Size Matters

What draws us to the environments we love? What attracts us to spaces in our homes that we keep returning to over and over again? (I’ll give you a hint - it’s not grandeur.) Sure, some people may like rooms with large expanses where they can spread out or feel limitless. However, in my experience, the most successful spaces in a house are the ones that feel appropriately human-scaled. A cozy reading chair in a corner with ample light and a table to set a book on. A sunlit breakfast nook in which to start your day. These spaces are not meant to intimidate. They are meant to be inviting and they do this by keeping size and scale in check.

Humans are naturals at creating spaces scaled for living in ways that allow them to relax as well as relate. It’s the reason we pull chairs together, often in a corner of a room. It’s why we shop for a coffee table we can put our feet on, and then bring it home to place it at optimal foot- perching distance. If we put furniture in the middle of the room, this penchant for gathering leads most of us to define the space with rugs, tables, lamps, etc. in order to fill the space so that it doesn’t seem empty. As humans, we find that spaces with too much void are unsettling. They feel cold and unfinished. Tall ceilings and ominous expanses are great for subway stations and high-rise lobbies, but at home, we like to nestle.

This might be hard to imagine with the advent of the McMansion. Houses in the US have grown by an average of a thousand square feet since the early seventies, but the size of the average family has not. Somewhere along the way, we collectively decided that more space was better, more separation was better, but I don’t think this accurately takes into account the way people actually live. Double height foyers with cascading windows dressed in yards of fabric may be appealing to the eyes and provide avenues for displaying wealth, but as any inhabitant of such large houses will tell you, “Nobody uses the living room much.” I would extend that to the dining room in many cases. And I would wager that these rooms only exist to host family Christmas photo sessions and the first thirty minutes of entertaining an important guest (like the kind you break out the good china for). This leaves the average inhabitant of large homes doing most of their living in just two or three rooms of a house, usually the cozier ones. I’m convinced that comfortable human scale is the reason people flock to kitchens.

In 1989, Sarah Susanka wrote the book, The Not So Big House. This was a direct backlash to the growing proliferation of overly large homes. Susanka proposed that the environments we love being in aren’t tiny or cramped. They’re simply not as big as we perhaps envisioned, and that maybe designing with this in mind gives us better, more efficient spaces that render full use of a house and are easier on a building budget. They’re also less expensive to heat, cool, and maintain. These homes include lots of built-ins in the form of bookcases, window seats, and eating nooks, which provide precious storage space and the need for less furniture. They devise laundry closets with well-appointed shelves for folding and storage instead of a seemingly endless marble table in a laundry room where clothes seem to pile up and multiply, and which we “swear will double as a place for crafting, gift wrapping, and hobbies,” but we all know that’s done at the kitchen table.

Similar movements in recent years echo this longing for less stuff and more meaningful spaces. The Minimalist movement along with the Tiny House movement have kept this idea of using only what you need in the forefront of American design thinking. I think we keep coming back to these ideas because at heart, we want comfort and simplicity. We want to feel welcome in our own homes, and while museums are fun to visit, no one wants to live there.