Home, Small Home

I am in search of a dream house.

I am driving along the outer edges of Raleigh, North Carolina in search of this house and its inhabitant, a now-famous architect who has found her calling as a drafting-table psychologist, probing the most potent symbol of the American dream like a modern-day Freud armed with a mechanical pencil.

I am close to the house, in the cul de sac where it sits even, but no single one stands out as being hers. With their bright paint, swaying flags, porch swings, and modest scale, all of the residences are more appealing than the cookie-cutter mansions that dot the landscape of the urban fringes these days. But certainly, Sarah Susanka, the author of The Not So Big House: A Blueprint for the Way We Really Live (Taunton Press, 1998), perhaps the best-selling book in the history of the world on building and retooling a home, ought to live someplace truly extraordinary.

I finally walk in, however, and it's just a house, like many other nice houses. The entry is not double-height. The refrigerator is a GE Profile, not a Sub-Zero. The screened-in porch is a bit noisy, thanks to the swim club the next block over. The master bath has no whirlpool tub, no sexy see-through shower.

This, it turns out, is just the way Susanka likes it. In fact, the house is a showcase for her ideas, though it's not exactly showy. Susanka wrote The Not So Big House as a prescription for all of the miserable people she'd counseled over the years, homeowners who were profoundly dissatisfied with what were supposed to be their so-called "dream houses." Her diagnosis? Susanka believes that many successful people are afflicted with starter-castle complex, and they build or buy houses to impress other people instead of satisfying their own particular needs.

Susanka's remedy suggests the following: Build or buy a house that's a third smaller than your original goal, but spend just as much on it as you had originally planned. Think quality over quantity and comfort over size, and personalize it to fit your needs. Her model home connects most of the ground floor with the cooking, eating, and lounging space all running together. She's big on little details too: corner nooks, varied ceiling heights, carved molding and railings, and bountiful built-ins. If you're not going to use each space every day, don't build it, or avoid buying houses that have superfluous rooms.

The Not So Big House was not meant to be a manifesto, but readers and remodelers have embraced it anyway as a call to crowbars. So far, 300,000 people have purchased the book, inspired by the ready-made slogans contained within its pages: "Less square footage, made with more care and detail"; "It isn't just a small house. Rather, it's a smaller house, filled with special details"; "The floor plan of the Not So Big House is a map, not a fossil," with Not So Big House capitalized in accordance with its status as a federally registered trademark.

It's tempting to dismiss this all as a full-employment act for architects fed up with erecting anonymous office parks, but Susanka's own house suggests otherwise. When she moved to Raleigh this summer, she chose to buy rather than build. Once she signed the papers, she spent $70,000 rearranging walls and adding detail to about half the rooms in the 1800-square-foot house that she now shares with her husband. "This is the way most people change the way they live in their home," she says, noting that architect fees wouldn't have amounted to much if she had needed to hire someone to design it for her. "Every architect should have to do a project like this at least once."

So this house in Raleigh is not a dream house exactly, not the one that Susanka would necessarily build if she had the time and the inclination. But it does have nice details, and it came with a great screened-in porch. What follows is an edited transcript of a couple of hours of conversation that took place on that porch last week.

When you sat down to write your book, did you realize that you were about to launch a movement?

I was trying to explain to people that there is an alternative to what is being built in suburbia today and to tell them how to go out and get it for themselves. Manifestos tend to polarize things. I've been careful not to point the finger at anyone and say, "Those are the bad guys, and those are the good guys." I'm trying to build consensus.

But before I wrote the book, I had a feeling that in the new world of the Internet, good books wouldn't just disappear. Instead, they'd tap into a seed of an idea, and the Web would be the infrastructure on which to expand that idea. My Web site today takes every message in the book and expands upon it in every possible way. It gives links to people who need technical information on choosing the right panelization company, and it helps others who are reading on a more spiritual level, trying to build a life that's more in line with their values.