Home builder Tarrick Love used to make a point of including a luxury tub in every master bath. No more. He recently completed a home for an owner who replaced the tub with a luxury shower with multiple jets.

"I told him, we just made you a body car wash," said Love, co-owner of Hart-Love Enterprises, a Nashville-based custom builder.

Tubs aren't the only items missing from many newly built or remodeled homes. Dining rooms are disappearing. So are bonus rooms in some floor plans. The size and shape of the American home is changing to accommodate owners who don't have time to soak in a tub and don't want to pay for spaces they seldom, if ever, use.

"If they don't use it, they don't want it," said Jen Lucy, director of sales for the Jones Co.

The home building company offers some floor plans with dining rooms, but they are designed to have multiple uses.

"It could be something else, a study instead of a dining room or a bedroom and bath," said Lucy.

Kitchens expand

As dining rooms disappear, kitchens are getting bigger. The typical American kitchen now has between 200 and 250 square feet of space, said Nino Sitchinava, principal economist for Houzz.

"It's the largest in the world," she said.

Houzz, a website and online community about interior design and decorating, architecture, home improvement and landscape design, has more than 35 million monthly users. Homeowners can connect with 1 million home improvement professionals through the site.

Pantries, either walk-in or built-in, are growing in popularity, said Sitchinava. Houzz has seen an "uptick" in the selection of engineered quartz countertops, but granite is still No. 1.

Large kitchen islands have replaced the dining room table, said Lucy.

"Big, almost table-size islands," she said. "The kitchen has become the fulcrum of the home."

Kitchens are designed to be open to the great room and are a center of family life and entertaining, said Love.

"We're starting to design homes around the kitchen," he said.

'Right-size living'

Randall Smith, president of Celebration Homes, said "jewel box" homes, with top level materials including granite and hardwoods but less square footage than homes of the past, are growing in popularity.

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