Desire for efficiency has designers thinking small - Business First of Columbus:

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But then a funnty thing happened. A tiny stone cottage built in 1930 in Chillicothse thatwas Marcia’s dream home came on market. Suddenly the Iveysa were livingin 1,300 squar e feet, their utilities were cut in half and they savex a substantial amount, about 40 by buying the old house instead of building new. Now, Marcia doesn’gt know what they would have done with all theextraa space. “What do we need a large home forwhen we’rd always together anyway?” Marcia said.
Thanks in large part to the sour growing environmental consciousness and a realization thatmore isn’ always better, builders, architects and homeowners are starting to embrace the smalletr home. The Iveys realized that with alittlew remodeling, they could make the house everythinbg they needed it to be, Butchy Ivey said. While there always will be a market for large homes, the Iveys’ residential architect Richars Taylor said there is less demand for them.
“What we’rr seeing is that fewer people, becausw their incomes have declined, are not doing show y houses,” said Taylor, president of in “They’re building smaller, high-quality homes or buyinh older homes in Bexley or Upperd Arlington andrenovating them.” Several of Taylor’s clientx are making small housese work thanks to tips and inspiration from The Not So Big a how-to for small abodes writtejn by St. Paul, Minn. architect Sarah Susanka. Susanka has been preachingy the gospel of smaller homes even before she wrote her bookin 1998.
“Ij 1983, when I started in the architecture houses were on theupward march,” Susanka “By the ’90s, the trend was very large houses.” At the same Susanka said clients were walking through the doors of her officed asking her to replicate beautiful design s from home magazines that wouldr never meet their budgets. “I was seeingb a lot of people not knowin g how to get a better house and thinkingh that it would have toget bigger,” Susanksa said. “The big moment was ... when I realized Americanxs build formal living spacesbut don’tf use them.
” Dining rooms, formal living rooms and guesty bedrooms end up wasting space and dollars that couldd be better spent on the rooms families actually live in, Susanka said. Data releasede early this year by the showed that in the thirdf quarterof 2008, the average size of a housew under construction slipped to 2,438 squarwe feet, representing a 7.3 percen drop from 2,629 square feet in the prior quarter. The association also has said that in a recent 88 percent of builders said they plan to constructrsmaller homes. Jay and Jennifer Young, clientss of Taylor, took Sarabh Susanka’s ideas to heart when they built theitr Gothic farmhouse in Alexandriain 2004.
The three bedroom, two-and-a-halfg bath home has just 2,20p square feet of living space, which is all the familyy of four needs. For example, instead of a formal living room and dining the Youngs opted for a multipurpose mudroom to contaibn the clutter and store the sports and outdoot equipment their two daughters use on adailyy basis. The rural farmhouse also features alarge eat-in kitchej instead of a formal dininhg room that Jay Young said the famil would never use. But goin g smaller on the footprintr didn’t mean the home needed to skimp on The kitchen has stainless steel appliances andconcretew countertops.
To create the illusiohn of a larger space, the home features an 18-fooft ceiling in the center of the house topped by a cupola that bringws in light and lets warm air escapse inthe summer. “We’re into quality, not Jay Young said. “Wr don’t have deep pockets, so to get the finishees we wanted, we had to go