I can answer YES to nearly all of your questions. I just posted a thread with photos of our new bar table. We eat on it for most meals (the more formal dining room off the LR is used for some dinners), use it for family games (GREAT for cards), guests gather around it as a bar/snack zone as I'm working in the kitchen, the kids do homework on it, and I occasionally use it for prep (the counter space in the kitchen is usually adequate.) Eventually, we're going to add multi-media to this space and I think it will be used even more then. Right now, I estimate we use it 2-3 hours a day. It helps that the stools are comfy (suede padded seats with high backs)

Hope this helps.

My dad has bar height seating in his kitchen. Every tine we visit, we read newspapers, eat, and use laptops at that bar. It is very comfortable. That's why we are going to have a similar set up in our remodelled kitchen.

Ours is 18" deep. We use it for everything ... reading the paper, eating meals, using the laptop, watching TV, etc. My prep area is directly below the raised bar.

BUMP and thanks for your answers.
For those of you that use the bar height counters, have you lived with spacious "countertop" height counters also? I guess what I am asking is have you compared the usefulness of countertop height versus bar height...

I'm curious to see how this conversation evolves. Personally, I tend to avoid bar height even in restaurants. I'm short and I tend to be uncomfortable in bar stools, not to mention the whole hiking myself up there thing. However, my aunt is a big entertainer with 3 kids and she says that folks in her houses always seem to migrate to the upper bar height area, even if it is just to lean against it.

I've been leaning towards counter-height, but...we'll see.

I've used counter height in friend's homes and that's one of the main reasons why I chose bar height for ours. I wanted a well defined break in the prep and bar area. Our bar is 18" deep. I wouldn't go with anything smaller.

Ours is 18" deep. We eat most breakfasts and lunches there (DH and I usually work from home.) I read the paper; the kids use their laptops and often do their homework there even tho we have large desks in a dedicated 'homework room'. We don't really prep there -- the 'work' side of the island is the other side. But we use it often for serving when we entertain.

We used to have a one-level island that was also handy but wide enough that it was a stretch to clean all the way across from one side (even tho I'm 5'11".) Since all my friends with new kitchens had 2 level, that's what I went with. Also, the higher level shields anyone in the adjacent great room from seeing what's on the lower part of the counter, which was one of my goals.

IMO each type -- one or two levels -- has certain advantages and few negatives. I think a 2 level in a rental should be fine.

We have a bar height table that connects our kitchen to the dining area. The height was determined by the design and we were a bit leery re: how well it would work. A few considerations: 1) comfortable stools make a real difference. They should be easy for both kids and grandparents to get on. We also find padded seats and high backs much more comfortable. 2) We personally find the height nice in a room with higher ceilings. No sense of crowding and the height seems proportionate with the vertical space.

I'm interested in how this evolves too. It might help to post pictures. Here's my seating area. I couldn't decide on which beautiful-rainforest-hardwood-stools-made-to-look-like-cheap-junk I felt like springing too much money for: there are so many! So I just grabbed a couple $30 steel and laminated beech variants from IKEA. If I find something nicer I'll get it but don't want to search.

I intended this space to be for all of the above but so far it's summer and no one has had any homework. When the littlest draws she's gone to the table. I, of course, always have stuff strewn across the surface but we haven't established a moved-in routine yet. So I think the jury's still out on how well it works. I concur that comfortable seating matters. We have an older IKEA stool that doesn't have good foot support at perching height. The newer ones do and it matters a lot. I've sat at the counter often and worked on my computer there. I'll be putting plugmold underneath the countertop along the cabinet top to facilitate laptop plugging-in. But I *love* the large, continuous space morphing from prep to fruit bowl to stuff-dumping to dinner staging surface. I thought about having a discontinuous surface delineating the spaces but far prefer the flexibility of just melding into another purpose when needed. But like you, I worried there wouldn't be enough space which is why we moved toward that blobular turned out section to try to accommodate space to actually write and computerize, etc.