Living Small

Not long ago, I realized that our home is almost always the gathering place for my two sons and their pack of friends, even though ours is the smallest of any of their respective houses. Never mind that these boys can choose among residences more than twice as big as ours, where huge family rooms give way to expansive yards. Our home remains the place they seem to feel most comfortable.

While I'd like to say my wonderful mothering skills determine their preference, the real explanation is more complicated. It has to do, I believe, with the fact that bigger is not always better when it comes to houses. Kids sense something that adults typically forget: often, it is the smallest spaces that are most filled with love and comfort.

My family's insight puts us on the vanguard of a significant shift in American living patterns. The conventional wisdom for decades has been, “Buy the largest house you can afford.” Home builders have certainly responded: in 1950, the average house size was 983 square feet, whereas by 2007 it was just a hair under 2,500 square feet, even as the size of the average family shrunk. Stroll through the homes in many new subdivisions and you’ll see laundry rooms, play rooms, mud rooms, powder rooms, craft rooms, guest rooms, home offices, libraries, and home theaters that rival the local multiplex. These abodes are common enough to lay claim to their own derisive nickname: the McMansion. Once the pride of their owners, many of these showplace homes are suddenly strapped with huge mortgages and declining house values, plus the concomitant big property taxes, big utility bills, and big time commitments for maintenance and upkeep.

Small homes seem better able to weather the mortgage meltdown: a study released last year by the real estate Web site Zillow.com found that homes 1200 square feet or smaller lost just one percent of their value over the previous year, compared to 3.1 percent losses for midsized houses and 2.8 percent losses for large homes. Beyond the economics at play, there is growing recognition that modest-sized houses can be less isolating for families and more charming and cozy—and that they also take less time to maintain and are better for the environment. These factors help explain why 58 percent of affluent baby boomers say that they are interested in downsizing to a smaller home in the next 10 to 15 years, according to a recent article in Money Magazine. Indeed, the American Institute of Architects found that twice as many residential architects reported home sizes to be decreasing than reported them to be increasing.

This new ethos is vindication for thinkers like Susan Susanka, an architect who published The Not So Big House in 1998. She advocated homes in which each room is used every day, with quality construction and an attention to detail missing in mass-produced tract houses. Perhaps the biggest barrier to this trend is psychological. The Dutch researcher Ap Dijksterhuis says that homebuyers often made what he calls a weighting error--when choosing between a large house that requires a long daily commute and a smaller one that is closer to their job, people often give too much weight to how they will use the extra space. How nice it would be to have that extra bedroom when the grandparents visit, they think, not giving proper weight to the fact that they will be commuting five days a week, whereas relatives will visit just a handful of days out of the year. The happiness brought by extra space is far outweighed by the drudgery of commuting, which makes the homeowners far less happy over time.

When my husband and I bought our house 18 years ago, we didn’t spend a lot of time deliberating on its merits. Some friends were going to put their 1950s-era cottage on the market, and even though we hadn’t looked at a single other house up to that point, we decided to buy it. With 1200 square feet, it had two bedrooms and a postage-stamp yard. What it lacked in size and storage space it made up for in charm, we decided; and here we have stayed, even after we had another child and could have afforded to move to a larger home.

Well, that’s not quite true—we couldn’t have afforded a larger home unless I would have found a different job and worked longer hours, something that I wasn’t willing to do. Ours was a concious choice to trade space for time. Though I've never regretted that choice, make no mistake that it was a tradeoff.