A Home Is Like A TomatoA home is like a tomato. When seeking one out, you just can’t go for size, you’ve got to go for taste. There is not much that excites me as the topic of green homes does. I mean green like quality, endurance, longevity, and functionality. If something does not do its job well, it will not be used for long. A home that is not comfortable, useful, and affordable is a home in the landfill. Quite possibly the only topic that could get me going more than the topic of green homes is the topic of America embracing a more thorough definition of what a green home actually is. For a home with solar panels, geothermal heat, FSC certified wood and no-VOC furniture is not green if it has 8,000 square feet of living space for two people and a dog. And a cat. And four children. It is just too big to be considered green due to the exorbitant rate of consumption of materials during construction and energy throughout its lifespan.
Getting back to me being excited, this is why I flipped over the recent article in Trim Tab, a new quarterly e-magazine that highlights green building trends published by the Cascadia Region Green Building Council. The article talks about Sarah Susanka’s book series, from which one of my favorite books comes; The Not So Big House: A Blueprint For the Way We Really Live. If you are interested in these two things, you will thoroughly enjoy this read:
1) how the design of your home effects your health and well-being
2) how the size of your home effects your health, well-being, and wallet
It conceptualizes how “The American Dream Home” has transformed over the last several decades and reveals blunt truths about McMansions, over-sized, empty boxes that are built using cheap materials and are poorly designed. In other words, a large investment that does not give a fraction of the satisfaction or longevity you expect of it and, to top it off, grossly increases your carbon footprint and energy bills. Not So Big gives solutions to many of the obstacles we encounter in the quest for a dream home, like how to get good design on a budget and how to figure out what size home works for you. It also plunges into detail about how subtle design moves are the ones that create the most treasured nuances in a home and how you can achieve them with very little space.
Trim Tab’s article gives so many great pieces of information that make your Green Home IQ sky-rocket. Not only does it steer you towards one of the most useful books regarding home design, it sums up how the issue of wanting ‘too much house’ has become grossly out of control and unnecessary. It gives statistics that show the trend in increasing square footage in single family homes and underlines the need for quality design and materials to create homes that are comfortable and long-lasting and work with our lifestyles without energy-gorging. The idea is to build smaller and smarter. It’s kind of like going with that organic, medium sized farm-stand tomato instead of the colossal, wan, peaked hybrid that was grown using chemical fertilizers and contains one tenth of the vitamins and flavor of the former.
You can find the article here in Trim Tab. It is free.
photo source: http://www.worth1000.com/emailthis.asp?entry=251912
This post was submitted by ThinkDwell. Visit Our Blog.
Bookmark/Search this post with:
economics of home size
"Dennis" posted a good response to this post on www.thinkdwell.com/blog. He suggests that "The economics of a modest home on an expensive lot don’t work." And that now may be a good time to dicuss "limitations on the mortgage deduction, as an economic motivator to build smaller more efficient homes..."
great post
that's a great post Nick, and an excellent article. I really like the format of the zmags site too. I've come to realize that even setting eco-concerns aside, I don't think I like big houses! We only use a certain amount of space. Beyond that it makes the house feel less intimate and comfortable in my view. - maxmsf
re: great post
Thank you. I could not agree more! Homes should not produce an echo. Studies have actually shown that a person's sense of security is directly relative to the size of space and amount of glass in the immediate building envelope. It stems from our primitive instincts to seek shelter from danger- a place to hide. I just thought that bit of information was interesting. Maybe someone else will, too. :)
Suzy