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When less is more

It is quality and design, not size, that make a truly livable house.

WHEN YOU MOVE from one country and culture to another, as I did in my early teens, you become a keen observer of your new environs. Until 1971, I was an English schoolgirl, living with my family in Kent, just south of London. All that changed when my father took a job in Southern California, and we moved from a small village of 1,000 inhabitants to the sprawling metropolis of Los Angeles. Talk about culture shock. We might speak the same language, more or less, but very little else was familiar.

What struck me was the difference between how my own family used our house and how my new friends used theirs. In our home, we ate dinner at the dining room table, which was set with a tablecloth and what most Americans would consider a formal table setting. No paper napkins here. My friends' lived much less formally, eating in the kitchen most of the time. Meanwhile, the main rooms, which were the largest and clearly had the most money lavished upon them, sat idle, waiting for some apparently more important folks to appear.

Even the front hall, the foyer, as I learned to call it, seemed to be used only when solicitors came to the door. Anyone who was a friend used the side entrance.

Later, as a young architect, I started to work with clients looking for a more personal statement in their houses. The almost universal problem, however, was that everyone seemed to want more house than they could afford. So, I started asking them what rooms they used the least. My thought was that if we could pare away such spaces, accommodating any functions associated with those rooms in other, well-used areas of the house, we could reduce the overall size. In the process, we could save enough money to give the house more personality. This was the inception of my Not So Big approach to home design.

An informal poll over 15 years of architectural practice revealed that for the 90 percent of my clients with family rooms, the formal living room was almost never used. The dining room was used by many families only once or twice a year. And even on those occasions, it was often used for a buffet meal rather than a formal sit-down dinner, because there were more guests than the room could comfortably hold. What became eminently clear was that while our lifestyles were dramatically different from those of a century ago, our houses had stayed more or less the same.

Before women had joined the work force in any significant numbers, families would get together in the living room when the husband came home from work. The kitchen was a place of utility, and certainly not a place to gather.

Later, with both adults often working, needs changed. The discreet separation of kitchen from living areas no longer served, and the family room was invented to provide an informal place to gather while the evening meal was being prepared. But there was no commensurate deletion of spaces that were no longer used with any frequency. The living room became a sort of safety valve, ready for the arrival of unexpected visitors who might be offended by, or unwelcome in, the informal living space. Even when I would visit new clients, as soon as they decided I was a decent human being, they would usually suggest we meet at the kitchen table.

So it seems we are often spending some $60,000 to $100,000 of our construction budgets on rooms for people we'd rather not have in our houses. Does this make sense?

Once my clients understood my logic, I was able to suggest ways to reduce or eliminate the formal spaces. The dollars saved were spent on making their everyday spaces truly wonderful places for both formal and informal occasions. After all, most of the people we invite to our homes are close friends - people we want to have in the areas of the house where we do, in fact, live. A rule of thumb I've developed is that no matter what size house you think you need, reduce that square footage by about a third. Then you will have sufficient budget available to make your new house into a place that lives beautifully, expresses something more about who you are and the things you love, and is better designed for the way you live today. In other words, resources are reallocated from mere acreage of space to the qualities that make house into home.

All this sounds good, but the sad reality is that we have almost no language in this culture to describe those qualities of home. Look through any real estate listing, and you will see words like "spacious," "cathedral living room," terms that seem to suggest that big is better. But is it? In most new houses, there's something missing. These structures have more area and volume than ever before but not much soul.

I have tried to give some terminology to concepts that we architects use all the time in our designs, but which we have never named. My hope is that by putting words to these ideas, builders, architects, designers, and their clients will be able to talk with one another about how to tailor a house to fit both body and spirit.

So much of what we are grappling with in home design today has to do with proportion - with making spaces that fit like a well-made suit rather than a sack, with assessing what spaces really feel comfortable to us, and with making the best use of the money we have to enhance our lives within the dwelling.

There are many simple spatial concepts that can help make a house feel wonderful. These ideas don't require degrees in rocket science to be applied successfully, yet they can make an enormous improvement in a home's livability, often making it seem bigger in the process.

At the core of building Not So Big is a strategy for making your dollars go further while creating a sense of more, not through scale but through quality and design. I'm not proposing that we all live in little houses, with little rooms, and less stuff. Rather, I'm proposing that we reassess what really makes us feel good and redesign our houses to reflect these qualities and characteristics instead.

It's time for our homes to catch up with a century of lifestyle changes. It's really not that difficult to do, once we recognize the problem.

The homes presented in the following pages incorporate many of the principles of No So Big design to create spaces that are visually and physically satisfying. They have the heart, soul, and attitude to stand the test of time.