 | The Not So Big House: A Blueprint for the Way We Really Live author: Sarah Susanka asin: 1561583766 |
 | Creating the Not So Big House: Insights and Ideas for the New American Home author: Sarah Susanka,Grey Crawford asin: B000H305TQ |
The "not so big house" is an antidote to the McMansion complex where people are buying ever-bigger houses and thereby consuming more and more and more. Sarah Susanka of Susanka Studios, author of The Not So Big House, is interviewed in the podcast with Green Living Ideas.
She claims a study that most, in the U.S., are buying large houses with spaces they believe are required in order to have high resale value. She had lived previously in England, and experienced a jarring shift in practice. In England every part of the house, even the "formal" portions, are used every day. In the U.S. the "formal" portions of a house are often left unused most of the time. This represents extra cost on many levels, and is done (she says) to serve the supposed needs of a future buyer. But that future buyer is also likely to not be using that extra space, either.
Bigger is not necessarily better, and in the bigness we often lose the quality we wanted in the first place.
