These new builds are super common where I live too (NC) and the thing that drives me nuts about them is that the first floor is almost always entirely open concept. So yes, the house is big but there’s no real privacy or delineation of space. You can’t have one kid practice piano while another does homework and you cook dinner and your spouse watches tv. Or, I guess you can but it’s loud and unpleasant. My house is 1200 sq ft but I have different rooms for different activities which makes the house actually feel larger and flow better than its enormous neighbors.
Yeah, I think the layout is probably more important than the size above a certain size. The open floorplan is probably just cheaper to build, and somehow it got sold as a modern style. I've never liked it. (Our own house is about the room number of the house Sonja in the comments describes as coming in around 3,000 square feet, but we're closer to 2,000 square feet. It probably feels about as big because the rooms are nicely delineated (and still have some dead space from being too long.)
I can answer - 1 bedroom for the parents, 1 for each kid. A home office because one if not both parents work from home. A guest bedroom because one of not both parents moved away from the place they grew up, so in order to maintain relationships with even just their nuclear family, not to mention any cousins they were friends with in their youth, or college friends, they should have a place for guests to stay overnight. A dining room and living room for company, and a playroom or den for their kids to make a mess in.
Having separate entertaining rooms for company is huge for facilitating adult social life because it already takes a couple of hours to make food and stuff. If you also have to straighten up the room where your kids play together (because you only have one living room) AND keep it picked up it adds a whole other dimension of work. Also of course, the kitchen should be separate from the entertaining rooms because again - making food AND cleaning the kitchen before anyone gets there isn’t realistic, especially if you’re also watching the kids while this is happening.
That’s 8 rooms - 4 bedrooms, 1 work room and 3 living/ entertaining rooms; not counting bathrooms. IMO people don’t really need more than 3 bathrooms for a house like this but now a days the trend is to have one bathroom for each bedroom plus a half bathroom, so a house like I describe would have 4.5 bathrooms. Plus a two car garage. That’s about 3000 sq ft.
The wHo nEedS a BiG hOUse discourse is a NIMBY, degrowther mindset imo, and that’s me being nice. It’s people who don’t have small kids, or else maybe they do, but their kids don’t need space to do things because they just watch tv and iPad all day. Also people who don’t ever have guests.
But most damagingly, it’s people who see that today’s tradeoff for most people is less space in a walkable neighborhood VS more space in an exurb and (1) take that tradeoff as a given and (2) valorize it.
To be clear - we have 5 people living in 1600 sq ft, because given our constraints, I’d rather trade walkability for space. But that doesn’t mean I wouldn’t rather have both space and walkability. They’re not inherently impossible. We can still build more.
"But most damagingly, it’s people who see that today’s tradeoff for most people is less space in a walkable neighborhood VS more space in an exurb and (1) take that tradeoff as a given and (2) valorize it." Is that trade-off *not* a given? I've never really seen this challenged by anybody, a great deal of the YIMBY complaints I see are little old houses being torn down for huge new ones in walkable-ish inner suburbs (here that would be MoCo near the D.C. line or Arlington). This raises something else I was thinking about, about the floorplan question, and how a lot of floorplans are large but too open for privacy or distinct uses of space.
I understand how or why someone would use all that space in one of these larger houses, I more wonder how many people actually do use it that way, or if it's often aspirational in the "if I buy a better golf club I'll be better at golf" sort of way.
And I suppose I also feel a certain responsibility to understand how and why exactly people did entertaining/large families/extended families/etc. with a fraction of the space a couple of generations ago. I think I wonder on some level if *not* being used to lots of open, free space made it easier to do those things, because it was less of a departure from the everyday expectation than it is today. IOW, if the large house is the microcosm of suburbia. (None of which is to say people shouldn't live in big houses if they want to.)
They didn’t need it as much because they didn’t move away from their families. When your cousin lives down the street and your parents live a few blocks away, etc. etc. no one needs to visit you. Plus air travel was expensive.
As far as having dinner parties, people were poor in the past. life was actually just worse, so fewer people could afford to have dinner parties. Instead, they socialized more in church or some communal ethnic hall.
Huh. This is not the way my parents describe their childhoods in small homes, but they were both Italian-American and more or less working-class. So their experiences/expectations may have been a bit below what Americans overall expected even at the time. (They were also New Yorkers, so space was limited no matter what.) The moving-away part I totally get.
They were children - to understand what adults want today you would have to ask what your grandparents’ experience was having a lot of kids in a small apartment.
Also, expectation is exactly the elephant in the (small, crowded) room. In a world where no one knows anyone who has more than a 2 bed 1 bath, one wouldn’t necessarily think to ask for it. But we do know that when they got the opportunity, most Americans did choose to move to the suburbs. A lot of of those houses started out almost as small as the apartments they left, and over time they added additions. And over time they wanted to buy bigger and bigger houses.
Revealed preference is an important data point. Of course, an adult with a happy childhood will look back and say “oh when I was a kid, we were happy with this small amount of space,” but we can see what adults have been choosing. It does show that when people can afford more space they take it.
These new builds are super common where I live too (NC) and the thing that drives me nuts about them is that the first floor is almost always entirely open concept. So yes, the house is big but there’s no real privacy or delineation of space. You can’t have one kid practice piano while another does homework and you cook dinner and your spouse watches tv. Or, I guess you can but it’s loud and unpleasant. My house is 1200 sq ft but I have different rooms for different activities which makes the house actually feel larger and flow better than its enormous neighbors.
Yeah, I think the layout is probably more important than the size above a certain size. The open floorplan is probably just cheaper to build, and somehow it got sold as a modern style. I've never liked it. (Our own house is about the room number of the house Sonja in the comments describes as coming in around 3,000 square feet, but we're closer to 2,000 square feet. It probably feels about as big because the rooms are nicely delineated (and still have some dead space from being too long.)
How big is the house?
I can answer - 1 bedroom for the parents, 1 for each kid. A home office because one if not both parents work from home. A guest bedroom because one of not both parents moved away from the place they grew up, so in order to maintain relationships with even just their nuclear family, not to mention any cousins they were friends with in their youth, or college friends, they should have a place for guests to stay overnight. A dining room and living room for company, and a playroom or den for their kids to make a mess in.
Having separate entertaining rooms for company is huge for facilitating adult social life because it already takes a couple of hours to make food and stuff. If you also have to straighten up the room where your kids play together (because you only have one living room) AND keep it picked up it adds a whole other dimension of work. Also of course, the kitchen should be separate from the entertaining rooms because again - making food AND cleaning the kitchen before anyone gets there isn’t realistic, especially if you’re also watching the kids while this is happening.
That’s 8 rooms - 4 bedrooms, 1 work room and 3 living/ entertaining rooms; not counting bathrooms. IMO people don’t really need more than 3 bathrooms for a house like this but now a days the trend is to have one bathroom for each bedroom plus a half bathroom, so a house like I describe would have 4.5 bathrooms. Plus a two car garage. That’s about 3000 sq ft.
The wHo nEedS a BiG hOUse discourse is a NIMBY, degrowther mindset imo, and that’s me being nice. It’s people who don’t have small kids, or else maybe they do, but their kids don’t need space to do things because they just watch tv and iPad all day. Also people who don’t ever have guests.
But most damagingly, it’s people who see that today’s tradeoff for most people is less space in a walkable neighborhood VS more space in an exurb and (1) take that tradeoff as a given and (2) valorize it.
To be clear - we have 5 people living in 1600 sq ft, because given our constraints, I’d rather trade walkability for space. But that doesn’t mean I wouldn’t rather have both space and walkability. They’re not inherently impossible. We can still build more.
"But most damagingly, it’s people who see that today’s tradeoff for most people is less space in a walkable neighborhood VS more space in an exurb and (1) take that tradeoff as a given and (2) valorize it." Is that trade-off *not* a given? I've never really seen this challenged by anybody, a great deal of the YIMBY complaints I see are little old houses being torn down for huge new ones in walkable-ish inner suburbs (here that would be MoCo near the D.C. line or Arlington). This raises something else I was thinking about, about the floorplan question, and how a lot of floorplans are large but too open for privacy or distinct uses of space.
I understand how or why someone would use all that space in one of these larger houses, I more wonder how many people actually do use it that way, or if it's often aspirational in the "if I buy a better golf club I'll be better at golf" sort of way.
And I suppose I also feel a certain responsibility to understand how and why exactly people did entertaining/large families/extended families/etc. with a fraction of the space a couple of generations ago. I think I wonder on some level if *not* being used to lots of open, free space made it easier to do those things, because it was less of a departure from the everyday expectation than it is today. IOW, if the large house is the microcosm of suburbia. (None of which is to say people shouldn't live in big houses if they want to.)
They didn’t need it as much because they didn’t move away from their families. When your cousin lives down the street and your parents live a few blocks away, etc. etc. no one needs to visit you. Plus air travel was expensive.
As far as having dinner parties, people were poor in the past. life was actually just worse, so fewer people could afford to have dinner parties. Instead, they socialized more in church or some communal ethnic hall.
Huh. This is not the way my parents describe their childhoods in small homes, but they were both Italian-American and more or less working-class. So their experiences/expectations may have been a bit below what Americans overall expected even at the time. (They were also New Yorkers, so space was limited no matter what.) The moving-away part I totally get.
They were children - to understand what adults want today you would have to ask what your grandparents’ experience was having a lot of kids in a small apartment.
Also, expectation is exactly the elephant in the (small, crowded) room. In a world where no one knows anyone who has more than a 2 bed 1 bath, one wouldn’t necessarily think to ask for it. But we do know that when they got the opportunity, most Americans did choose to move to the suburbs. A lot of of those houses started out almost as small as the apartments they left, and over time they added additions. And over time they wanted to buy bigger and bigger houses.
Revealed preference is an important data point. Of course, an adult with a happy childhood will look back and say “oh when I was a kid, we were happy with this small amount of space,” but we can see what adults have been choosing. It does show that when people can afford more space they take it.