He describes it as a moment of sheer panic. “When they first broke ground, I was standing there and I swear it was like I was standing in front of an excavation for a hot tub. It (the hole) was so small. I thought `Oh God. We have invested all this money and now we can’t expand it.’ “
A year-and-a-half later and all moved into his “little castle” of just 1,350 square feet, Anderson Ferrell now describes something that sounds like awe:
“You need to see the inside of this house,” he muses. “The sense of space is astonishing to me.”
Although it certainly cannot be labeled a “trend,” as the size of the average American home being built today has swelled to an all-time high of 2,100 square feet, a small, but committed number of Americans are going the other way–and loving it. They’re building strongly designed but amazingly diminutive homes.
We’re talking about homes that top out at about 1,500 square feet; 800-square-footers are not unheard of.
Why would anyone want so little space?
Their answer: Why would anyone want more?
“Even if I had lots of money, I would have gone this way,” says Ferrell, a writer who shares the house with his partner, Dirk Lumbard, an actor. “It’s manageable. The house doesn’t impose itself in this unspoiled place”–that being 5 acres of woods and rocks in the mid-Hudson Valley in New York.
Closer to home are Marcia and Craig Malin of far north suburban Grayslake. A year ago, they opted to build the smallest model then offered by the developer in their subdivision. They didn’t like the bigger models. They liked this one’s Midwestern farmhouse looks, its simple, honest charm, its lack of extra rooms, its modest 1,478 square feet.
And out in Adell, Wis., about an hour north of Milwaukee, former city-dwellers Jack Lutz and Lynn Molenda built themselves a mere dot in the woods: a 1,500-square-foot house, on 24 acres.
“The bigger the house, the farther removed you are from anything outside the house,” says Lutz, an outdoorsman at heart. “The windows tend to be farther away.”
Although none of them speaks of the simplicity movement that is spreading across the country, all three sets of homeowners are living it.
All have chosen to trade more space for less maintenance, less expense and less of a feeling of being cut off from nature and the world outside.
The personal touch
But less house does not have to mean less of a house.
Unlike the tract homes of the late 1940s and ’50s, which gave Americans the dream of single-family living but in cookie-cutter fashion, today’s new breed of Wonderful Small Home is more personal.
And, most importantly, it doesn’t feel small. Its architects push the element of design to the farthest reaches and use everything from illusion to plain ol’ good planning to create the feeling of spaciousness.
“It is just astonishing what he got into this house,” Ferrell says of his architect, Dennis Wedlick of New York. “There is a little laundry with a full-size washer and dryer, and lots of closets.”
There also are three levels, two bedrooms, a sitting room, two full baths, a galley kitchen, a more than ample dining room and a separate living room.
Come together
Ferrell and Lumbard originally planned this to be a weekend country home; they have a tiny apartment in Manhattan as well. But these days, Ferrell spends up to four days a week in the house, where writing comes easily, he says.
“There is a serenity to this place,” says Ferrell. “There is a sense of space and light and air.”
They happen to be Wedlick’s favorite toys. The 37-year-old architect (and former 10-year apprentice to world-renowned architect Philip Johnson) is gaining a national reputation for designing small homes that seem anything but.
“The small house is my favorite commission,” says Wedlick, who crafted himself a charming, 800-square-foot weekend home and who is not afraid of the word “affordable.” He delivered the Ferrell/Lumbard residence for $160,000, including architectural fees.
“What you tend to get with small homes,” he continues, “is people who have families who like to be with their families. My larger-home families are really about families who like to be apart.”
One of Wedlick’s spatial tricks involves windows. To keep costs down, he uses ordinary double-hung windows, but in 6-foot-tall sizes (“It’s about the same price regardless of size,” says Wedlick) and then gangs four or five of them together for a dramatic effect.
Lutz and Molenda know the window trick–and a few others. From the outside, their new home, set way off the beaten path in rural Wisconsin, seems much larger than its footprint of just 34 feet by 28 feet suggests.
“It is a combination of the shape of the roof plus the overhangs (3 feet deep all the way around the house) and the way the roof comes way down in the back to almost knee-high,” explains Lutz. “It all makes the house look bigger. It is an illusion.”
Inside, find more sleight of hand. The house counts 1,500 square feet, divided between two floors. But nowhere does it feel cramped. Lutz and Molenda, both artists and interior designers, were bent on making it feel as wide open as the great outdoors.
They also were bent on doing it themselves.
They designed the house. Lutz shouldered nearly all of the construction work himself, from building the walls and hoisting them up with elaborate, one-man pulley systems to laying the hardwood floor, strip by strip. The project has consumed the better part of three years, but cost them a very modest $70,000.
“After all these years of doing different design work for everybody else and traveling (in Europe),” we knew what we wanted, says Molenda.
The bottom line: High quality, high design in a nice small package. A house that would simplify their lives–both emotionally and financially.
A new life
For the past 20 years, the couple had been living the urban life, which they “loved.” But when “urban” turned into constant violence in their Milwaukee neighborhood, Lutz and Molenda decided it was time for a change.
It made sense to build on the wooded property that they already owned. They bought the acreage, which is located about an hour’s drive from Milwaukee, 20 years ago as an investment in their peace of mind. Weekly pilgrimages allowed them to hike, camp, garden, grow vegetables, ski and, in general, de-stress.
When it came time to relocate, the property became their ticket to a new life.
Molenda compares the process of designing their small home to “arranging your purse, so that everything works for you.”
Into the plan, which includes three bedrooms and two full baths, went built-in shelves and cabinetry. Built-ins minimize the need for free-standing furniture, which swallows up space.
Ceiling heights climb up and down throughout the first floor, adding volume to the free-flow of kitchen-dining-living spaces.
The house works
Making the house function economically also was part of their plan–and they were adamant about achieving financial freedom.
In each room, they capitalized on natural light by creating exposures from at least two different directions.
Instead of a fireplace in the living room, they installed a highly efficient wood-burning stove, which heats even the bedrooms upstairs.
They sited the house 45 degrees to a true north/south direction to maximize the winter sun and minimize that in the summer. They also placed the house in the protection of a hill, which shields the house from the howling northeasters in the winter.
It has done wonders for their heating bill.
Since last June, their gas bill, which includes hot water, stove and heat, has totaled just $220.
But building small homes today can be problematic.
The cost of land is exorbitant in prime locations. And in some Chicago suburbs, particularly the ones experiencing high growth, new (or amended) zoning ordinances dictate minimum sizes for lots and new homes. And those minimums are getting bigger by the year.
Last year in Lake Villa, the village raised the minimum lot size for a single-family, detached home from 6,000 to 8,000 square feet. There is talk about raising the minimum once again, to 10,500 square feet.
In Vernon Hills, a home less than 2,000 square feet is technically illegal to build, “although the minimum norm is easily 2,500 square feet,” says Craig Malin, assistant manager of the Village of Vernon Hills.
The reason is simple: More land, more house, more taxes.
“There is no discussion of quality. It is just quantity. If you build a bigger house, that house would be valued more,” says Malin, who is not shy about criticizing “fiscal zoning” and in speaking out on behalf of small homes.
He and his wife, Marcia, own one.
Last year, they built The Halsey, a not-quite-1,500-square-foot home in Prairie Crossing, an innovative subdivision/conservation community in Grayslake. The developers here are trying to recreate a traditional neighborhood by building homes of many different sizes and keeping lot sizes relatively small. This allows for open space for parks, prairies, even an organic farm to be shared by the community.
From the outside, the Malins’ house looks like a Midwestern farmhouse, which they find “honest.”
On the inside, it feels right to them.
“We don’t have the separate dining room,” says Marcia Malin. “We don’t have the separate living room. . . . Who uses them except for the holidays?”
What they do have is three bedrooms, two and one-half baths and a nice open flow between the living spaces, which allows them to keep a constant eye on 3-year-old Amanda.
They have an inordinate number of windows (20 in all) and natural light. Noted Chicago architect Margaret McCurry designed the home and designed into it carefully sized and placed windows. When you enter most rooms, there is an immediate view through glass.
They have a decor that suits the house–spare, Shaker-style furniture, folk art on the walls, a less-is-more approach. Craig, whose hobby is woodworking, made nearly all the wood furniture in the house. Marcia sewed the Roman shades that cover all the windows.
And they have time.
Because the house is small and forces them to keep “stuff” out, Marcia says she spends just a half hour a day cleaning. The rest is devoted to Amanda–plus one. A new baby is on the way.
“We live in every square inch of this house,” says Marcia Malin. “That is what a home is supposed to be about.”
THE BIG SECRETS
New York architect Dennis Wedlick, a champion of innovative small homes, shared some of his tricks for making small space seem big:
– Oversize windows. “We use ordinary double-hung windows that are 6 feet tall, and then we gang them together–four or five of them–so you get a wall of glass. . . . It’s a dramatic effect.”
– Eroded corner. Instead of centering windows in each wall, “we take two sets of windows on each wall and push them close together on a corner. The effect is you lose the corner of the room, because it is all glass. That will make the window area seem larger.”
– Dual-function rooms. “We make small architectural moves in a room, so that it has the essence of two different places.” For instance: “We might put the living area and dining area in one space. . . . But maybe we will jog the wall a bit or use a special window arrangement to denote where the dining room is.”
– Enfilade. “It means an arrangement of rooms in a row. . . . The effect is borrowed space. If your living room is open to your dining room, both the living room and dining room feel larger. You don’t quite have the definition of the end of one room, so your eye travels into the next room.”
– Columns between spaces. They make rooms seem larger. “It is another trick of the eye. . . . Your eye rests on the columns and then goes to the next wall.” Gardeners use this trick too. “Anything you put in the foreground makes the background seem even farther away. . . . It also has the effect of making the house seem very grand.”
– A monumental fireplace. “I choose prefabricated as opposed to masonry ones, because masonry ones require more space. . . . I use design tricks to make these fireplaces seem like monuments. We will give it an enormous hood or we will give it a very robust mantel, and we do all of that with Sheetrock, standard moldings, maybe we will put some ceramic mosaics around it.” Interior designers use the trick of stunning disproportion all the time. They will put a four-poster bed in an 8-by-10-foot bedroom. “You want to make the room seem more grand, you make the fireplace very grand.”
– Ceiling tricks. “We like to use 8-foot ceilings on the ground floor. To make them seem taller, we will wrap a continuous picture rail, which is the piece of trim wrapped around all windows and doors and around the room (at a height of 7 feet). Your eye goes first to the picture rail and then it goes to the ceiling. . . . On the second floor, we tend to leave the ceilings as high as proportionally correct. We often have the second floor tucked into the roof, so it is not expensive at that point because you are dealing with the roof.”
THE WRIGHT DIRECTION
Frank Lloyd Wright, known best for his larger commissions, also knew a thing or two about the glory of well-designed small homes.
During the height of the Depression and in the fallout years, Wright designed affordable houses for middle-Americans. His Usonian homes, as they were called, have a lot in common with today’s new breed of small home. They were cleverly compact but felt spacious. They used simple materials and uncomplicated construction techniques.
“We get so many calls from people who want to build a house that has a strong design principle and that is affordable–but is small. … There is a great deal of interest in the Usonian design because people know it and associate it with affordable housing,” says Sharon Hart, manager for marketing and development at Taliesin Architects, the Arizona-based firm that was established to carry on Wright’s work after his death.
Hart notes that the request is problematic. Wright’s Usonian design could not be built today with the economy it was intended to have.
