The Not So Big House: A Blueprint for the Way We Really Live

WOW... what a breath of fresh air this book is.Back in the Reagan years, the go-go '80s, a very ugly trend known as the 'McMansion' or 'Starter Castle' syndrome began in (of course) some red states, and unfortunately spread almost everywhere.The idea behind 'McMansionism' to have homes designed to IMPRESS visitors, not to be comfortable places to actually LIVE in (remember how many people in the '80s started getting into ostentatious displays of wealth?).Thus we got the widespread lunacy of couples with maybe one or two kids at home (or none at all) living in 5,000 square foot plus castles with three-story great rooms and not enough money left over to furnish it all.Hilarious I guess... unless you're the poor schmucks living there. =\But you were told that was the 'way to go', and tract home builders always have YOUR best interests at heart, right? Oh, heck no.Even people who should know better can get sucked up in this. My father was a builder for 30 years, and he fell prey to the McMansion syndrome when he built a new house for himself a few years back. 5,500 square feet, no kids at home, just him and my mom, all on one story.Living in it truly sucked, and he ended up selling it to someone clueless and built himself an actually livable (read 'smaller') two-story across the street.The 'Not So Big' house series is a great antidote to this madness.It focuses on a house having only the rooms/spaces you ACTUALLY USE (wotta concept), and designing around human and personal needs, not the idea of 'ostentatious displays of wealth' for the terminally insecure. The result? A home you can actually be happy inhabiting every day, as opposed to only on days you're entertaining, and only because you feel you've 'impressed' your guests.I do hear a few people whining that good design is too expensive, but the price of bad design, in terms of lack of livability/unhappiness, is a lot higher. Plus, even in simple dollar terms, they're not seeing the big picture.Susanka maintains that a well-designed house will use a third less square footage than you probably thought you originally needed. With building costs routinely running at around $150/square foot in many parts of the country even for generic-quality builder homes, just by going with a smaller house you've freed up a LOT of cash to put towards better and more personal design/detail, i.e. things that are going to be a lot more rewarding to a home dweller than unnecessary extra formal rooms they use perhaps twice a year.In the long run, the cost of a large generic house is probably going to work out to be the same as a well-detailed Not So Big home, but the difference is you'll be a lot happier, with a house tailored to the way YOU live.This book is a winner, and has definitely influenced the conversation about what kind of homes people want to live in. The trend of McMansionism has definitely weakened in the past few years, with more and more people demanding 'right-sized' houses and turning up their noses at the generic starter castles tract home builders try to push them into.Once the nation comes out of the subprime mess, I think the building landscape of home choices will become even more varied and interesting, and we'll have Ms. Susanka to thank for much of that, as she got the ball rolling.Will tracts of well-designed 'Not So Big' houses become commonplace, perhaps even the standard in many places? They do fit on smaller lots well, yet fetch more per square foot, and most importantly are what more and more people WANT.So the same builders who pushed wasteful, unsatisfying tract McMansions on us may end up changing their tune (in the name of $$$, of course)... we shall see.

Some people's list of life-changing books focuses on works of great spiritual, emotional, political or literary power. Sarah Susanka's The Not So Big House and at least some of its sequels happen to be near the top of mine.When I ordered the book in 2002 after hearing the author interviewed on NPR, we were living in a rambling old Tudor with 5 bedrooms, a full basement, and enough storage space to absorb just about anything we brought into it. Though I loved the house, I now saw what I had never seen before - how much duplication of function we were supporting (= repairing, cleaning, etc.), and how we had nonetheless managed to miss opportunities to make it our own. Guided by the book, for example, we converted an outdoor stair landing to the screened-in porch we'd always dreamed of but never thought we had a place for, till we realized it could be really tiny and yet both beautiful and functional. Later, when we moved to a smaller house, we didn't feel we'd downsized in the negative sense at all, because following the not-so-big approach, we devoted available resources to making our space the best (rather than the biggest) we could afford.When I say the book changed my life, I'm not just referring to decorating tricks or clever ways to use the same space in different ways. Absorbing the ideas in this book actually freed up our thinking about how we wanted to live, and live together, in our physical space. We have learned to design our interiors to please ourselves and serve our own needs (open storage! no closet doors!), not someone else's idea of what a house ought to be. Maybe these are things that other people are born knowing or figure out for themselves, but for us, this book was truly an eye-opener.I highly recommend this book.

There's a healthy amount of evidence that even those with unlimited budgets and the ability to live anywhere they wish get a raw deal from current real estate development practice. This book is about thinking out of the box - out of spending money on making your house beautiful instead of simply massive. I've checked out a lot of open houses and seen more than a few of the homes she criticises in her book - and she's dead to rights in saying modern architectural practice is too big, too overwhelming, too sterile. Frankly, in my case, I don't care about sustainability or environmentalism or any of that stuff -- the big houses just feel chilly-cold. If you want to learn how to build a warm house at about the same price as a cold and impersonal one, well, this is a fabulous book.This book has been criticised for concentrating too much on high-end homes. I don't think this is fair, because she does an exceptionally clear job in her section explaining why some homes are expensive to build while others aren't. She walks us through three homes, low, mid-range and expensive, explaining how the detail quality changes. Now, admittedly, she obviously loves the really expensive, high-end, $ 175-500 a square foot masterpieces she profiles. But she has empathy for those of us at the low end, and I think most readers will walk away from that section enlightened, if a little wistful.I'm afraid I'm one of those hapless low budget folks, but I still loved her book. It has great ideas for any budget. But, in the final analysis, remember this: 'tis better to build at $ 50 a square foot, then not to build at all - as long as you're not kidding yourself about feasibility.