By Kathleen Lynn
A decade ago—when home sizes seemed to be on a relentless march upward—architect Sarah Susanka wrote “The Not So Big House,” which proposed a radically different approach: Homes should be smaller, but more carefully crafted.
Her latest book, “Not So Big Remodeling” (Taunton Press, $32) applies the same “less-is-more” ideas to renovations. It comes out at a time when homeowners and home buyers are reeling from the recession and housing bust.
Whether in response to economic forces, or a growing interest in a simpler lifestyle, new homes have begun shrinking slightly, after expanding from a median of 1,525 square feet in 1973 to 2,277 square feet in 2007.
The Record spoke to Susanka recently about her new book and how remodeled spaces can feel large without actually being large.
Following is an edited transcript:
Q. What are the different challenges in remodeling, as opposed to building a new house?
If you start with a new-house client, they’ll usually tell you what they’re looking for. When you start with a remodeling client, they’ll say, “We have this corner in the kitchen where, when I’m cooking dinner, my husband gets caught over there and he can’t escape because I’m moving across the pathway.”
It’s all this little minutia of detail about the particulars of the house: “When I open the powder room door, it hits the sink.” The issues are things they are intimately familiar with and haven’t a clue how to solve. And you have to take people into their house and not only understand those little things, but also what are the bigger-picture opportunities that they can’t currently see.
Q. Two of the most common remodeling jobs are kitchens and baths. How do your principles fit into kitchens in particular?
When most people start thinking about a kitchen remodeling or a bathroom remodeling, they’ll automatically assume they’ve got to add on. They think the solution is: We need more space. What I’ve tried to point out is in many, many cases, the space is already within the house.
There’s a lot of square footage in the formal spaces of the house that is grossly underutilized, and it can be much less expensive to borrow that square footage than to add on.
Q. Do you think the recent economic hard times and the housing bust have made people more open to your ideas?
It’s a much different group. It’s not just people who subscribe to this basic philosophy of less is more, but a whole new segment of the population is realizing, “We want to conserve our resources and make better use of our money, so we’ll go with a smaller addition or smaller remodeling, or just stay put rather than move to a new house.”
Q. What are the changes you’ve advocated that have made their way into the mass marketplace?
It is much more acceptable today to not include a formal living room in a house design. The focus on formal spaces has been reduced tremendously.
Q. What about high ceilings?
It’s a slow process, that one. When I give talks, I can watch people’s faces as they realize that it’s the variation in ceiling height that makes a house feel alive, not that they’re all tall. And that’s news to most people.
Q. Right. I toured one of Frank Lloyd Wright’s Usonian houses a few years ago—the Pope-Leighey house near Washington—and it’s a tiny house, but that’s a striking thing. You come into a small foyer, and the living room and kitchen have much higher ceilings, and you definitely have that feeling of being released into this bigger space.
Even with a good photo, you can’t really imagine what that’s like. That’s why I’d like to get more of these houses built around the country so people can go in and walk around them. I encourage people to do that with Frank Lloyd Wright houses, because they’re open to the public.
Q. How do your ideas fit with the growing interest in green building?
On the absolutely most fundamental level, not so big is the first step in sustainability. It needs to be part and parcel with the design of the building envelope, the energy efficiency of the house, indoor air quality, the use of sustainable materials—all those things are absolutely key.
I encourage everybody to have an energy audit on their home. You can pay for an energy audit—it’s usually about $500 or $600—in a year’s time if you implement some of the simple strategies to improve the energy efficiency of your home. It’s not rocket science, but most of us live in very leaky houses that are essentially throwing away dollar bills, and there’s a better way.
Q. When I read your books, it seems the main principles are open floor plans, built-in furniture, such as bookcases or banquettes, and lining up windows and doorways to create a sense of space and a kind of vista.
Yes. Lining them up is one thing, but really providing light at the end of the vista, whether it’s through a lighted painting or a window so it draws you into that next space.
Q. And a lot of the interiors use wood in a really beautiful way. Are there any other major principles?
I would add ceiling height variety, and I would add connecting views so you make sure you have fairly wide views from one space to another. If you can’t see it, you don’t tend to use it.
Q. A lot of people have the idea that if they have a smaller space, they’re sacrificing something. What would you say to people who say, “I’d rather live in a 3,000- or 4,000-square-foot house”?
What I usually point out to people is, take a look at that 3,000 square feet. How much are you actually living in every day? Most people are living in less square footage than the houses I’m advocating. A good third of most houses sits empty 99 percent of the time: the formal living room, the formal dining room, the front foyer.
What a lot of people are hunting for is their ideal home. For many years, we’ve been hunting for that with size. And really the whole inspiration for this movement is that I got to see what happened when people focused on square footage. They ended up losing the very qualities of space, detailing and character that would have made this place feel like home.
I’m not trying to cram everybody into little tiny houses. I want them to experience more space, more of what it is they’re looking for with better use of the resources.
Q. Your new book talks about ways you saved money when you remodeled your own kitchen. I believe you used granite on the island, but laminate on some of the side counters.
I wanted to show things that I learned that could make a big difference to the cost without compromising the character of the space. When you use granite—I actually used a quartz surface called Zodiaq—when you use a big slab of material like that on the island, it doesn’t have to have any cutouts [for the sink].
The cutouts are very expensive because you’re grinding through a very, very hard material. So the big slab [on the island] is the least expensive way of getting a piece of that into your kitchen. Your eye gravitates toward the center of the room, so you don’t pay attention so much to the fact that the other countertops don’t have the same kind of material.
Another example from my kitchen was that I picked an area above the cooktop and I picked one expensive tile and surrounded it with a number of much less expensive, standard tiles. It gives the whole room character. My experience with homeowners is that they’ll pick the most expensive tile and be disappointed that they can’t afford to use it in their kitchen. The reason is they are trying to buy 250 of that expensive tile, instead of just one. You can make one do as much work as all those separate ones.
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E-mail: lynn@northjersey.com
(c) 2009 Record, The; Bergen County, N.J.. Provided by ProQuest LLC. All rights Reserved.
Source: The Record, Bergen County, N.J.
Publication date: 2009-12-20
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