style with substance
the call to small Pinpointing the essential qualities that make home deeply satisfying can help you design a right-sized house that meets all your needs.
Attention to the details of design can make size seem irrelevant while allowing the homeowner to pile on the green-built features. House sculpture by Hoss Haley.
If the media buzz is any indication, green building continues to be the dominant design trend of 2007. This represents an amazing shift of awareness. Who ever heard of “carbon footprint” just a couple of years ago? And even if most of us still aren’t sure what green building is all about, that doesn’t seem to be stopping us from taking the green leap.
As a New Mexico designer, I routinely get new clients who announce that they want to build green. “Great!” I say. “Music to my ears—but what exactly does that mean to you?” Usually they are voicing a sincere and heartfelt intention but lack the necessary knowledge to decide which sustainable systems are right for them. So we’ll begin filling in those gaps, exploring all the green-building options and weighing personal and planetary benefits against the economic costs and attendant lifestyle changes.
Turns out it’s the lifestyle changes, not the costs, that give people pause. Most green-building systems are solid investments that pay for themselves over time. But when it comes to giving up comfort, we red-blooded American consumers are in a fix. We just hate having to choose between an old lifestyle that is comfortable but wasteful and a new one that is less wasteful but not as cushy or convenient. Faced with such tradeoffs, some people stick it out and develop a workable green plan, but a lot of people simply jump ship.
For example, I had a client who wanted to be off the power grid but just had to have an outdoor hot tub and a battery of flashy kitchen appliances. The problem, I explained, is that these gadgets would require a photovoltaic system so huge as to make any pretense of sustainability rather silly as well as terribly expensive. She needed either to let go of the gadgets or just connect to the grid and look for other opportunities to go green—such as solar heating, roof water collection, or natural and native materials. In the end, she settled on a grid-tie solar system and a blend of green and conventional features, which satisfied both her budding green heart and her need for comfort.
This is a process we might all have to go through sooner or later. Let’s face it: global resources are scarce and expensive and our way of consuming them is wrecking the planet, while a growing population promises to only make things worse. Add to that a softening housing boom and we really have no choice but to simplify, streamline, downsize, and reengineer.
This is really bad news if we respond by clinging, like strung-out junkies, to the way it used to be. But it’s really good news if we resolve to get with the program and start shaping a world our great-grandkids can enjoy. How big a house does a person need to be happy, anyway? How many bathrooms does it take to stay clean? Instead of building a McMansion, maybe it would be more satisfying to build small and solar, reducing the amount of coal that gets shoveled into the plants out there in the Four Corners region of New Mexico.
I’m convinced that it’s more fun, more challenging, and more rewarding to create homes that are 25 percent smaller and 50 percent more energy efficient than the old-school dream house of the last few decades. Such a workhorse of a home can be so cool that we’ll look back at the bloated houses of the past and wonder what we were thinking. It’s all about going straight to heart of the matter: knowing exactly what we need, cutting out what we don’t, and making it all sizzle with innovative design solutions.
The key is to pinpoint the essential qualities we want in our homes and to find the most efficient way to render them while not confusing the issue with materials or style. For example, a working kitchen is essential, but a massive granite-topped island is not. So if you want a kitchen that performs well and also serves as a social center, you might opt for the more efficient storage that a pantry provides and drop the island in favor of a peninsula with stools (avoiding the wasted space needed to move around an island). Skillful use of light and an open relationship to the dining area can increase the sense of spaciousness, while in fact this more compact arrangement will probably feel warmer and more intimate. When you’re sure you’ve got the design right, then is the time to consider surfaces, cabinets, and appliances.
You can apply this same approach to every room by simply zooming in on the form and function of a space while ignoring the eye candy that design magazines and realtors like to market. Oceans of marble and multiple shower sprays are no guarantee that your bathroom will be rejuvenating or beautiful—that has to come from flow, color, texture, and light. Emphasize the vanity and the lav, where you spend the most time, and find a way to tuck the toilet into a corner or behind a half wall. Then deal with some real basics, such as a low-flow toilet that flushes thoroughly instead of a fancy throne that sometimes takes two flushes to do the job.
Of course many tricks of the trade allow us to compress, streamline, and extract multiple functions from a given space. That’s relatively easy. What’s much harder are the personal issues. Since most of us home builders were raised during a 30-year period that saw the average American home grow by close to 50 percent, the small-is-beautiful approach doesn’t come naturally. Our favorite solution to a design challenge has been to throw square footage and Sub-Zeros at it. In plain words, we’re all a little spoiled.
Americans have always responded successfully when our safety or way of life is threatened from abroad. The difference today is that the threat of climate change comes from inside—it’s from our own bad habits and energy-burning lifestyle. We have a challenging project ahead of us: to clean up our act, learning to be happy on the strength of inner resources rather than relying on outer ones.
It’s an exciting time, and it offers a unique opportunity for design work that is not just creative but actually critical to our survival. It should be fun and rewarding and all the more so if we all do it together—so let’s do it!
Vishu Magee designs homes around Santa Fe and Taos. He is the author of Archetype Design: House as a Vehicle for Spirit. Contact him at archetype-design.com.