We don't spend equal amounts of time in all the rooms in our house. You may well neglect the living room if you have hearth room, because the hearth room would take the place of the living room on a daily basis. I don't think that is a bad thing necessarily. The bigger space would be used more for entertaining in that case.

The pertinent question is would you refer to spend your time in a cozy room off the kitchen or a cavernous one? If you are TV watchers, your TV placement will affect the outcome. Of course you could just put a TV in each room ... but what fun would that be? Seriously, think of how you would like to use the rooms. Maybe put more books and board games in one room and the TV in the other in order to differentiate.

Hi Kate..i agree with the above posters. It depends on how u want to use the rooms. However, I’m thinking that the cozy hearth room can expand and become a very cozy great room, without a cavernous feel. In my humble opinion, people want to be and congregate in the kitchen. Will you find yourself in the hearth room and thinking “too bad this isn’t bigger so more people can sit in and enjoy it?”

I've seen them as a small bumpout from the kitchen with a fireplace and a couple of large wing chairs. Are you also going to have a family/great room and a living room?

Thanks for all the feedback so far.

Rita, we are TV watchers, and while I like the idea of tucking the TV away in the hearth room, leaving a fireplace and the view as the focus of seating in the living room, I wonder if that means we'd rarely hang out in the living room. Board games and books in the hearth room seems appealing. And we have a little girl who could do homework while we cook, etc.

P G, any tips for making a great room feel cozier? We are cooks and enjoy having people over, so we would love to have the kitchen congregating spill over into the living room if possible.

Chispa, we will indeed have a living room on the same level as the kitchen (initial idea was open concept), and a family room on the lower level.

Maybe we just need to work on making the great room cozier. Hmm.

Don't put a TV in the hearth room, close off the room with the TV a little more, and that's a recipe for happiness to me!

This is really a question specific to your family.... We don’t have a TV in out living/dining/kitchen combo, but we use that space every day. It’s a space for the family to hang out and talk and play games and not have the distraction of the TV in the background. I love having this TV free zone, but pretty much everyone who walks into my house asks when we’re going to mount a TV over the fireplace.

I️ feel like the room with the TV gets a little messy anyway, so it’s in a separate cozy den off the main living area. We eat snacks and read in there, so there is just a tendency to leave things lying around and it’s nice not to have to be super fussy all the time.

So to answer the original question, if we were home for 4 hours on a Saturday evening, we would probably spend 2 in the LR and 2 in the den. Both spaces get used and it’s nice to different areas with different functions to relax in. If I had a TV in the living room, there would be no reason for the den and i would use that square footage differently.

Good luck with the design!!!!

I've never heard the term "hearth room". Do you mean den? Is this a regional expression? Everyone seems to know what a hearth room is but me. Sounds cool though. What is it?

Friedajune, I only discovered them a few days ago. Some people call them keeping rooms. As far as I can gather, they are rooms near the kitchen (usually with a fireplace) that serve as a casual, comfortable spot for family to hang out.

We have a hearth room, but we use it as a breakfast nook instead. It's perfect for our table, we are a family of seven and our table seats eight. The original spot for a kitchen table was WAY too small for our needs, and the room for the formal dining room is quite a jog away from the kitchen and we don't use it as a dining room, it's our music room and houses our grand piano.
I do like having a fireplace where our kitchen table is though. :)

We actually removed a portion of the wall that kept it a little more separate from the kitchen during our kitchen remodel. We got rid of the section that housed the tv... house was built in the early '90's and it was a deep nook that was totally useless for today's tv's... removing that section of wall gave us a lot more space for kitchen cabinetry and made our hearth room feel more like a part of the kitchen.

Oh, and our kitchen is in between our hearth room and our family room... I did think it was weird to have two areas for lounging/watching tv so close to each other in the house. It just felt very natural for us to turn our hearth room into the kitchen table area. :)

Sometimes people have a hard time visualizing the use of rooms beyond the label given on the plan.

We took our formal living room in the front of the house and made it our TV room. The family room, open to the kitchen is more formal and mostly used during larger gatherings. We also have a play/teen room off of the family room with another TV.

I really like not having people watch TV in the family/kitchen space in the middle of the house. It would drive me crazy to have to be forced to watch football while cooking because the TV was in that space.

Right now DH is watching football in the front living room, teen is watching same football and playing computer games in the teen room ... I have peace and (mostly) quiet in the middle of the house.

I had a hearth room in a former home we had. I loved it. We used it a great deal. We used the large open living room when we had guests and to watch tv and movies. I liked having both and it we used both equally.

I'd like to see an example of a hearth room off the kitchen, sounds warm and inviting.

We had one in our former house, and we loved it. It was wonderful to sit there after dinner in the evenings with a glass of wine or a cup of coffee. No TV, just a little music and maybe turn on the gas fireplace for a bit during the winter. It was a nice place to transition between cleaning up after dinner and bedtime. Or a place to enjoy one more cup of coffee after breakfast on the weekends. I'd strongly advise not putting a TV in a hearth room. It should be a place for relaxing and reconnecting with the people you love.