So you’ve arrived. Good career, clean credit, growing family. It’s time for a better house, which for most people means a bigger one.
Watch out, says author and architect Sarah Susanka. “They can be bigger without being better.”
In the past eight years, Susanka, 48, has become a kind of mini-industry on what she calls the “not so big house.” She advises spending money on craftsmanship instead of square footage to have an aesthetically satisfying house, in which all rooms are used and built-in details allow for a life of organization, ease and comfort.
With her down-to-earth, real-people approach to architecture, Susanka has won a staunch following among design professionals as well as regular folks — and she’s become a passionate proponent of her cause, says Los Angeles architect Marc Appleton.
“Sarah’s one of the few architectural voices that has managed to penetrate the popular press in an extremely significant way rather than just talking as a professional to other professionals,” he says. “She’s made it an attractive proposition to scale back from extravagant and overindulgent houses that seem to garner most of the attention and has refocused everyone on the fact that smaller can be just as beautiful.”
Susanka’s obsession with residential space started at age 14, she said on a recent trip to Los Angeles. That’s when she moved from England to California with her mother, a renowned ballet teacher, and her father, an industrial designer. They settled in a 2,400-square-foot ranch-style house in Rolling Hills Estates, where her parents still live.
She noticed a huge difference in the way people in England and America used — or didn’t use — the rooms in their homes. “In England we had many rooms and used every inch of space. We lived in our living room and ate in the dining room three times a day.”
In the States, she says, people gathered in their dens and family rooms. There were huge chunks of space rarely used.
The girl just couldn’t understand it, and she has spent her career figuring it out — first as head of her own architectural company in Minneapolis for 16 years, then as the best-selling author of five books, her newest, “Inside the Not So Big House.”
As soon as she opened her own company, Susanka says, she realized that most folks have no idea what architects do. If they wanted an addition, a remodel, or a new house, they went directly to a builder.
So she decided to promote the idea that architects can solve house problems better than anyone else and began giving lectures at home and garden shows. “It was something no other architect in Minnesota would have been caught dead doing at the time. It was considered declasse,” Susanka says.
Maybe so. But those shows introduced her to hundreds of middle-class, middle-income Midwesterners, all looking for home-improvement experts and ideas. Using photos of projects her company had completed, Susanka and colleagues offered wisdom to anyone who stopped to chat For a reasonable hourly fee, they’d come to a person’s home for a consultation.
Her basic handyman philosophy — no job too big or too small — netted her business a full schedule, she says, and her expertise grew with every attempt to turn less space into more and make it comfortable and satisfying.
Susanka, who lives in Raleigh, N.C., says she also realized quickly that most people have the misunderstanding that “anything really beautiful was probably unaffordable.”
That, she says, was the beginning of the “not so big house” idea. “You take dollars out of just bigness, out of square footage, and put them instead into the quality and character and usefulness of the space.”
After years of dealing with design, she felt she had lots to say. So she landed a publisher (Taunton Press) and wrote her first book, “The Not So Big House,” using photos of work done by her firm. “That first book shot up to the top of Amazon’s best-seller list in the first two weeks. It changed my life forever,” she says.
Asked to lecture around the country, and determined to write more books, she decided to leave the company and concentrate on her literary and public-speaking life. “I couldn’t be a full-time architect and a full-time author and lecturer,” she says. She didn’t stop designing houses, exactly. “I just am not available to be hired, because I’m so busy with everything else.”
Some people misunderstand Susanka’s theories to mean that big houses are bad or small ones are better. “Untrue,” she says. Size is not the point. Whatever size you need or want, just make sure it has the floor plan and built-in architectural specifics that create “a sense of comfort and soul in a house to which people respond. That comes from detail and design, rather than sheer size.
“Build about one-third less square footage than you planned for, but build it at a slightly higher dollar cost per square foot, in order to get the character and quality of the space you want,” Susanka says in her slight British accent.
Spend that one-third on architectural details that will make the house totally responsive to your family’s needs, she says. This can involve entire walls of built-in cabinets or niches built into walls for work or hobbies.
It can mean lowering a ceiling in a room or part of one or heightening by exposing rafters. These are all special projects that most builders and remodelers don’t ordinarily take the time or spend the money to do, she says. These details create a “sense of more-ness” — more usefulness and more beauty.
For architects, she says, the word “detail” means design features that are sometimes so subtle the average person doesn’t realize they’re there. They are built into the house. They are not cosmetic, she says. “Details are the things that if you could turn your house upside down and shake it, they wouldn’t come loose.”
The architect says she wishes people would start thinking of home not as rooms but as “a sequence of places where various activities occur. It’s a way of thinking about space differently. Don’t think living room. Think place to drink coffee and read paper, place to play piano, whatever you really do or want to do in that space. Frank Lloyd Wright called it breaking out of the box. We’re so confined by our labels that we can’t actually design for the way we really live.”
