In 1998, for instance, the average home was 2,195 square feet, and in 2013, it was 2,679, according to the National Association of Home Builders.Ī: We’re seeing a small resurgence moving toward bigger again, but that trend won’t have the same sway. Q: Yet the average size of new homes is still growing. To see the housing industry embrace that has been affirming. Especially since the recession, we’ve seen a fundamental shift in attitude, where many more homeowners want quality not quantity. That had to end somewhere, and it has really changed.
Everyone was focusing on how to get the square footage up, up, up. Q: How has the American house changed since your first book came out?Ī: When we first spoke, the idea of building smaller, and using the money (that one might have put into a larger home) to make a smaller, better-quality home was really out there. This week, I took the pleasure of speaking with Susanka again to ask what she believed had changed since she turned a critical light on the bigger-is-better building mentality. In fact, many in the industry credit Susanka, whose own home is in North Carolina, with having the single most profound influence on the American home in the past 20 years. There is nothing not so big about her impact. “I thought part of the population will love this, but it will be a small-scale footnote to the housing industry.”īoy, was she wrong. “I could not have imagined how the mainstream marketplace would embrace my ideas,” says Susanka, when she and I caught up on the phone last week. Nine books later, with more than 1.5 million books sold, no one is more surprised by this than the author herself. By May 1999, “The Not So Big House” was already in its seventh printing, her work was on the cover of Life magazine, and, as we spoke, she was on her way to appear on “Oprah.” Seven months earlier, in October 1998, Sarah Susanka’s first book, “The Not So Big House” (Taunton Press), hit store shelves. Sixteen years ago this month, while covering real estate for the Los Angeles Times, I interviewed a little-known architect on the verge of becoming a household name.
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