Years ago, when I first picked up and thumbed through The Not So Big House (Taunton, 2000), I felt I'd stumbled upon a treasure. Suddenly, here was an architect, Sarah Susanka, who was speaking my language, a clear, elegant language that I could understand completely. Moreover, she shared both my aesthetics and my values. The idea of having a home with a high level of quality and the custom touches that make houses so appealing—all within a small package—was a revelation to me. • Clearly, the book and its ideas have been a revelation to other readers, as The Not So Big House and subsequent books have become best sellers and Susanka herself is today celebrated as a cultural visionary. Her ideas about how we live and how we respond to our built environment have had profound effects on the way we talk about home. • So I was especially pleased to have a chance to speak to Susanka myself about her ideas, what's behind them, and where they are taking us. To learn more about Susanka, her ideas, her many books, and her larger interests, please visit www.notsobighouse.com. 
—Jim Andrews

"We've taken perfectly good house designs, put them in a copier, pushed enlarge, and built them. And it looks silly."

Jim Andrews  For eight years you've been promoting the concept of smaller, high-quality houses designed to reflect the way we live. Can you explain the concept a little bit, talk about where it came from or what drove you to it?

Sarah Susanka  Starting in the early 1980s, I began working with residential clients. I was an architect in Minneapolis and St. Paul and started to realize that most people didn't have any way of articulating what they really wanted. A lot of the people that came to us as clients had looked high and low through new suburban markets and tried to find a house that fit them. They didn't like what they saw, so were coming to an architect as a last resort. [I saw] that there was this basically middle-class America that was looking for another option than what was presently being made.

The paired interior photos, which appear in Susanka?s 2004 book, Home By Design (Taunton Press), are modified to illustrate Susanka?s ideas about how design affects us. On this page, we see how solid and non-solid walls affect our sense of containment or connection to the rest of the house.

My partners and I started to promote the idea of a smaller, better-designed house, basically encouraging people to use their money in a different way. So given that everybody has limits, that we can't just go out and build whatever we want, we saw that the problem was that people were building what they thought was going to be a better house, but the only way they had of thinking about that was a bigger house. But the bigness didn't get these folks what they were looking for, and they could tell that from looking at the character of the houses, that, no, that's not me. But they didn't know what else to do.

So, over the course of a 15-year period, my partners and I all were working on this issue. I started to figure out a way to articulate for the average homeowner how to get a house that really fit them, and that the whole idea of bigger is not necessarily better, of emphasizing quality over quantity, of rethinking the floor plan, of understanding that there's a lot of spaces that we build today that we really almost never use. How much sense does that make?

All of that came from being in the trenches with people with real-life problems and real-life budgets, trying to get their goals of a nice house, a place that really felt enlivening and felt comfortable at the same time, within the parameters of the cold, hard reality of the cash. So it's a very practical resolution, saying, Let's not build the things we don't use anymore, and let's find a way to make the spaces that we do use much more inhabitable and much better designed for the way we actually live. And everything I've written since then has really been about that.

JA The idea of quality over quantity is such a sensible idea, you'd think everyone would have signed on by now.
SS  It's just that our culture doesn't recognize what quality really is. Everybody gives lip service to quality, but it has a meaning that's sort of gotten lost in the shuffle, and oftentimes actually when people say, "We build quality," they're actually meaning, "We build big." So we have to reexplain what quality means and then help to bring about an awareness of when there is true quality and when it's absent. And anytime that there's a major focus on quantity, chances are, the quality's going to go down the tubes. Inadvertently, it does.