Customer Reviews

Creating the Not So Big House: Insights and Ideas for the New American Home

5 star:		(25)
4 star:		(10)
3 star:		(6)
2 star:		(2)
1 star:		(0)

 

 

This is a great book for anyone who questions the need to build ever bigger and bigger homes. Written by an architect but easy to digest. Simple but elegant ideas for creating more with less.

This is packed with so many great ideas and principles. It'll change everything you thing you want in a house. A must read.

I liked the way this book looks. It has beautiful photos in it, with a wide variation of house styles, sizes and cool solutions tailored to each homeowner/family. That being said, what intrigued me the most was *why* Susanka chose the houses, and what she saw in them that worked with her "Not So Big" philosophy. I have not read her original book, so none of the information was rehashed in my reading. Perhaps if I had, I wouldn't have enjoyed this book so much. However, I suspect that "Creating the Not So Big House" offers more in the way of practical application of the theory and is therefore valuable on its own. I also figure that since it shows personal interpretations of Susanka's original thoughts on homebuilding, it offers a different "flavor" of the same basic idea.

This book also made me want to buy the original, so I can get more of the pure "mindset" part of Susanka's message. Perhaps that was part of the point. :)

This is a good book. Unfortunately, it's a follow-on to an EXCELLENT book ("The Not So Big House"), and fares poorly by comparison. As this later volume is sold as a companion book in collection with the original, it's entirely fair to take this comparison into account.

So what's wrong with "Creating the Not So Big House"? It comes down to the writing, the photos, the editing, and the content. To be clear, none of these four areas are terrible -- but the first book hit high marks in all respects. So I'll go through each in turn.

Sarah Susanka is by training an architect rather than an author. The text shows the lack of a professional writer, for example, in excessive use of commas, separating both dependent and independent clauses, resulting in choppy sentences, just like this one. (A real quote: "By adding the new area as a separate structure, connected to the old house by a flat-roofed section, the existing roof could remain untouched, which was a major money saver.") It is clear that freelance writer Kira Obolensky made valuable contributions to the original "The Not So Big House".

This volume and "The Not So Big House" have the same format: 10" x 10" square, with photographs pushing to all four page edges at times. Most photos in the first book are at least 1/4 page in size (25 square inches); about 20% (or over 40 of the 200+) in "Creating the Not So Big House" are under 6 square inches, and in many cases they're just too small to be worthwhile. An example from page 129: "A spacious pantry serves the same function as cupboards" -- but the size of the photo renders this "spacious" pantry only 5/32" across.

Their size apart, the photographs by Grey Crawford are well composed, with excellent contrast and color depth. It's unfortunate that Susanka had to rely on photos from other architects for some projects. "Photo courtesy Jacobson Silverstein Winslow" generally labels the disappointments.

Moving along to the editing: I REALLY miss the first book's use of orientation arrows matching the photos to the plans. With the frequent small size, as noted above, it's often difficult to match the two. Also, the layout editing is weak. The book features numerous oversized box quotes in the margins. These sentences are all in the text anyway, and repeating them just takes away from space that would be MUCH better used for larger photographs. This technique of spotlighting key sentences is an editorial gimmick to get people to read an article as they're flipping through a magazine. In a book rather than a periodical it's purely annoying. Naturally, the original "The Not So Big House" doesn't have this fault; it reserves large margin text for quotes from the likes of Frank Lloyd Wright.

It's gospel that you sell houses at daytime, with all the interior lights turned on. This theme is carried to extreme in "Creating the Not So Big House". Only 5 (out of well over 200) interior photographs are shot without daylight. (The first book had 13 nighttime photos out of a smaller total.) Doesn't Susanka realize that many of us see our houses primarily at night? If she's serious about DESIGNING for the way we really live, how about SHOWING it the way we live?

Finally, there are relatively few new design concepts compared to the first book. In "The Not So Big House" Susanka discussed the value of substantial trim around doors and windows, built-ins, an "away" room, double-duty spaces, varying ceiling heights, acoustical privacy, and at least a dozen other design thoughts that aren't commonly preached to the home-buying public. "Creating the Not So Big House" only adds a smattering of new ideas: a pod of space, themes and variations, spatial layering, and golden mean proportioning.

Now that I've finished with the complaints I'll depart on an upbeat note. Its refreshing breadth of architectural designs adds utility to "Creating the Not So Big House" over the first book's emphasis on Craftsman style. In a book that attempts to teach by illustration it's very helpful to show a variety of forms in the hope that one of them may resonate with the dreams of potential home builders.

I keep buying copies of this book because its a book friends and new acquaintances pick up and fall in love with and I end up saying "Oh take it...let it be my gift"... The fact that it is so popular with all my friend who come from all walks of life tells me that its a book that just about anyone will like and a book that the reader will find something of interest and use in.

Beth

I have been looking through "idea" books for solutions to some of my redecorating problems and came across Ms Susanka's book Creating the Not so Big House in my search on [Amazon.com]. I was hopeful that the book would provide me with some ideas for my living room and kitchen spaces and for my bathroom, but I was somewhat disappointed. Essentially I found nothing new in the book that I had not seen in others or had not already considered myself on my own. Seeing some of my design ideas actually used did give me a more concrete concept of what they would actually look like were I to put them in place, however, which was very useful in itself. I had thought of opening the pass through window between my kitchen and dinning area to increase the sense of spaciousness and had considered columns to support the overlying structure. The illustration and description of just such an arrangement on p. 173 is a case in point. It helped me realize that this plan might well be a good one. Most of the rest of the book just didn't apply to my situation at all.

I bought this book having enjoyed the original Not So Big House, but I found this book to be disappointing - it is very repetitive and doesn't contain any new ideas. All the examples are much in the same style (lots of wood, 1980s style open layouts etc) and the advice is repetitive (lower soffits ...). The look would be very expensive to achieve, and the book doesn't cater for real-life "not so big" circumstances, like how to deal with small blocks of land with neighbouring dwellings close by (e.g. terrace houses). The interior design and finishings depicted are also quite dated, neither classic nor contemporary.

This book is amazing! I bought both books (the not so big house and this one) and they were incredibly valuable in designing my own home. I would recommend reading the first book as a primer of sorts for this one. It introduces the main ideas in building "not so big" and allows the reader to get a feel for what Susanka is trying to achieve. This book allows the reader to see real-life examples of the principles of "not so big".

We started out in a 5000 sq. foot home. We ended up building a 600 square foot home with two bedrooms (and it wasn't because of budget). People are always amazed when we tell them the size of the house. They always guess it to be 1000 sq. feet or more!

I would recommend this book to anyone looking to build a home. It demonstrates rather effectively that less is, in fact, more.

I liked these books when I first read them, about a year ago, but, having read much since, now find them lightweight. These same problems have been encountered and solved in ingenious ways throughout history. Still, it's always nice to read an architect's opinion, although in this case the writing is too cheerful--like something out of a catalog.

Okay, i'm a sucker for this type of book. I mean she suggests that we buy more quality and less quantity. Better houses are built not by making them bigger but by designing them better. Not a novel idea, but one that we constantly forget in the land of bigness.

We will probably be building a new house next year and will be using her books for inspiration. If you are building or thinking of building and are interested in doing the earth justice as well as getting a more liveable house, i would strongly recommend her books as well as "A Pattern Language".

Great photos, great concepts (e.g the "away room"), great designs, though her designs are somewhat expensive.