The size of a home often influences our first impressions, and the often unspoken assumption is that bigger is better.
From the 1960s to year 2000, the size of the average American home grew steadily, reaching 2,266 square feet, then stabilized in the last two years at slightly less, says Gopal Ahluwalia, director of research at the National Association of Home Builders in Washington, D.C.
“The average home is a third larger today than it was 40 years ago, although our household size has gotten smaller,” says Roberta Feldman, an architect and environmental psychologist who heads the City Design Center at the University of Illinois, Chicago.
Rooms are also bigger and more specialized, as homeowners seek multiple sitting areas with several views; more work, eating and pantry space in their kitchens; more bedrooms and bathrooms; home gyms; home offices and even second home offices or crafts areas; more storage; larger-scaled furnishings and accessories to fill the additional square footage.
“Many thought the solution to their housing needs was to build bigger and make the spaces within larger,” says New York architect Dennis Wedlick, author of “The Good Home: Interiors and Exteriors” (HBI, HarperCollins, $50), who has seen an increasing number of clients request houses 8,000 square feet and beyond.
The reason in some cases was no different than the reason mansions sprouted decades ago in Newport, R.I., Chicago’s North Shore or centuries ago across the English countryside. Though big homes accommodated large families and staffs in days past, they also implied something more than what could serve even the largest, most demanding homeowners. They conveyed the notion that the occupants had achieved great wealth.
Today, the amount of space we have is still viewed as an indicator of success. “The more you have, the higher your status,” says Feldman. The lines have blurred between what we need and desire, she adds. “Now you have to have a bathroom with every bedroom. That’s not a necessity.”
Unlike some prior periods of history, today’s big-home buyers and their design professionals are willing to go to great lengths to increase square footage and gain the status and extras desired. They have resorted to demolishing smaller, older houses or building anew, farther into the exurbs, depending on the availability of land, Feldman notes.
The process has spawned new terminology–“teardown” for perfectly good housing stock eliminated because it wasn’t big enough or filled with enough of today’s amenities and “McMansion” for an enormous house that could be churned out almost as fast as McDonald’s burgers and fries. Instead of ketchup, cheese, pickles and lettuce, all the trimmings came to mean elaborate rooflines, sumptuous building materials, oversized windows and doors, endless bedrooms with spa bathrooms.
Yet, bigger homes require more work. There’s more to clean, sort, monitor and repair, which takes time, effort and bigger budgets. The changing nature of family life, with two partners working or many singles heading households, has cut into the amount of time we have to spend on these activities. Coupled with the recent downturn in the economy and the continued aftershocks from 9/11, homeowners and the professionals who service them have started to reassess wish lists and budgets.
“Some people are finally beginning to realize that size isn’t always the answer. Most have homes they aren’t using effectively for their lifestyles. Many of those who pack up and move into larger dwellings remain dissatisfied because their dilemma isn’t about size, it’s about how to make their homes more comfortable and useful for the way they really live,” says Sarah Susanka. She has written a series of books published by Taunton about living well but not necessarily in gargantuan homes: “The Not So Big House,” “Creating the Not So Big House” and “Not So Big Solutions.”
Susanka’s vision of the ideal home is not small per se, but rather not as big as the occupants thought they needed. It is “designed for today’s informal lifestyles . . . trades formal rooms for multipurpose spaces that are used every day . . . favors craftsmanship and quality over quantity of space . . . and expresses the homeowner’s personality and values.” She advocates selecting higher-quality building materials, interior appointments and furnishings in exchange for space. As a general rule, an owner’s house should be one-third smaller than the original plan but the price should be the same, she says.
At the same time, the big house and apartment remain an option for those who have the funds and feel they can’t do with less, says Marta Borsanyi, a principal at The Concord Group, a strategic marketing firm that analyzes real estate trends.
Homeowners of all ages build and buy these megahouses for specific reasons. Those with children think they truly need the extra space. When grandchildren come along, some desire a multigenerational gathering hub, particularly as families no longer live in the same city, or even the same region or country. Some simply view real estate as a safer place to put funds than the volatile stock market.
But economic and demographic trends also have made the smaller house an attractive alternative. “There seem to be two very different options going on–bigger and smaller, as much about lifestyle as economics,” says Borsanyi.
Of course, size is relative, depending on location in an urban or suburban locale and on the part of the country. A 1,500-square-foot apartment in New York may seem quite grand but hardly so in Chicago’s Lincoln Park or in the hills of Bel Air, Calif.
What is more noteworthy is the recent realization that a homeowner’s satisfaction has less to do with house size than other factors, such as good room proportions, the right number of rooms, their layout, storage and even its relationship to the environment, says Denise L. Caringer, executive editor of shelter books at Meredith Books, which recently published “Small Houses, Big Style” (Meredith Books, $34.95).
“Why should someone who is single need four or five bedrooms? Or, how can the parents of two or three young children supervise them in a playroom and make dinner in the kitchen at the same time?” asks Jamie Velez, architect and principal at Skidmore, Owings & Merrill in Chicago, where he heads the Interiors Group.
Velez, from South America, finds the residential tradition in the United States intriguing but inefficient. “People are sentimentally attached to patterns that were borrowed from Europe, where rooms are large and dedicated to specific uses. Since we are not that formal anymore, this creates a tremendous disconnect between the way people live and use their space, and what the housing stock offers them.”
He, Susanka and others believe that our homes should support our lifestyles. “We should create spaces that fit needs. Depending on the program, they can be quite large or very small,” he says.
Chicago designer Daniel DuBay agrees, and he has seen homeowners choose big homes but end up living in only a few rooms, which may provide no intimate place to sit. He recently downsized twice to find the right fit and now resides in a 1,000-square-foot apartment. “The space works beautifully for what I need,” he says. A country house supplements his itch for square footage in another locale, a trend among other homeowners who are scaling back.
In the end, quality and functionality should be the ultimate measures of a perfect house, according to Witold Rybczynski, an architectural professor at the University of Pennsylvania, who makes this point in his recent book, “The Perfect House” (Scribner, $25). It details the influence of 16th-Century Italian architect Andrea Palladio, whose beautiful villas spurred colleagues to create domestic architecture rather than just public spaces.
His homes remain an inspiration today, not because of their size but for their harmonious blend of elements outside and within–what Rybczynski terms scale.
That lesson should be heeded today by design professionals and homeowners: to seek houses that are worthy as works of architecture and art and that meet their owners’ needs, rather than compete on size, status or price.
