Posted on: Friday, November 5, 2004
Making sense of building small
By Cindy Hoedel
Kansas City Star
KANSAS CITY, Mo. — Something small is afoot in the custom homebuilding business.
Six years after Minneapolis-based architect and author Sarah Susanka wrote "The Not So Big House" (Taunton, 1998), there are signs that the one-time media trend is becoming a real shift in attitudes toward size.
"What's the point of a 4,000-square-foot house, where whole wings of the house are not used?" asked Hesse McGraw. McGraw and his partner, Cobi Newton, recently purchased a 1,200-square-foot home in Kansas City, Kan. "It's an ostentatious grabbing of space that didn't interest us."
The couple says the two-bedroom, one-bath home, built by architect Dan Rockhill's Studio 804 graduate program at University of Kansas, doesn't feel small.
"The scale of the rooms is planned so well it works," McGraw said. The bathroom, for example, is quite large for the size of the house. And the home features a 1,000-square-foot basement for storage.
Other features that maximize floor space:
Pocket doors save space and eliminate obstructions in hallways.
Translucent panels and doors that let light flow between rooms create a feeling of openness.
Nine-foot ceilings make the rooms feel larger.
For Rachael Blackburn Cozad and her husband, Kanon Cozad, it was a coincidence that the house they fell in love with had only 1,600 square feet.
"Small was not the goal," Blackburn Cozad said.
But the home's size had an unanticipated benefit. "Getting rid of stuff was a great experience," she said. "We feel lucky to have gotten rid of tons of furniture. Now all we have is stuff we really love ."
If McGraw and Newton's house looks like a wood-ribbed shoebox, the Cozads' looks like a two-story shoebox.
Blackburn Cozad, director of the Kemper Museum of Contemporary Art, thinks the long walls and simple form are part of the reason her house doesn't feel small. "The long walls create a continuous vista from wherever you are," she said.
Stephen Worden had the opposite experience from the Cozads. Worden intended to build small — 1,600 square feet was the goal — but says the design got bigger when his wife, Cathy, got involved.
"Most of our friends live in cookie-cutter subdivision homes of 3,200 square feet plus a basement, and it was hard for her to imagine living with so much less space," Worden said.
At 2,100 square feet, the home is still smaller than the average for a new home — 2,320 square feet, according to the National Association of Home Builders Web site, ww.nahb.org. The irony, Worden says, is that after the couple moved in they would say to each other, "We could have gone 1,600."
When their friends visit, Worden says, "they're here for, like, five minutes, and say they can't believe how neat it is."
Besides coziness and energy efficiency, there is a luxury payoff to building smaller. The fewer square feet you have to work with, the more resources you can devote to each one of them.
Hesse McGraw says the level of high-quality materials and custom workmanship in his house was one of the reasons he bought it. "This home is built like a piece of furniture," McGraw says.
Susanka says in her architectural practice she spent considerable time and energy trying to counter clients' notions that value meant the most square footage possible for a given price.
"I used a car metaphor. I'd ask, `Do you decide what car you want to buy based on which one contains the most cubic feet of space for a given price? No way."'
When she was designing homes, the bigger-is-better mindset was near-universal, she says.
"Regardless of how much money people have, they almost always want more of a house than they can afford ... I was constantly struggling to get people to eliminate spaces that would not be used to liberate dollars to add character to their home."
Cobi Newton says after several months of living in her new 1,200-square-foot home, she honestly wouldn't want it any larger.
But that doesn't mean there are no tradeoffs.
"I could use another closet," she said.
