Architect Bruce Goff sank his first living room in 1927, decades before the phrase “conversation pit” existed, and it took until the back half of the twentieth century for the rest of the country to catch on.

A Frank Lloyd Wright Protg Started It in 1927

Goff, who trained under Frank Lloyd Wright, is credited by the design history site Click Americana with designing the first modern conversation pit in a 1920s Tulsa house. Dwell traces the real tipping point to the Miller House in Columbus, Indiana, completed in 1957, where architect Eero Saarinen and designer Alexander Girard built a sunken square seating area into the plan.

The Pit Goes Mainstream

Saarinen’s own TWA Flight Center at JFK Airport, opened in 1962, put sculptural sunken seating in front of millions of travelers, cementing the pit as a symbol of Jet Age optimism, as design writer Nicole Bozzani has documented. By the late 1960s and through the 1970s, the feature had trickled all the way down to suburban tract houses, often paired with shag carpet. A built-in sunken seating area even showed up as a fixture on The Mary Tyler Moore Show, per Click Americana.

Why It Got Filled Back In

A step down in low light is a rolled ankle waiting to happen, the fixed built-in seating couldn’t be rearranged for a growing family, and the open-concept, television-centered living rooms of the 1980s and ’90s had no real use for a room you couldn’t easily see across. By the 1980s, Click Americana notes, the sunken living room had become “hopelessly out-of-date.”

The New Builds Bringing It Back

Dwell has documented a wave of new sunken living spaces from working firms: architect Craig Steely built an eggplant-purple pit into a Cupertino, California house, Nic Brunsdon sank a garden room into a Perth renovation, Paul Archer Design worked one into a London infill home, and Taylor Knights built a Melbourne pit into a Victorian-era house with no television in sight.

The conversation pit didn’t really go extinct so much as go into storage for forty years, waiting for architects to solve the parts that made it impractical the first time.