Downsizing Homes or "Living Small"

Unfortunately, I did not keep the exact date and page of this 2007 article from the Toronto Star which is about architect and author Sarah Susanka's latest book in her Not So Big series, which has more to do with making space for those things that matter in life, that material possessions and activities:

Downsizing
LIVING SMALL IS NEXT BIG THING

Latest book in architect's Not So Big series
focuses on inner life more than houses

Judy Gerstel
Living Reporter

Supersizing is offensive, everything small, simple and supple is lauded and one and all are urged to tread minimally upon the land.

It's no wonder Sarah Susanka, architect, author and seeker, is regarded as a pacesetter and perhaps even a prophet.

In 1998, she published The Not So Big House: A Blueprint for the Way We Really Live. It quickly became a bestseller and more Not So Big titles followed. “The J.K. Rowling of home design books,” she's been called by the Washington Post.

Susanka may be famous for ideas about not-so-big living space but her ideas about life itself are as big as can be.

In Toronto, sitting on the balcony of a 540-square-foot condo on The Esplanade, she talks about no-so-big living and her revelatory books, including her latest, The Not So Big Life.

“Every one of the principles architects use to make space more intriguing,” she says, “you can apply to any space, no matter how small.”

She acknowledges she was ahead of the curve. People were coming to her architecture firm in Minneapolis and even though they talked about “what they thought they wanted, which was always about square footage and names of rooms … I would say 100 per cent of the time what they really wanted was a feeling of home.”

Because she's always explored not merely where we live but how we live, her new book is not so much a leap as a flow along a continuum of exploring “our dilemma of scale, pace and proportion, both in house design and in life.”

”The Not So Big Life: Making Room for What Really Matters,”says Susanka, is a logical sequel to her home books. “Just as the sense of home has almost nothing to do with size, the sense of feeling at home in our lives has nothing to do with the amount of stuff we're doing.”

Or the amount of stuff we have.

In fact, she writers, “the ability to purchase whatever you want – or the desire to – often becomes a huge obstacle to understanding what matters.” She urges us to consider “the possibilities inherited in the word 'enough' … The opposite of enough is too much.”

And just as “architecture becomes art by transcending the materials” from which it's constructed, she says, so can people's lives transcend material things and activity.

Not exactly a self-help book, Not So Big Life is more a meditation on what makes life meaningful, though the author does append exercises to the end of chapters, including ways to explore dreams and to practise meditation.

But references to dream work and meditation practices – and other “things a cynic would discount” – almost didn't make it into the book.

Some were objectionable at first to an editor at Random House who otherwise was enthusiastic about what the book had to offer. “And I realized,” explains Susanka, “what she was really saying is, 'I've shut the door on my inner self.'”

The author, however, even as she was designing dwellings and deciding where walls and ceilings would go, was opening doors to her inner self, beginning with a meditation class when she was 19.

Now 50 and living in North Carolina, she grew up as Sarah Hills in an English village called Knockholt and then, at the age of 14, moved with her family to a suburb of Los Angeles, where, she says, “there was no people centre.”

The sense of dislocation was not just geographical: “People still had plastic covers on the dining room furniture.”

The contradiction between ways of living gave her “a way of seeing differently,” she says. “We can't experience anything but contrast.”

A strong believer in leaving space for the future to unfold, Susanka is unwilling to make predictions. But she's convinced that “as we begin to live in a not-so-big way, societally, a letting-go will happen … a vastly more creative, more balanced world will evolve.”

She's working on a book about not-so-big remodelling, likely the last in the house series, she says.

“I'm feeling drawn towards and getting a lot of interest from people in (the idea of) the not-so-big community,” she says. “People are saying, 'I want to engage my life in this different way and I want to shape my environment to support that.”

'We Are Creating A Lens'

From The Not So Big Life: Making Room For What Really Matters by Sarah Susanka:

*  “I started to understand what my architectural colleagues and I are attempting to do when we design houses that are beautiful: we are creating a lens through which the inhabitants of the house can experience more of who they really are and who they are becoming.”

*  “If we're struggling, thinking too hard, and worried about getting something done before the next meeting, our creativity is limited and derivative. But when we're attuned to the vitality of the moment, everything is informed by the creativity of the movement.”

*  “We're buying stuff that fits our image of who we'd like to be rather than tools to help us become who we actually are. This is why so many McMansions or starter castles, as I call them, include top-of-the-line kitchens … even though their owners go out to eat nine nights out of 10.”

For more, go to notsobig.com