Author urges developers to build 'not so big'

Friday, March 17, 2006

By GORDY HOLT
P-I REPORTER

Sarah Susanka, best-selling author of books on residential architecture and home design, told a Built Green Conference & Expo audience Thursday that change is in the air.

Home buyers and home builders alike, she said, are beginning to calculate the environmental and psychological damage wrought by the phenomenon she referred to as "the McMansion," a trend more commonly known locally as the megahouse.

Bigger, she said, is not always better.

Built Green was created in 1999 by the Colorado building community and the governor's office. The trademark is used in this area by permission of the Colorado group, said Colorado Built Green specialist Jeff Lyng, and it is administered here by the Master Builders Association of King and Snohomish Counties along with the counties of King and Snohomish, Puget Sound Energy, Whirlpool, James Hardie Siding Products and Port Blakely Communities.

The movement's goal is to encourage environmentally friendly building practices, and its reputation is growing such that attendance at its conference and expo at the Washington State Convention and Trade Center doubled to 500 from what it was just last year.

Susanka's seminal "The Not So Big House: A Blueprint for the Way We Really Live" (The Taunton Press Inc., 1998) set the "better not bigger" pace for an emerging crop of builders and buyers who deride megahouse projects that nevertheless continue to march across King and Snohomish county hillsides.

In "Not So Big" and six following volumes, Susanka lays out ways to design a home that, she insists, will satisfy the heart as well as the pocketbook and ego.

Among her examples is the angular, porch-friendly Craftsman-style bungalow, which was the early 20th century's answer to the McMansion of its day, the Victorian manor.

There is a reason why it has survived since those early years, she said: "It feels like home."

In Susanka's view, a not-so-big house should include lots of built-ins, nooks and hideaways. Bookcases should hug the walls and even the spaces over windows. Indeed, she said, the slam-bam-thank-you approach to building and design should be replaced by careful attention to detail.

Kitchens should be gathering places to entertain as well as to eat while formal dining and living rooms should maybe take a back seat -- unless you expect the president.

Her "not-so-big" building ideas are what will create neighborhoods that help sustain a healthy environment for future generations, she said.