Behind the Curtain: What the size of your house says about you

The Royals
Everybody Knows
Published in
6 min readApr 2, 2019

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Heleen Hidskes takes a look at what the shift towards downsizing says about us. Because when space is at a premium, how we use it is a proxy for our priorities.

Australia is the sixth largest country in the world. It’s a massive island that can fit the whole of Europe and the UK in its surface area, but our population is only 3% of theirs. That means there’s a lot of empty space for not that many people. So it’s not surprising that the Australian dream of owning a quarter acre block of land — with a three-ish bedroom house, enough space to entertain family and friends and swing a pet or two — still exists for many of us.

According to a 2016 Commbank report, our houses are among the largest in the world. But we’re not taking up that space just because we can. There’s a status that comes with spreading your arms, looking out over the back deck and saying: “this is all mine, I’ve made it.”

Bigger is not always better
With an increasing cost of living (Australia is the third least-affordable housing market in the world), a growth in single-occupant households, a shifting focus from possessions to experiences, and a desire to be more friendly to our planet, younger generations are looking critically at our long-held property obsession.

And there are valid reasons for doing so. Research conducted by US university UCLA showed that the average family only uses 40% of their homes. The heat map below shows how little of our homes we may actually use. We like to hang out in communal kitchen areas and family rooms, and barely spend any time in more formal entertaining areas — where our “stuff” merely collects dust. But we completely furnish, clean, heat and cool the entirety of our houses. It all adds up to a massive waste of space, energy and money.

Image from “Life at Home in the Twenty-first Century: 32 Families Open their Doors” by UCLA.

Three ways to rethink space

Build a tiny house in your parents’ backyard
Your own place minus the lifelong mortgage. Designed for minimal power bills, everything you need within reach, limited clutter and an insignificant impact on the environment. Sounds pretty good, right? These are just some of the benefits of a tiny house.

This trend started in the US, and was born out of a desire for living off-the-grid, and in-sync with nature. More and more people around the world are using this micro-housing trend to optimise existing space within inner-cities that are already connected to infrastructure and community services. Like that patch of unused grass in your parents’ backyard. Another upside? When the smothering love of your parents starts giving you cabin fever, you can move the house to another spot.

But what if you already own your own place? What if tiny is too small for the space you sometimes need, even if it’s away from your loved ones?

Credit: The tiny house company, Australia.

Go up instead of out

Tiny houses aren’t the only solution for optimising our limited space. Former Apple and Tesla engineer Sankarshan Murthy needed more room while he and his wife were expecting, but didn’t have the funds to move out of their San Francisco apartment. To create space for his growing family, he started to rethink the existing floor plan.

“People always look at their square footage horizontally, but there is so much unused space when you look at it from a different angle; vertically,” he told attendees of the 2019 SXSW festival in Austin, Texas.

This brainwave led to the birth of Bumblebee Spaces, a new tech start-up that uses ceiling space for storage and hides away furniture that’s not in use. This modular furniture system can turn a lounge into a bedroom in seconds. The artificially-intelligent storage units can also scan each of your possessions, track their locations, and anticipate what you’ll need to bring out.

“It knows where you’ve stored all your stuff. If you’re on the way out, your car keys and shoes come down. If it’s going to be raining, your umbrella presents itself,” Murthy told architecture and interior design magazine Dezeen.

Keen to keep things minimal? The system can also let you know if you haven’t accessed a storage unit for a while, so you can make a call on if you’ll keep or ditch the unused items inside.

Credit: Bumblebee Spaces

Rethinking apartment living

The opposite of spreading out, building a McMansion and living the Australian Dream is buying an apartment in a CBD high-rise. But according to Jeremy McLeod, founder of Breathe Architecture, neither scenario is ecologically-sustainable, neither solves the housing affordability crisis, and both contribute to modern urban isolation.

In response, McLeod came up with a solution that sits somewhere in the middle of these two extremes: the Nightingale housing model. He calls it a “triple-bottom-line housing model” — ecologically-sustainable, community-building and affordable.

When Breathe Architecture started using the model in 2007 — designing The Commons in Brunswick, Melbourne — it meant questioning the entire notion of how an apartment should look, going through a process of reductive design, and deciding what people really need and want from an urban home.

The result was the first apartment building in Australia without a car park, and with bike parks instead. Smart design also allowed the removal of unnecessary second bathrooms, air conditioning, plaster ceilings, ceramic tiles and chrome plating. This not only made the building carbon neutral, it reduced the cost by $62k per apartment.

McLeod took inspiration from walkable European cities like Amsterdam, Barcelona and Berlin. In these places, people prefer to live close to a city centre where there’s a greater community feel and less of a focus on driving. Nightingale medium-rise apartment buildings are built in areas that already feature amenities like public transport, kindergartens, schools and markets. Areas where workplaces, friends and family are nearby.

Additionally, Nightingale buildings are limited to 40 apartments, and are designed in a way that instigates interaction between residents — using elements like communal areas in the entryway and on the rooftop, and a downstairs cafe.

Credit: Nightingale 1, Brunswick, Victoria. Photo credits: Archinect.

The decadence of our era has always been about progress. Growth often seems to be the only metric we care about. But our take on progress has forced a shift away from having “more”. More money, more space, more stuff. There’s a limit to our natural resources. But there’s also a limit to us being able to cope with all our possessions. They can stress us out and doesn’t make us happier human beings. We’ve had to start deciding what we want and what we need from our homes, instead of letting a real estate agent decide for us.

Maybe we should progress not by focussing on getting bigger, but by trying to be better. For ourselves, for our planet and for the people around us. Let’s ditch property pride that has the sole purpose of showing our friends that we’re better off. Let’s find status in not having to pay a mortgage for most of our lives, and by being able to get out of the house and do things that make life more interesting.

Find pride in having multipurpose rooms in your house — rooms that can function as a home office as well as a guest bedroom when the in-laws visit. Be chuffed about not having a carpark because you can use the car share service outside. And find status in sharing a front door with your neighbours and knowing their names.

Next time you think about your house’s worth, assess the value by the quality of life it gives you and those around you, instead of the number of zeros that follow the dollar sign.

- Heleen Hidskes

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