RDH - What Would Our Homes Be Like If We Weren’t Forced to Compromise?

What Would Our Homes Be Like If We Weren’t Forced to Compromise?

February 16, 2007

Most homes are too small, concludes a new survey conducted earlier this morning. The results of the survey, in the form of more or less detailed answers to a handful of questions submitted in response to a single survey, would seem to come up against recent concerns voiced by environmentalists about the impact of new homes—in particular, calls for limiting "footprint" size in much the same way one would switch off unneeded lights or trade the family truck for a sedan.

But let's skip analysis and move directly to a presentation of the completed survey itself.

Home Size Questionnaire (Presented in Its Entirety [Excepting the Small Print])

"But isn't the cost of an enormous estate out of the question, especially for you?" It doesn't have to be. All the land and wealth is available right now—many, many times over. It's just that it's in other hands. Other hands than my own, that is.

Q. How many rooms, per family member, does your current home have?

A. Including pets but excluding bathrooms, hallways, and closets, there are 1.5 rooms for each member of our family. But it might be more fair to say 1.3, because our basement is almost uninhabitable.

Q. Would you say that your current home is large enough, and if not, how many times larger would it have to be to meet the needs of you and your family? (If your answer to the first part of this question was yes, skip the rest of the survey and move on to whatever it was you were doing before you were interrupted.)

A. Our current home is too small. To meet our needs, it would have to be in the neighborhood of five to ten times as large or more, depending on whether, for example, you'd count the addition of an indoor-outdoor pool when calculating the size of the theoretical larger home.

Q. Discuss at length your additional requirements—i.e., the rooms, staircases, balconies, additional yard space, etc. that you would add to your home if you could.

A. First, I'd like to say that I'm impressed with this survey for mentioning staircases, which are too often overlooked when it comes to home construction and improvement. In fact, I'd like two or three additional staircases, for starters. It would be fun to be able to go and hang out in some remote stairwell in your own home, or to travel from one floor to another in more ways than just the usual one. Stairs are the gateway to new worlds. And with the perfection of mobile telephony, it's no longer a matter of living out your life in quiet desperation in the manner of past generations of the British upper classes: you'd be free to choose whether or not to cut yourself off from the rest of the household. . . . I'd also like many more rooms—of all kinds. I'm fully aware that there are houses out there with libraries and sitting rooms. Why, I've often wondered, were such great ideas not applied to more houses? . . . Also, there should be several rooms with padded walls and bars on the windows designated as children's playrooms. And there should also be several rooms that are entirely in the interior of the household, for those times when it is desirable to shut out the outside world entirely. There should of course be one bathroom for every bedroom and at least one in the basement, and most of these should be large enough to accommodate a huge tub; there should be, in addition to these, at least two half-baths on each floor. The basement should be finished and carpeted, and it should include the obligatory pool table and other instruments of amusement. On the exterior of the house, there should be plenty of balconies on every floor (in what would be, ideally, a four- or five-story house), some of them enclosed, for year-round views. A separate room off the rear of the house should include a swimming pool, large enough to accommodate the execution of laps. This room should feature a retractable roof and glass walls. There should be a small (e.g., thousand-square-foot) detached cottage suitable for use by family members who may require such a space for their work; it should include a loft with a bed and have adequate light, heat, and ventilation. The lot on which the house is placed should comprise a minimum of sixteen acres, with several ideal spots for a picnic.

Q. Would the environmental impact of your prospective home play a role in any of your decisions about its size?

A. Not really. It's not all my fault that other people have used up so much fuel, so quickly, on so many marginally productive enterprises (think of the environmental impact of the space industry, for example: the return on that investment—aside, perhaps, from the magic of satellites—is that now we know for sure that even if there was anything interesting in space, we'd never get to interact with it in any meaningful way, or, to take another example, try to wrap your mind around the practice of flying middle-level managers around the country well into the era of long-distance telecommuting). . . . As for myself, I drive a car, it is true, but not all that often, and if I buy individually packaged toothpaste and run through a lot of bar soap, I'm otherwise pretty low maintenance. I'm only one person, and I won't be here forever. And to come back to the idea of having a huge house, I'm only making the point that it would be nice to have such a thing, which isn't so weird when you think that entire religions have been founded in order to promise some better place. Finally, this is just a survey, and people tend to answer in self-interested ways on surveys. I could probably get by just fine with a lot less house than I am willing to admit.

Q. Have you ever lived in a home that was large enough to meet all of your needs?

A. Yes. The small studio apartment that I rented before moving into my current home was perfect. The television—which shared a windowless wall with an array of audiovisual components—could be seen from the easy chair or the bed and also from the kitchen (but not from inside the bathroom, from where, however, music from the stereo could be heard with almost no loss of clarity or depth, even in the bathtub, which featured a wide shelf on which books and other things could be kept). There, the living was easy and entertaining was a snap. But that was in a big city, and it was just me living there.

Q. In your opinion, could there be such a thing as a home that was too big?

A. Of course. No family of under twenty should need anything more than fifteen or twenty-thousand square feet of indoor space, nor more than a thousand acres of land.