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Sarah Susanka, the author of the Not So Big House books, recently finished a book tour for her seventh book, The Not So Big Life: Making Room for What Really Matters. In September she joined Sarah Bronstein at KPLU by phone from her studio in North Carolina to discuss her "Not So Big" philosophy and her integrated approach to "right-sizing" your home and lifestyle.
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SB: You just finished a book tour for The Not So Big Life: Making Room for What Really Matters. I'm going to get to that, but first I have some questions about your first book, The Not So Big House. Some people look at this book, and their initial reaction, looking at all the pictures, is, "These houses don't seem very small!" How big is "Not So Big"?
SS: There are two answers that I want to give to that question. First, when you photograph a small house, you use a wide angle lens, and it ends up looking a lot bigger than it actually is!
But in terms of how I answer "How big is not so big?", paradoxically, it's not really about the size, as in square footage. I say to people, it's about a third smaller than you thought you needed, but just as expensive. I'm really encouraging people to take square footage out of the things that they don't use very often or that they never use, and instead take the dollars they saved and put those dollars into the quality and character of what they actually live in. It's really more about proportion than it is about any specific size.
SB: These days, smaller homes are equated with notions of sustainability. What makes a home sustainable?
SS: There are a lot of characteristics. I always say that the first step in sustainability should be not so big. If you're doing something that is right-sized for you as opposed to overly large, it's going to be something that people will want to look after for the long haul. It's also more sustainable in terms of its energy use and it's consumption of natural materials. And perhaps most important of all, from an architect's standpoint, the structure needs also to be beautiful. When something is beautiful, it tends to be looked after for generations to come. Just look back at the bungalows of a hundred years ago, and you'll see that they've kept their value and their character, because people look after them. That's a big step in sustainability, even though we don't normally think of it that way.
SB: Designing homes for today's lifestyles is another one of your buzz phrases. But this concept of the arts and crafts movement is actually very old...
SS: It is. The thing that's interesting to me about the arts and crafts sensibility is that it became attached to a particular style. So when people think "arts and crafts" they think of a particular style of house. I've tried to get people to understand that no matter what style you build in, be it English Tudor or Contemporary, you can still have the sensibility of smaller and better. A lot of what I've been talking about over the last twenty years has to do with that issue. Oftentimes people assume that style is the bottom line. In fact there's a lot that underlies style and informs how the house is lived in. The style is almost like the clothing you put over that body.
SB: How do people choose a style when they're looking into building a home?
SS: Well, if they're working with an architect they often actually don't pick a style. The style evolves from the design process. That's something that's often frustrating to architects. People will come in and say, "We want a French Country!" The architect wants to know "What is it that you really want in terms of your special needs," and then, "show me some pictures of things that you like." Then they'll create something that's absolutely personal for you. So it doesn't necessarily have a style name. That's a totally new thought for a lot of people.
Really, when you're having someone help you design a house, you can make it your style. Our houses really need to be personal expressions, or we're not going to feel comfortable there. If you wait for somebody to tell you what it's supposed to look like, or you allow an interior designer to decorate it completely with no input from you, you're going to feel like you're staying in a hotel. It has to express who you really are.
SB: When you first set out to write The Not So Big House, you had just finished building a not so big house of your own.
SS: That's right. In fact a lot of things happened simultaneously. I realized that I wanted to explain how to make the smaller, better designed house, and in order to do that, I needed a very good example that showed all the things I was talking about. So I built myself this Not So Big House prototype. I have to tell you, amusingly enough it was actually larger than the house I moved out of. But I realized that I was trying to help people who were currently building much larger houses to see their way to building smaller but better. If I had built a 1,200 square foot house, which was the size I moved out of, all the people building the 4, 5, or 6000 square foot houses would not have read this book! It was a very intentional move to create a house that illustrated well something that a large portion of the American public could imagine living in.
SS: They were actually really connected. I describe at the beginning of my latest book, The Not So Big Life, how I began to live in a not so big way by starting to integrate into my everyday life a time to meditate and to contemplate; to start to actually breathe; to take to time to realize what it was that I really loved to do.
I had a very successful architecture practice at the time that I was beginning to feel this desire to do some writing. I'd always loved writing, so I knew that I wanted to. But I had absolutely no time in which to write. Just like a lot of busy professionals, my life was completely chalked full. I began to see that the only person who could make a shift was me. Part of that shift happened as a result of making a place to meditate each day.
It's an interesting phenomenon that I talk about in The Not So Big Life. As you take time for yourself, and as you build a place into your house or carve out a little corner to take that time, so you've got a place and a time of your own, everything else shifts with it. When things seem so hectic, it seems like absolutely the most impossible time to take time for yourself, and yet that's the time that it's most important, because it will never change until you start to take control of a piece of the time. [You'll] start to be much calmer, much more peaceful, not thinking constantly about what you've got to do next or what you just did.
That was actually how I started to live a not so big life. I made a meeting, essentially, with myself, to write twice a week. Even though at the time I didn't know what I was going to be writing, I just made the time commitment. Gradually, what came out of me was The Not So Big House, my first book, in 1998. In fact, that was the most sustainable thing I could do, both for my life, and for the effect it had on so many people.
SB: One of the things I really love about The Not So Big Life is your use of architectural design concepts as a metaphor for life. Could you talk a little bit about what unique perspective you gain on life as an architect?
SS: Absolutely. I think one of the things that architects do automatically is [to] think in terms of dimensions. For example, we're constantly working with the third dimension, the height of every space. We're shaping space so it accommodates the activities of the people who are living in that particular house. In many ways this new book is about the fourth dimension, rather than the third dimension. We've come to understand that time is the fourth dimension in our reality. Many of the things that I talk about in terms of space are absolutely translatable to time.
Let me give you one example, since we were talking about that space to meditate a few minutes ago. In The Not So Big Life I talk about the importance of just being present in what you're doing, literally showing up in the activity and engaging one hundred percent. That is very similar in analogy to what I talk about in house design, and our physiologically being programmed to move towards light. It's not just a near death experience! We are literally pulled towards bright light. Architects use this all the time when they are trying to move somebody down a hallway, or emphasize a particular axis in a house. It's just the same way with presence in our lives. Once we have experienced being completely engaged in something, we move towards that because it's so vital.
There are many different analogies like that throughout the book. I also use the metaphor of a remodeling. When we remodel our house we understand that we've got to first de-clutter, and then understand what it is that we like about the house; what it is that we don't like; move some walls out of the way so that we can start to see from place to place. We can understand what we need to do in our life remodeling by using that analogy. We can see, "Oh yes, I need to de-clutter. There [are] a whole lot of things that I do out of obligation that I don't really need to do." Or, "There are the equivalent of walls between my work life and my home life." Open those up so that you can be the same person at home as a work.
SB: You have said that we're reaching a crisis point. That's some pretty strong language!
SS: It is, and I don't think a lot of us really recognize it because we're so used to going so fast. But I'm sure that some of your listeners will recognize themselves when they hear this: your constantly answering emails, and answering text messages, and on the phone, and racing from place to place, so that you never have time to stop and take stock of what you're doing. Is there some meaning to what you're doing? Do you feel enlivened by your everyday life?
Unfortunately, because of all this information that's flying at us all the time, and the necessity of our responding, (or so we believe!), we end up completely disconnected from who we really are on the inside. That's where the crisis point is. We have more and more tools that supposedly are saving us time, but in reality, they're doing a very different thing: they're keeping us out of being involved in our everyday life.
SB: Any last words of advice for life and home resizing?
SS: Well, obviously I would encourage people to read my books! I think there's a lot of things there that will jog the imagination and give you some thoughts about how you might do that. There are a lot of resources on my websites. If you go to notsobig.com you can get to the Not So Big House and Not So Big Life websites. Just start to read, start to listen to some of the materials there, and I think you'll begin to see how you can live a much fuller life, a much more meaningful life, both by rethinking your house, and rethinking how you're engaging it.
You can view Sarah Susanka's websites at www.notsobig.com.
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