to some long-dead leader of men. They kept the doors shut and didn't heat the space. During winter, you could hang beef in there.

And now I have a room just like it, though mine, because it doesn't have doors, remains at room temperature year round, so you won't get frostbite if you walk through it in February. Our front room contains a wingback chair, an ottoman/ coffee table and a long, skinny table that we bought to display three vases and a painting. Or did we buy the table first and the other stuff after to put on it?

We also have a black, leather couch that is hard as concrete, not that it matters, because nobody ever sits on it. That sofa sees fewer posteriors than a proctologist with hooks for hands.

There are only two items in the room that get used on a regular basis. One is our piano, which our seven-year-old daughter is dragged to several times a week to sit and complain about how much she hates piano. The other is the sixfoot-tall mirror that leans against one of the walls. I often stand in front of it and practise my golf swing with my five-year-old son's toy lightsaber.

So why do so many houses have these unnecessary rooms? Eat-in kitchens have made formal dining rooms obsolete. Family rooms have done the same to formal living rooms. And having a space for "formal entertaining" seems a bit antiquated, don't you think? These days, families with young children tend to keep things fairly informal when hosting a get-together. In our house, the only difference between a family dinner and one with guests is that, during the latter, my son will have on more than just Lightning McQueen underwear.

Maybe home builders are in cahoots with furniture store owners who want to increase sales of uncomfortable sofas. Perhaps realtors favour formal living/dining areas because, like teenagers without nose rings, they "present well." Or maybe there really are hordes of homeowners out there who actually require two rooms to meet their dining needs and two more to meet their sitting needs.

Then again, maybe not. In the United States, more homeowners are eschewing formal living rooms, according to a paper by the National Association of Home Builders, a trade organization based in Washington, D.C. (The New Home 2015). The association surveyed thousands of builders, designers, architects and marketing specialists, and the consensus was that by 2015 "the living room will either vanish or merge with other spaces in the home."

To this I say: "Good riddance." I can always practise my golf swing in front of the mirror in the master bedroom. In fact, that would be better. I wouldn't have to wear pants.