Space use is the missing piece of ‘big American houses’ discourse

Plus: ghosts on the glacier, AMA plans, and more

Good morning! It’s Wednesday, and here are this week’s five items for you.

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1. A take I haven’t written elsewhere

Space use is the missing piece of ‘big American houses’ discourse

(via)

“Want to be happier?” I wrote in 2017. “Live in a smaller house.” And on rereading, I still think I was right:

"I always wanted a house big enough that my kids could be in their room screaming, and my wife could be in a room screaming, and I could be somewhere else and not hear any of them," Michael Frisby, a former Wall Street Journal correspondent and owner of an 11,000-square-foot home, told NPR in a piece on booming home sizes.

What Frisby wanted is what I never want. Don't get me wrong: I'm an introvert's introvert. I love being alone in my house. But at a certain point—which I would suggest is somewhere well below 1,000 square feet per person—extra space becomes dysfunctional. "I worry about the future of a culture and a society that has this extent of excess in it," says John Halsey, president of Peconic Land Trust. "I think there is a disconnect, and we are in a bubble. Somehow, we are just not experiencing the realities that the rest of the world is."

If you own an American home built in the last three decades, your house is probably too big for your life, sucking away your money, energy, time, and relationships, and adding only to your accumulation of stuff. It won't be an easy problem to fix, for you or for the American real estate market more broadly. But as a happy owner of a small home, I can assure you it's a problem worth fixing. Next time you buy a house, consider shopping small.

That said, I now live in a larger house. It’s got double the finished square footage of the home we owned in 2017, which was around 1,000 square feet when we bought it and 1,250 or so after we finished half the basement.

Of course, our family has also more than doubled since 2017, and now both my husband and I work from home full-time. Accordingly, we still easily meet the guideline I gave then: “well below 1,000 square feet per person,” and we do even better if you count the extended stretches when we’ve had members of our extended family living with us and/or exclude our home offices from this math.

Still, even if the ratio of space to people is slightly improved (as in, 2,500 square feet is “smaller” for a family of five than 1,250 for a couple), in every other way, our new house is bigger, and that size comes with all the woes I forecast six years ago.

There is more vacuuming. More dusting. Three toilets to clean instead of one (though, if I’m honest, I don’t clean the Pittsburgh potty much). We have so much more furniture. So many rugs. There are 15 rugs in this house, not counting carpeting or bath mats. It is more work. Mercifully, the yard is still a tight city lot.

But there’s one sense in which the bigger house is not more trouble: We do not have unused space. From the 2017 piece:

Does your home have a formal dining room and an eat-in kitchen and a breakfast bar or nook? How often do you use all those spaces? (Let's be real: How often do you ignore all of them and eat on the couch instead?) Yes, it's nice to have these extra rooms for special occasions, for all the entertaining we're so sure we're going to do. But it's not realistic, and it's certainly not financially sound. A study by the Center on Everyday Lives of Families at the University of California found that having spare rooms almost always means having empty rooms, which don't come free.

We eat exclusively in our dining room, and every room in our home is used extensively every day. Even the guest bedroom does double duty as a TV room and a place for our nanny to sit undisturbed when the kids are in quiet time. And that brings me to the occasion of this post: this 2019 article about Americans’ giant homes, which was promoted anew this week on the homepage of The Atlantic.

“Why are American houses so big?” it asks, going over a number of answers—cultural, economic, geographic, historic. But there’s one factor I’ve realized is missing there and in most (if not all) conversations on this topic, including my own prior writing: It’s not just the sheer size of the house and the ratio of space to people. It’s also the apportionment of living space between bedrooms, bathrooms, and public rooms.

Here’s some data from a 2011 Census report. It’s a little old, but comprehensive, and reporting elsewhere indicates these trends have basically continued in the years since.

The number of bedrooms does rise as houses get bigger, even though American families and households are getting smaller. But notice the trends for public spaces: living rooms, family/great rooms, dens/libraries/TV rooms (ah yes, that well-known beast, the domestic American library), and rec rooms. By 2009, six in 100 new builds had two living rooms—and that’s with calling all those similar rooms by other names.

More recent Census data similarly shows (see the “Bathrooms by Bedrooms” table here) a shifting ratio for bathrooms. We build houses with markedly more bathrooms per bedroom than we used to, moving toward a 1:1 ratio as the new standard and even, on the high end of the market, more bathrooms than bedrooms.

Comparing my house to a new house of the same size is instructive. Our 2,500 square feet goes to six bedrooms, two bathrooms, and a living room, dining room, and kitchen. (Though the first owners likely had a large family, two beds and one bath were originally servants’ quarters.) This is a very typical arrangement for houses of this age in our area.

Looking up new construction homes with roughly the same square footage nearby, the proportions are very different: Typically it’s four beds, three or four baths, and at least one secondary living space. Here’s a representative example with an absurdly large living room, a game room, and a nearly-finished basement to offer a third public living space.

That allotment makes sense in light of shrinking American families and our national tendency to fantastic notions about how often we entertain. But it’s also extraordinarily conducive to the characteristic problems of over-large homes, which arise not only from the fact of the space but from how it’s used.

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2. What I'm reading this week

“Ghosts on the glacier,” by John Branch for The New York Times this past weekend. Half a century ago, an American mountaineering trip to Argentina went awry. Two climbers were found dead under suspicious circumstances. Recently, a camera—belonging to one of the dead climbers and holding two dozen intact photos—was found on the mountain, newly visible in shifting glacial ice.

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3. A recommendation

On the subject of space use past, check out floorplans of the past on Instagram. It’s just what it sounds like: posts of old floorpans for houses. I like to browse them to see what was normal, what was luxurious, how these households would’ve worked.

The layout of this one looks very comfortable—and it has so many bathrooms by the standards of the day (you’ll have to click through to the original post to see the actual floorplan):

floorplans_of_the_past

A post shared by @floorplans_of_the_past

And this very detailed one includes basement plans, which are extra-handy for catching implications about daily life:

floorplans_of_the_past

A post shared by @floorplans_of_the_past

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4. Recent work

• Journalists won’t earn back trust by claiming a monopoly on truth | Christianity Today (unlocked link)

• Bah, humbug! But I’ll echo the joyous strains | Christianity Today (unlocked link)

• Russia’s in it for the long haul. Ukraine’s building fortifications. What next? | Defense Priorities (newsletter)

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5. Miscellaneous

Are you interested in an AMA? Lots of Substack writers do these from time to time.

For the less online, AMA stands for ask me anything. The idea is that readers to send in questions for me to answer. They can be political, theological, professional, even personal, so long as they aren’t impertinent. (“Anything” is a slight overstatement: I have a high sense of propriety and don’t forecast elections.)

So if you’d like me to do an AMA, send in questions! You can either leave them as comments on this post or reply directly to this email. If I get a critical mass of good queries, I’ll devote a week to answering. Maybe next week, maybe the first week of the new year—I dunno, but don’t dawdle.

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