Small Space Utilization
American society has grown accustomed to the idea that “more space = better”. Think about the preeminent example of a billionaire’s vacation house (or often, houses). It's fun to look at beautiful images of sprawling seaside mansions with tons of guest rooms, pools, and other amenities in their pristine settings. But really, these are basically boutique hotels that only get utilized by a single family for a few weeks out of the year and otherwise sit unused and empty. It’s sad that as a society we have given up access to these amazing spaces just so a tiny group of individuals don’t have to share them with anyone else, regardless of their wealth or station.
The average home size over the last few decades has ballooned from 1,200 sqft to over 2,500. And the reality is that this increase in size has been coupled with a decrease in quality of construction and detail. For homeowners, more space often equates in the long run to more expense—heating and cooling, more walls and floors and roofs to maintain, more furniture and other expenses related to its upkeep.
We often attribute this growth in space to needs and wants related to tasks we’d like to accomplish within our homes. The easy mental leap in needing your home to accommodate a new task is to add space for it. But if we created a heat map of our utilization of space in our homes at any given time of day, we are typically only using a small percentage of it at any given time while the rest of it sits empty. What we need in order to accomplish a new task is not necessarily additional dedicated space, but convenient access to the tools needed to accomplish the task. Rather than new space and the exorbitant price of an addition, it's always better to first look at underutilized space within the home that could easily accommodate a new task through creative design solutions.
A good example of how this “scope creep” happens is to look at the home office. The pandemic led to an unprecedented increase in people who work from home now or at least work under a hybrid system where some of their days are spent there. Social media bombards you with beautiful images of dedicated home offices making people think they need another room in their home to accommodate this lifestyle change. It seems like an ideal solution, and a space you use for upwards of 8 hours a day feels like a vital enough need for a dedicated room.
There is nothing wrong with creating a dedicated home office out of a never-used room like a basement, front parlor or extra living room, or even a dining room that gets used for 2 holidays a year if at all. But the reality is that most people either don’t have or at least don’t feel like they have a space they can sacrifice for a new task. Without sacrificing the current use, thinking about when you need workspace can make any of these rooms dual-use and add to the mix additional spaces that could easily accommodate new additional tasks. The guest room/office combo is a typical example, but consider also a primary bedroom, or kids playroom, or even a primary family room barring nothing else.
The key to making dual-use spaces work is good space utilization. A guest room closet can be converted to a workspace without disrupting the use for guests (and don’t tell me you need all the stuff you cram and forget about in there, you know you don’t). And you can even design in it a way that keeps closet doors or a curtain that can close off the clutter when it needs to be used by guests. Or a Murphy bed can flip the script and make what looks like a dedicated office easily convertible to a comfortable guest room. Similarly clever but classic solutions like a secretary desk can be added to almost any room to create a functional workspace with the ability to still close off and visually disguise it when the space is needed for other tasks.
Another design element typical of older historic homes that has fallen by the wayside in modern development is the use of built-in millwork and clever cabinetry. Unfortunately, this is another quality construction element that has been replaced with “more space = better” because we tend to value real estate in cost per square foot rather than cost per functionality. Millwork can certainly be a significant expense, but it pales in comparison to the cost of an addition or new home. When you look at the design of highly functional tiny spaces like boats and RVs, the millwork is where they really create a plethora of flexible room use through clever design. Open, closed, pull-out and fold-out storage can turn what was one room use into many without leaving cluttered tools and elements scattered around the space.
When we break free of the “more space = better” mentality and embrace ideas about minimal living and efficient space utilization, the idea of living in a smaller footprint becomes a lot less scary as a concept. It’s one of the conceptual drivers we embrace in our design philosophy at MicroLife that helps us build small without making spaces that feel small. Fitting creative, intuitive function into a small space helps us create better density, which helps catalyze more attainable home prices without feeling like a sacrifice is being made in the process.
