Home Sweet Home

Architect Sarah Susanka has some big ideas in Creating the Not So Big House. She contrasts the glamorous, glossy-photo house plans of vaulted ceilings and palatial living rooms with the livable, day-to-day pleasure of cozy window seats and comfortable breakfast nooks, and her conclusion is resonating with families across the country: bigger but shoddier isn't better than smaller and well-made. Face it, do you really need a 5,000-square-foot house when it's just you and your dog living there? Read what Susanka has to say about her beginnings in architecture and the appeal of smaller, more efficient, and more interesting houses in this exclusive essay for Amazon.com.

I am often asked how I got started thinking about the design of the American house. In 1971, when my family emigrated from England to the United States, I was just 14 years old. We moved from a quiet village of 1,000 people in Kent to Los Angeles, where my high school had a population three times the size of my village.

In the U.S., we lived in a suburban development in a ranch house, and though not large by American standards, to us it was palatial, with three bathrooms, four bedrooms, a spacious living room, and a family room replete with a wet bar and built-in barbecue. It was a far cry from our decade-old two-story brick home in Kent, which had much smaller rooms and only one bathroom.

But what seemed very strange to me, a teenager not yet of driving age, was that there were no shops close by our new home, no places to hang out with friends other than each other's houses, and an almost complete dependence on parents--and their automobiles--to get anywhere worth going. Unlike England, where people walked daily to the grocers, the butchers, the bakers, and the sweet shop, here, no one walked at all. There was an absence of people on the street, and even inside the houses there was no visible activity. The "front" room, or formal living room, presented a window to the sidewalk, but it rarely revealed any human beings.

As I got to know other teenagers in the community, I was invited into their homes. I noted that American families ate in the kitchen, usually at a small round table with little to recommend it aesthetically. Meanwhile, the formal dining room and living room looked overdecorated and underinhabited. Many of these homes, although large, felt insubstantial to me. They were all square footage, and not much else, and while the formal rooms were lavishly furnished but seldom used, the spaces people lived in were often lacking in windows, lit with florescent lights, and generally uncomfortable. I came to see that though this was a country rich in material possessions, it seemed to be missing a certain soulfulness. Money was spent on making an impression, rather than on livability.

I decided to pursue a career in architecture in large part because I knew that there was certainly a way to make better places to live and work. Using my own physiological responses to the places I visited, I started to develop a personal approach to architecture. For example, I noticed that given the choice, I would almost always prefer to sit in the corner of a restaurant rather than in the middle of the seating area. There was a greater sense of protection and comfort in the corner. If in addition the ceiling over the spot in the corner were a little lower than the rest of the room, I found it even more appealing. Labeling this concept "Shelter Around Activity" gave me the opportunity to both explain and repeat this spatial construct. I also found that if you place a lighted picture, or better yet, a window, at the end of a long hallway, the experience is transformed from inhospitable to delightful. Our physiological response to light overcomes the oppressive feeling so common in a corridor. I named this concept "Light to Walk Towards." Gradually, I discovered that by naming these concepts we can develop a language that will allow us to identify and design in those characteristics that make "house" into "home"--the key to Creating the Not So Big House .