[.ca] Creating the Not So Big House: Insights and Ideas for ... (ISBN 1561586056)

From Amazon.com:
Sarah Susanka has a not-so-insignificant idea in Creating the Not So Big House. She contrasts the glamorous, glossy-photo house plans of vaulted ceilings and palatial living rooms with the livable, day-to-day pleasure of cozy window seats and comfortable breakfast nooks, and her conclusion is resonating with families across the country: bigger but shoddier isn't better than smaller and well made. Descriptors like "spacious" and "expansive" fill the real-estate promos, but Susanka seeks the elusive yet affordable qualities that turn a house into a home. And she provides more than mere ideals around which to rally. She selected 25 house designs, from a southwestern adobe to a Minnesota farmhouse to a New York apartment to a Rhode Island summer cottage, and she profiles each home in great and well-illustrated detail. Her ideas for interior as well as exterior views, airy stairways, diagonal views, and framed openings translate well in an array of different houses appropriate to childless couples and large families, as well as hot climes in Texas and cooler regions in Vermont. There are traditional designs to fit in with Massachusetts styling and contemporary designs to adapt to California cliffs, and they range from country spaces to suburban homes to city apartments. Susanka selected house plans that are available for sale, because her purpose is to make affordable quality housing accessible to the general public, but they're also presented as catalysts for your own designs, because the house that worked for one person might inspire the plan that would work best for you. Whether you're in the market for a new house, want pragmatic renovation ideas, or are interested in the concept of space-saving abodes from a city-planning, philosophical perspective, Susanka's book is an eye-opener and a mind-expander, providing conceptual and practical tools to assist you in planning your own livable home. --Stephanie Gold

An OK book, but WAY below the par of "The Not So Big House":
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.

Nice pictures, but the attitude is always the focus:
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. :)

Greatest House book, awesome stuff.:
This is packed with so many great ideas and principles. It'll change everything you thing you want in a house. A must read.

Just didn't apply to my situation at all.:
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 \oAmazon.com\c. 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.

Fun and useful ideas:
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