D-room: Where Split Level Personalities Run Rampant
This commercial is for Daiwa House, the largest homebuilder in Japan. Apparently D-room is a reference to the dining room in a Japanese house. In fact when you’re looking at real estate ads in Japan they’ll often use letters to represent the number of rooms in a house. So an LDK would be a house with living room, dining room and kitchen. And from what I can see D-room is an online service for real estate.
Nick Kent sent me his take on the above spot:
I’m not 100% sure I have my facts right but I’m pretty sure you blogged slightly inaccurate info the other day. Yes, you got LDK abbreviation correct, but it means one room with those areas, you sort of imply separate rooms by naming them.
I think the woman is bragging in tongues to her friend that she can call her dining room a “D-Room” , because normally it isn’t enough of it to make the claim as a proper room.
So real estate will commonly say 1LDK, meaning one bedroom and a combined living/dining/kitchen that’s more or less a kitchen + dining area by western standards. A 1DK would be just a bedroom and kitchen with enough space to barely dine. Then 1K means eat on the kitchen counter, etc.