The Not-So-Big™ house? I don’t think so.
An architect from Minnesota has made a name for herself promoting a style of housebuilding called the Not-So-Big house, where you write off some of the more grandious tackiness of modern houses in favor of a design that's more like houses built in prehistoric times (1920 or so.) It sounds like a good idea; a house with little rooms is, at least in my experience, a lot nicer than a house with great big rooms that either (a) fill up with junk (cf: the third floor and basement in our house; we have a 3600 square foot house, and, even with 2 children to help, we don't use more than about 2700 square feet at a time. It doesn't help that the third floor is what you'd call a "great room"; it's a huge poorly-insulated chamber, which after a while of trying to keep the piles of debris down, was driven over the edge into absolute chaos by the combined forces of the babies and our moving junk out of the stupid room, and there's really nothing like a huge room full of junk to destroy any incentive you might have to actually clean it up) or which end up being large empty chambers with nothing but a television and a couch in them.
So I was thinking that a Not-So-Big house would be a modernisation of the classic bungalow style; 1500 or so feet, broken up into 7-9 rooms that were designed for humans to live in (when the best and I moved up to Portland, we moved into an ~800 square foot 5-room flat, which we lived comfortably in for several years before we bought the big yellow house, and we didn't miss the space until we moved into our 3600 square foot mini-mansion.) A few days ago, we were at the local co-op and I frivolled some money away buying a copy of "eco-structure" magazine (I intend, before I get a decade older, to build a mountain cabin somewhere so we can have a place to decamp to during the lazy summer, winter, spring, and fall days. I'd like it to be somewhat earthy-crunchy, even though my "I'll build it out of pallets" comments are greeted with disbelieving looks) which, as one of the cover stories, invited us to "explore the not so big showhouse."
I really need to stop buying house design magazines. This one isn't as horrible as the mass-market ones (which are all variations on "look! We filled this BIG EXPENSIVE HOUSE with LOTS OF EXPENSIVE JUNK, to show you that we understand style better than you do!" I've been in houses like that, and have come home vowing to set fire to all of our belongings and move into a 5-room shack), but the "Not-So-Big showhouse" they featured was a house that was 2800 square feet, with huge rooms and as about as much character as the not-so-Not-So-Big house designs that I see in modern architectural designs. Except the modern designs are smaller.
Our across the street neighbors have a 2800 square foot bungalow (1400 square feet plus 1400 square feet of basement, so the house ads would claim it's only 1400 square feet). They also have five children. I'll bet they'd have trouble fitting into this "Not-So-Big showhouse", and I'd also suspect that we couldn't fit the contents of Chateau Chaos into that showhouse either.
Comments
Comments are closed
For me, it's the efective use of space that matters, and you're right, getting a big house then just using only less than half of it sounds like such a waste. My experiences in house design always tend to use space effectively. I just hate seeing space go to waste.