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Design
Urban Design
Architecture
Small homes
West By Northwest.org is grateful to Dave Weich, our own Studs
Turkel and Terry Gross rolled into his own unique person. As usual he brings us great
interviews with writers like Sarah Susanka who ask "how we live". (The
poets tells us why.) - Editor
Sarah Susanka's Not So Big Houses
Dave Weich, Powells.com
 Think
about it: Why do Americans entrust the most expensive purchase of their lives to
strangers with virtually no sense of their particular domestic needs? Are we so alike
that our dream homes share a common floor plan?
Sarah Susanka, whose architectural firm Life magazine commissioned
to design its 1999 Dream Home, has written two books to prove that we can, if we
choose, have it another way. The real estate market's obsession with "comparables"
– the number of bedrooms and baths, the holy grail of square footage – does little
to speak to our evolving needs as families and individuals. Bigger is not better,
not if it means wasting dollars on seldom-used rooms more suitable to lifestyles
at the turn of the last century. Spend the money you'd otherwise waste on
unnecessary square footage, Susanka argues, on an architect to customize your home
and craftspeople to implement the plans. A house can be smaller and every bit as
useful – more useful, in fact, more comfortable, and longer lasting, too –
by tailoring its design to the lifestyles of the people inside.
Creating the Not So Big House serves as evidence that the
principles outlined in Susanka's celebrated debut, The Not So Big House, apply to living quarters
of any size or style. Profiling twenty-five homes designed by architects across America,
running the gamut from a Manhattan one-bedroom apartment to a Minnesota farmhouse
and a Pueblo-style home in Taos, New Mexico, she describes in articulate detail the
creative elements and space-saving measures that serve these unique designs. Complemented
by revealing photographs and helpful floor plans, Susanka's ideas inspire hope that
our dream homes remain very much within reach.
 Dave: The Not So Big House has sold more than a quarter
of a million copies. How and when did you decide to write another book? What more
did you feel needed to be said?
Sarah Susanka: It happened in stages. The success of the
first book indicated that a large audience was hungry for this information. I thought
something was needed that showed you could implement the ideas discussed in the first
book at pretty much any economic bracket, and at any size. "Not so big,"
I make clear in the second book, doesn't mean small. It means "smaller than
you thought you needed." It's applicable whether you thought you needed a six
thousand square foot house or a twelve hundred square foot house.
I also wanted to show that it's not related to any particular style.
These ideas can be applied no matter what your likes and dislikes might be.
It's the mentality that's the key: How do I make my dollars do
the most for me? How can I enhance my life within this structure?
 Dave: The homes profiled
in Creating the Not So Big House were designed by
other architects.
Susanka: The hardest part about putting the book together
was to find good examples. I received a lot of submissions from architects around
the country, but many didn't illustrate the plan ideas I was trying to convey: basically,
rather than build formal spaces you don't use, build space you use every day.
There was a fair amount of legwork initially to find really good
examples all across the country at different price brackets and with different stylistic
approaches. Once the homes were selected, it was relatively easy to write. The houses
employed enough of the various concepts that there was plenty to say.
Dave: The plans for these houses are available for sale.
Are people buying them?
Susanka: They are. There's a huge market for a better-designed
house than is currently available. This is just a baby step into that marketplace.
I'm very interested in trying to get more well-designed houses built.
A lot of architects are concerned that if a house is designed for
a very specific site, it can't be transposed somewhere else. For many designs that's
true. But for a design that would fit a variety of sites, my feeling is that as architects
we have a responsibility to help get more good work out into the marketplace. If
you have a fairly standard house design for a fairly standard lot, there's no reason
you can't build it more than once.
Dave: I've been talking to people about your books and the
concepts you present. One friend's reaction was fascinating to me; she was visibly
upset – not because she didn't agree with you, but because she wanted to know, "Why
does it take this woman to convince people that big isn't necessarily better? Isn't
that obvious? New houses today are horrible! They're ugly, they're poorly built,
and they're still expensive!"
It's a good question: Why do you need to write this book? Aren't
these principles self-evident?
Susanka: It's an extremely good question. To architects,
this is so damn obvious! I think one of the things that struck me over the years
– I worked for almost twenty years as a single family architect – was that people
didn't have the courage of their own convictions. They knew they wanted this, but
the resale market tells them, "Don't do it." It's been reinforced for years
and years.
Somebody needed to come out and say it's okay to build a smaller
house, that it's not about keeping up with the Joneses. It's okay to spend your dollars
on more careful detail, on quality and character, rather than on square footage.
Those things seem so incredibly obvious when you're in the design world, but not
to people who are simply following what they're told is a smart investment strategy.
There are huge changes that need to take place to recalibrate how
we value houses. Currently, almost all those values are based on comparables, which
means similar square footage, similar number of bedrooms and bathrooms. It has nothing
to do with how long is the structure going to last, how beautiful is it, how well
is it designed, what materials are employed. It has nothing to do with energy efficiency
or sustainability, which of course are becoming more and more prominent in people's
minds.
There are some major attitude changes needed, but the infrastructure
won't change without the public saying, "This is what I want."
Dave: Once you have a lot, is it easy to build a well-designed
house that's right for you? Does it take more effort?
Susanka: A little more effort, still, than just going to
a contractor and picking out a plan, but there are an awful lot of people who, when
the process is spelled out for them, are more than willing to put in that extra effort.
 Dave: There are some unique
designs in the book. One that sticks out in my mind is the house with the silo. It's
so different. I showed it to someone whose immediate response was, "Oh, no,
I'd need windows in my bathroom," and I was able to point out the windows in
the entryway that allow light into the bathroom.
Susanka: Right. All of these things depend to some degree
on the clients and to some degree on the architect. One of the things I've been interested
in having people understand is how to find an architect that's right for you. On
my web
site, I have a list of people who work on these kind of
residential projects. There is a need, and many architects don't realize that
people are out there.
One result of these books is that architects and builders are giving
a copy to potential clients when they come through the door. They say, "Go read
this, go do your homework. Come back, and we'll start designing." And visa versa:
clients are showing up on architects' doorsteps saying, "We want one of these.
Can you help us?" It's an exciting change. It was very rare that people would
know how to get a better house, even if they knew they wanted one.
Dave: That's a point you express early in the new book.
Part of its purpose, you explain, is to build a common language so a homebuyer can
express what they want to an architect.
Susanka: You got it.
Dave: I like the idea that a vacation home shouldn't necessarily
be so different from a year-round home. Comfort is comfort, regardless.
Susanka: I say in the book that if we could learn more from
how we live in a cabin, we'd be much more comfortable in our houses. The openness
and the camaraderie cabins encourage is much more appropriate to the way we live
today.
Our lives have metamorphosed almost beyond recognition in the last
hundred years, yet our houses are built almost to the same floor plan. We have professionals
telling us what we need for resale and meanwhile the people in the houses are saying,
"Yeah, but I don't use those rooms anymore."
Dave: You use the analogy of cars: you don't buy a giant
car if you don't need the space. You buy a car that fits and spend your money on
quality and detail, as much as you think is worthwhile.
Susanka: Right. Maybe with the SUVs it's changed a bit,
but at least in the automobile industry you can get a beautifully designed smaller
car that maintains its value. It should be possible to build a beautiful smaller
home and have it maintain or even exceed the value of the houses surrounding it.
Size isn't the primary determining factor of its success as a home.
 Dave: One of the virtues
of the new book is the diversity of the homes presented. I found the New York City
apartment particularly interesting. Someone at Powell's had commented about the first
book, "Oh, but they are big houses," but it's really not true. You
talk about small ones, too.
Susanka: The problem – and I actually tried to address it
in this book – is that when you photograph a small space, it looks big because you're
using a wide-angle lens. When my old firm did the Dream Home for Life magazine,
the photographs in the magazine made it look gargantuan. They were tiny! It was really
frustrating. We got so much e-mail from people saying, "Are you suggesting that
this is a small house?!" It was misrepresented in many ways because of the photography.
Dave: The photography helps illustrate the concepts you're
discussing. Are you actually in the homes with the photographer when he's taking
the pictures?
Susanka: What I ended up doing with Grey Crawford, the photographer
for this book we went to the first photo shoot together, then I gave him a shot list
of what I was looking to represent in the other homes. He ended up following it beautifully.
It was collaboration, but only by being aware that we understood each other spatially.
Dave: Nooks, alcoves, bookshelves running up the wall alongside
staircases Are certain items or design elements universally appreciated or is each
homeowner different?
 Susanka: Everyone is different,
but I would say the thing that has the most impact on people is ceiling height variety.
People don't realize how much of an effect ceiling height has on our sense of space.
Being able to walk people through a space with that built in, you can just see their
faces light up. Oh, I get it! This feels totally different and only the ceiling
has changed.
Dave: It reminded me of my college dorm room. I was lucky
enough to be in the "old" dorm at my school. It was about a hundred years
old, a big stone building, and my bedroom ceiling sloped down to within a few feet
of the desk. People who visited asked if I felt as if I were living in a closet,
but it wasn't like that at all. It wasn't a big room, but it had a big window. The
room felt snug, but not tight. It felt like a playpen or something.
Susanka: Exactly. A lot of people who've had that experience
feel likewise. To people who haven't, it can be intimidating. They think, Oh,
it's going to feel minute. You have to hang out in a space like that a little
bit to realize how comfortable it ends up being.
Dave: If you've grown up living in the standard boxy, uniformed-ceiling
home well, do some people see these designs and just run away?
Susanka: I haven't done any careful study of "what
did you grow up in and how does this make you feel?" but I have collected
some of the opposite data, which is that kids who grow up in well-designed houses
often become future architects or designers. They're obviously deeply affected by
the structure in which they grew up, so I suspect that all of us are to some degree.
The little girl who grew up in the house in Chicago that I write
about has friends over to her house, most of whom live in large suburban homes. They
love to come to her house because it has a quality of place and character they're
missing in their own homes. There's a recognition among the children that her house
is special, even though it's smaller.
Dave: On your web site, you say that Portland "seems
to have the best traditional urban design zoning of any major American city."
Susanka: It's much more progressive than so many cities
in the country. Even if not everything that's tried works, it's still obviously streaks
ahead of most of the country, and it's exciting to be in a place where people have
such awareness of how planning efforts affect the built environment.
Dave: Have you spent much time here?
Susanka: I actually graduated from the University of Oregon.
If there had been work in 1978, I'd probably be a Portland architect at this point.
It was hard for me to leave, but at the time there wasn't enough work to go around
so I headed east.
Dave: Before I moved to Portland, I was living on the Front
Range in Colorado, just a few miles from about as much sprawl as you can imagine.
Even in the five years I lived there, the town had completely changed. The land was
being devoured by massive, colorless subdivisions, each house just like the next,
big cookie-cutter shells packed twelve feet apart.
Susanka: It's happening everywhere.
Dave: I love Portland because it's a city of real neighborhoods.
Every house has its own character. We're not all fenced off from each other. We live
in a city with easy access to downtown, yet we have yards, we have gardens, and we
know our neighbors.
Susanka: Even the downtown. Most cities of Portland's scale
don't have nearly the vitality of Portland's downtown. It's clear that someone has
thought clearly about it, and yet it's not too planned. You can go overboard
to the point where everyone has the same awnings and the same signs – that kills
vitality also – but there's been some savvy decision making over the last twenty
or thirty years that's allowed a natural vitality to arise.
Dave: What other cities are ahead of the pack?
Susanka: It's not necessarily the same size, but Boulder,
Colorado, certainly has some of that feel. And when I was in San Antonio this year,
I was delighted to find that it's also very comfortable.
In all these places, it's understood that you bring people to the
core of the city and let them make it vital. Of course there are the Bostons of the
world that have a vitality in part because of their history, but still it's the size
of the spaces that can make all the difference, for example the distance between
one side of the street and the other such that it encourages relationships between
the two sides. An awful lot of newer cities don't have that at all. If you're on
one side of the street, there's no thought that you might cross and see what's on
the other.
 It's about proportion, just as
what I'm describing in my books has to do with proportions of the inside of houses.
It works at every level.
Dave: When did you decide to focus on residential architecture
versus urban planning or commercial spaces? Have you designed non-residential buildings?
Susanka: All my childhood, I loved houses. I actually grew
up in a very mundane house in England, but a lot of my friends had absolutely spectacular
old homes with all kinds of nooks and crannies and weirdnesses about them, very beautifully
designed. Like a lot of architects, I have a very good spatial memory, so I draw
on those recollections all the time, remembering how something made me feel, the
size and the nature of the space, what made it memorable. That knowledge base has
dramatically colored how I think about my living area.
In architecture school, though, designing houses is often considered
the least desirable professional avenue.
Dave: Why is that?
Susanka: It's believed to be harder to make money. And the
buildings aren't like flagships; they're more behind the scenes. But after working
for three years with a firm that did mostly commercial buildings, I was incredibly
frustrated. The people I was designing for really didn't care what the environment
would be like for the people who'd be working in the building. They were much more
interested in the outside image, which frankly just didn't do much for me. I decided
that if I wanted to satisfy myself as an architect I had to find people who care
deeply about the environment I'm designing for them. That's the residential client.
No one cares more. Understanding that, finding that audience, that's when I really
started.
Dave: Now that you're lecturing and writing books, are you
still designing houses?
Susanka: Not nearly as much as I used to, but I'm still
trying to keep a toe in the pool. It's something I love to do. I'm actually doing
a remodeling for myself right now in Raleigh.
Dave: Do you find yourself endlessly tinkering with your
own house?
Susanka: Oh, yes, though I shouldn't say "tinkering."
I don't like living in a mess, so I like to do it all at once and get it done. Having
recently more or less moved to Raleigh from Saint Paul, Minnesota, I'm remodeling.
It's really quite a simple project, and yet the things we're changing will have a
huge impact on the feel of the house.
Dave: What do you hope to improve?
Susanka: Little things, it would seem, but things that people
normally wouldn't change. For instance, the front entry was rather tight, a little
too small, and didn't have any light, which is very common around here – front doors
don't typically have windows in them – so you come in and immediately you feel like
it's oppressive. We ended up relocating the front hall closet, which opened up the
space, and we added a window at the bottom of the stairway that pours light into
the area. Those two very simple changes made a big, big difference to the space.
We also turned the living room and dining room into office space
with a wall that can be removed relatively easily if in the future someone wants
to turn it back into a formal living room. We upgraded the master bath, upgraded
the cabinetry in the kitchen, and reoriented the kitchen a little so the flow of
space is much better. It's not particularly dramatic to describe, but it's dramatic
visually.
Dave: If a chef visits a friend's house for dinner, often
the friend will be mortified to serve. When you visit people's homes, are they constantly
asking for your advice? How do they feel about having you in their home?
Susanka: People who aren't architects fall into different
categories. Some are extremely proud of their houses and know that they're wonderful
expressions of themselves. That's really cool. You can feel how they've poured themselves
into it. It shows. Even if it's not "high" design, it's still wonderful.
And then there are people whose first words at the front door are "this really
isn't our dream home." You know there's a story of disappointment. You can tell
right away. Something didn't turn out right.
Dave: What books on the subject do you recommend?
 Susanka: The best one
is A Pattern Language. I describe myself as one of
the first generation of architects brought up on that book. It very much colors how
I think. Although it can be a fairly weighty tome and for some a little heavy-going,
it has an incredible amount of wonderful thinking in it. And there's another book
called The Place of Houses by Charles Moore. It's just
been republished. It's also good, though a little more academic, more oriented toward
people who already know architecture.
Dave: Is there a common mistake people make when building
a home, a pitfall to avoid?
Susanka: A lot of people don't know that you really have
to get the site first, before you think about designing a house. Often people go
about it backwards – they start with a house design then look for a lot. This goes
back to my comment about an architect's concern for the house plans: a house needs
to grow out of its site. It needs to be considered in terms of the surroundings and
the key features of the site: How should it be oriented? Where are south and east
and north? Where do windows belong? That sort of thing. A lot of issues evolve right
out of the ground.
Sarah Susanka visited
Portland on April 30, 2001.
All photographs by Grey Crawford unless otherwise noted.
Copyright © 2001 by Powells.com
See a not so big home in Michael Kemp's Yurt
Sweet Yurt in this issue of West By Northwest .org
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