So that's your dining room?

It's not just for supper. It's also a gallery, a game room, a lounge.

Karen DeTemple of Jamaica Plain turned her dining room into a lounge, complete with low-slung chairs and a shag rug. (Wiqan Ang for the Boston Globe)

When Karen DeTemple bought her house in Jamaica Plain three years ago, she asked the family vacating the space to take their old Victorian-style dining room chandelier with them.

"I hate traditional dining rooms," she said. "It's the biggest waste of a room. You only use it a couple times a year."

The event planner placed four low-slung orange lounge chairs and a glass coffee table in the middle of her dining room instead. For lighting, she put globe-shaped glass lamps on the floor. In the adjacent living room, she hung a flat-screen television, on which she plays a DVD by an artist who restages classic paintings as video art.

DeTemple's old dining-room table stands in the corner, ready for use . . . as a bar. "When I entertain, I only serve food you can eat with a fork," she said. "My guests have their plates in their lap, so they can't cut. But I can still serve an elegant meal, I just have to cut everything up in advance."

For many of us, gone are the days when everyone sits down together in the formal dining room for leisurely Sunday dinners. Time-pressed and frazzled, lots of families simply grab dinner in the kitchen or hunch over the coffee table in the family room, preferring to eat in full view of the 40-inch flat-panel TV. Those with great rooms often dine casually, hanging out in the dining area between the family room and kitchen.

The formal dining room, meanwhile, is being repurposed: into a lounge, a game room, or, simply, a showcase for fabulous, if little used, furnishings.

"People want the dining room to be a place where you can sit beyond the meal," said Paul Gaucher, owner of the furniture company Icon Group Inc. and the Beverly-based home store Coast. "Once you arrive, you can experience that room for three or four hours. In the old days, you would adjourn from the dining room and go out for a smoke or for cocktails in the study. That's not happening anymore."

Turahn Dorsey and his wife, Mariama White-Hammond, have defined the dining room in their Savin Hill duplex with one piece of furniture: a large ottoman.

"When we entertain, we set up small tables next to the ottoman," said Dorsey. "Our friends want to wander through the space with a drink. They want to have side conversations. This is a way to congregate without feeling like you're at a boardroom table. There's something very static about a dining-room table."

The couple, who eat many of their meals in front of the TV, plan to buy a table in coming months that can be hung on the wall.

"When we need to seat people, we'll take it off the wall," he said. Dorsey, a public policy researcher for Abt Associates Inc. in Cambridge, said he would like a table that has a graphic design on the top and folding legs. "I grew up in Michigan and there was a formal dining room in my house that never got used," Dorsey said. "We want to live in the space differently."

David and Camellia Sullivan, who closed their South End art gallery Genovese/Sullivan in July, chose to mix modern art with 18th-century architecture in their dining room. The Andover residents purchased from a historical society a paneled room from a condemned 1740 home. They added a wood burning stove and lowered their ceiling 15 inches to fit the panels. Rather than use an electric chandelier, they asked New York sculptor Jake Grossberg to make a modern forged steel sculpture that holds real candles. "It looks like black clouds are holding the candles," said David.

The room is filled with contemporary art, including a sculpture by Jay Swift of an abstract form holding a basket made of galvanized steel. There is a picture by Peter Campus of the inside of a pickup truck and a wood block print of a big eye by Pat Keck. "We wanted to challenge people intellectually," said Camellia, who hosts dinner parties every two weeks. "We wanted to marry the old and the new. It's an art experience."

The conversation-piece dining room, designers say, has evolved as more and more people dine out regularly at stylish restaurants.

"People have become room snobs," said Susan Orpin, design director for the interior design firm the Orpin Group. "Restaurants are destinations and people want that 'oooh' factor. If the room isn't great, they're disappointed. Now they want to take a piece of that home."

Some people, of course, decry such developments if it means fewer sit-down meals.

"It's nice to have some place special to sit down and have a meal," said Miriam Weinstein, author of "The Surprising Power of Family Meals." "Friday night or Sunday dinner. It makes a statement. We are here, we value this. It's a bigger statement in a separate room. We are carving out this special time and place to be together. Eating in front of the TV is a no-no. What's important is to face each other and have a conversation."

But Barry Glassner, a University of Southern California sociology professor and author of "The Gospel of Food," says longing for a past era is a waste of time.

"I think this nostalgia for the way we used to eat is much sadder than the actual change because, for the most part, these are odd, false memories," he said. "Typically when people remember the wonderful Sunday night dinners, they are forgetting all the fights people had or that the people in the room would rather have been doing something else."

Indeed, some argue that turning a dining room into a game room, for example, might be the secret to improved family relations - if it makes the space more appealing for everyone.

"I've seen a dining-room table that's a table on one side and a pool table on the other. It flips," said Jerry Epperson, managing director and cofounder of Mann, Armistead & Epperson Ltd., an investment banking firm in Virginia that tracks the furniture industry. "My wife would kill me if I got that. But my kids think eating at the dining-room table is a punishment. They'd rather eat outside or on the sofa. I'm into that myself."

For his part, Ed Herman just wants his dining area to reflect the way he lives - which is casually.

When the owner of True North Inc., a construction management firm, sold his five-bedroom house in Lexington and built a smaller home overlooking Spy Pond in Arlington five years ago, he built it without a formal dining room.

Instead, he designed an open floor plan on the first floor, 22-by-26-feet, that incorporates a casual dining room, kitchen, and family room all in one space. He added a wall of windows and a deck overlooking the water. He plugged in a 32-inch television (the 50-inch flat screen is coming soon). He sold his stuffy dining-room set and went to Crate & Barrel and bought a user-friendly oak table that can seat 10.

Then he and his wife Betsy started entertaining. "People always group around the kitchen and the TV anyway," he said. "Why not put it all together?"

Suzanne Ryan can be reached at sryan@globe.com