Indoor or Outdoor Dining? With These Hybrid Spaces, You Don’t Have to Choose.
Homeowners are ditching elaborate dining rooms and separate outside setups for a more blended eating environment.
When building his Sonoma, Calif., home, Mukesh Patel had a request: He wanted a simple way to enjoy farm-to-table meals. He meant it literally.
Mr. Patel had purchased a 100-acre lot with his wife, Harsha Patel, 59, for $5.7 million in 2016 that included a small fruit and vegetable farm. He then worked with architect Christie Tyreus to construct a 2,100-square-foot, two-bedroom home for $3 million.
The home features a glass-enclosed kitchen-dining room with exterior pocket doors that open up on two sides to make it easy to walk from the terrace to pick fresh food: tomatoes, avocados, lettuce. The other side of the dining area leads to the living room. “You pick, you cook, then you eat—it’s a smooth transition,” says Mr. Patel, 64, a technology executive. The two moved into the new house from Pleasanton in 2020 but kept their Pleasanton house as a secondary home.