Purpose of a Breakfast Bar?!

[ironsoulreaver]

So, What's the point of a breakfast bar, Historically anyway.

My best guess is that back in the day dining rooms were formal so the table was in a separate room from the kitchen which is really inconvenient for a quick morning meal.

My house has a breakfast bar but it's the only thing separating the dining room from the kitchen so it's purpose is not really useful. It's turned into a catchall and I really just want to take it out.

 

[cj-m]

Breakfast bars are a fairly new concept. More of a housing marketing gimmick than anything else.

It came along with open plan kitchens, "breakfast nooks", etc. It is an interior design meant to maximise limited space in the more modern and smaller houses/apartments being built today. A break from the more traditional kitchen and dining room concept.

Mind you, i prefer open plan kitchens leading into a dining room.

 

[Laura Knotek]

It is a fairly new concept that really did not start until the 1970s. Kitchen Island Furniture - The History

From Wikipedia: "Starting in the 1980s, the perfection of the extractor hood allowed an open kitchen again, integrated more or less with the living room without causing the whole apartment or house to smell. Before that, only a few earlier experiments, typically in newly built upper-middle-class family homes, had open kitchens. Examples are Frank Lloyd Wright's House Willey (1934) and House Jacobs (1936). Both had open kitchens, with high ceilings (up to the roof) and were aired by skylights. The extractor hood made it possible to build open kitchens in apartments, too, where both high ceilings and skylights were not possible.

The re-integration of the kitchen and the living area went hand in hand with a change in the perception of cooking: increasingly, cooking was seen as a creative and sometimes social act instead of work. And there was a rejection by younger home-owners of the standard suburban model of separate kitchens and dining rooms found in most 1900-1950 houses."

 

[mlm1950]

I don't know what a breakfast bar is, but we had both an eat-in kitchen and a totally separate dining room, that was used for holiday dinners, in the house I grew up in. That house was built in the '60's.

Don't know what the point of either was, though.

 

[Laura Knotek]

I don't know what a breakfast bar is, but we had both an eat-in kitchen and a totally separate dining room, that was used for holiday dinners, in the house I grew up in. That house was built in the '60's.

The house I grew up in was built in 1957. It had an eat in kitchen and did not have a dining room.

 

[ironsoulreaver]

I just find having a separate table in the design of a "bar" just to eat breakfast to be useless. Islands are good for having a nice large open space to cook. My breakfast nook/bar is just a 5ft piece of kitchen counter attached to a section of wall so it's not really functional like an island is.

 

[squire777]

My family would always just eat breakfast at the dining table so the concept of a breakfast bar was pointless to us. Also, I find eating in a kitchen is more of when you're in a rush but I like to be relaxed and take my time when I eat.