Re: [GBlist] Not so big? not so small either.....

[Reuben Deumling <deumling@socrates.Berkeley.EDU>]

I had another look at a copy of Ms. Susanka's very popular
Have-Your-Cake-And-Eat-It-Too Bible, and encountered the following:

"Not-So-Big doesn't necessarily mean small.  It means not as big as you
thought you needed....a Not-So Big house is approximately a third smaller
than your original goal but about the same price as your original budget."

Sarah Susanka, "Creating the Not So Big House," p. 9

She features her own house prominently in the book but never reveals just how Not-Big it is.  At what appear to be three stories + loft + an opulent attached two-car garage I would guess it to be somewhere in the vicinity of 2500 square feet.  Lots of uncoventional angles, features, materials, etc.  While her ideas may well be more pleasing to live in and view in coffee table book-form, I am not sure, materially speaking, whether her house should be assumed a-priori to place any fewer demands on the earth's resources than the ones she is reacting to. 

On second reading I find this book of hers an only thinly disguised attempt to re-conceptualize wealthy folks' over-sized dream homes in ways that more fully allow creative, personalized self-indulgence.
Aesthetics 	8.5/10
Environment 	1.5/10  

Reuben Deumling

At 5:03 PM -0500 1/8/2002, Martin&Caruso wrote:
> Hi everyone,
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> This is a little coincidence here for me, I had just checked out "creating the not-so-big house" from the library when this discussion began....one of the homes in it is in my town, Beaufort, SC, in an extremely (in my opinion) ritzy subdivision.
>
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> I live with my husband, two kids, and two large breed dogs in a slowly crumbling 906 sq. foot trailer, excuse me, mobile home.  The houses in this book that are called "not so big" look enormously huge to me.  We are thinking of building three small structures that will eventually be, in total, approx. 1500 square feet.  Some of the homes in the book are pretty cool but for the most part I did not see anything especially exciting.  However I was watching extreme homes on HGTV and saw a really awesome example of something like we want to do with our land, several structures, small in size and well placed to avoid as much damage to the landscape as possible-this really cool hawaiian tree house, etc.  Did anyone else see that? and also, does building in a tree have a damaging effect on the tree or can it be done without hurting it?  Just curious, we don't have any suitable trees here for that, or at least I haven't seen one that has just cried out "build a house on me", actually I am likely not to do that since I love trees more than I love most of my relatives and would feel like I was imposing (still haven't figured out how I am going to deal with having to put wood structures up to live in since that is made from former trees, hoping to find alternatives before I get that far, which is why I joined this list, obviously)
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> Anyway, I don't see how anyone could call a 2000 square foot house small. 
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>
> Elizabeth