10 Ideas for Designing a Home Perfect for Entertaining

Designing a home that makes entertaining a breeze is about more than making guests feel welcome and relaxed. It’s also about ensuring entertaining is easy on you! Whether it’s a post-game get-together for a child’s soccer team, a casual dinner for four, or your entire clan for a week during the holidays, you’ll enjoy yourself more if you’re hosting in a home tailor-made for gathering. Here are ten of our favorite ideas for making your home the ultimate entertaining space:

1. Incorporate a big kitchen island

We’ve all seen it a million times – the kitchen is where everyone tends to gravitate. Allocating space for a large kitchen island means your family and friends will be able to perch in comfort while you finish up dinner. A generous island also gives you the perfect place to set up buffet-style serving or a makeshift bar. Easy!

2. Mind kitchen traffic

Everyone knows the importance of a kitchen work triangle by now, but have you ever thought about the benefits of keeping guest traffic away from prep areas? Position a coffee station or a beverage refrigerator out of the cook’s way, and guests will be able to help themselves without bothering anyone. Win, win!

3. Skip the chairs

We love a comfortable dining chair – but it’s safe to say we love a built-in banquette even more! Not only does a banquette lend unique charm, but it also makes it easy to squeeze one more person in at the table without requiring you to pull up an extra seat.

4. Furnish with flexibility in mind

One of our favorite tricks is to furnish rooms with multiple tables that can push together – or pull apart – depending on your needs at any given moment. One day, you might find yourself hosting Thanksgiving for twenty, so you need a very large dining table. Done! The next day, you and your spouse might both be working from home and you each require your own desk area – flexible furnishings will cover you there, too!

5. Add a bar

One of the most hospitable moves you can make is to greet your guests with a warm hug – and a drink. A bar helps you make that move in style. We’ve tucked tiny bars beneath staircases, made them destinations in their own right within large kitchens, and incorporated them into family rooms. The point is to create an area where guests will beeline, and all your supplies will be set up and ready to go without effort or fuss.

6. Take it outside

There’s a reason indoor-outdoor living has become so popular, and we’re here for it. Almost every house we design places emphasis on easy connections between inside and out. This is a real boon for anyone – especially clients who enjoy entertaining.

7. Include a bunk room

If you’re a regular reader of this blog, you already know our mad love for bunk rooms. They’re genius. There’s absolutely no easier way to host overnight guests than to incorporate a bunk room into your home. It can be fancy, sure – or it can be made (beautifully, I might add) of plywood and planned into your basement. Regardless of how you approach its design, a bunk room will exponentially increase your ability to host sleepovers without stress.

8. Warm things up

We know that not all entertaining is large-scale. Some nights, all you want to do is have your best friend and their spouse over for dinner. We consider it practically mandatory to include a cozy fireplace somewhere in your home to settle in front of. It’s the best way we know to encourage conversation and enjoy quiet time with other people. A fireplace gives purpose to space and is a natural draw for nearly everyone.

9. Create accessible storage

If the thought of hosting a dinner party fills you with dread, we’ve got an idea for you: keep everything you’ll need close at hand to minimize the effort involved. Why trudge down to the basement for your seldom-used turkey platter when you can keep it right near your dining area with cleverly designed storage?

Make it feel special

If we do say so ourselves, this is an area where our residential architects and interior designers really shine. We’re all about creating experiences within a home so that daily living takes on a very special quality. And that includes hosting guests. We have so many ideas for elevating the ordinary into something extraordinary, which has the added benefit of making people feel pampered and inspired. Whether that’s a deep, dark dining room that evokes the swankiest restaurant and makes a dinner party feel like a can’t-miss event, or a sofa so comfortable a guest simply doesn’t want to get up to leave, we’re always looking for ways to make our clients’ homes memorable.

For more inspiration, follow us on Facebook, Pinterest and Instagram, where you’ll find countless other examples of ways architecture and interior design can help you host – and live – well.