Quantity-Quality-Cost, Which do you choose?

December 28th, 2009 by Morgan Andenas

Note: Morgan Andenas is back with us from Montana State during her winter break. Many of you will remember her blog posts from this summer when she focused on architectural and design issues. Welcome back Morgan.

As an architecture student, we study how the character of a place helps to define and shape the homes, buildings, and businesses surrounding it. The way the land is formed, whether it is mountains, prairies or woodlands, influences the shapes of buildings. In the same way, the people’s attitudes about themselves and about a place influence the way buildings are designed.

A friend asked me to design a forever-home for her and her husband on his family’s ranch, one in which they will live, well, forever. They wanted a house at or under 2200sq. feet with two bedrooms, one maybe two bathrooms, a lofted office, and enough room for a 14 foot dining table and lots of space for entertaining his large family. I thought to myself, no problem, that’s easy enough. That was before I tried to design it. The bedrooms and living room ended up being too big and looked uncomfortable, even though they were average sized rooms.

That’s when I realized “average” size applied to large suburban lifeless McMansions. This type of house is what Sarah Susanka writes against in her book, The Not So Big House by Sarah Susanka (Taunton Press, 2001). She describes the early 2000s housing boom as,

So many houses, so big with so little soul. Our suburbs are filled with houses that are bigger than ever. But are bigger houses really better? Are the dreams that build them bigger or is it simply that there seems to be no alternative? Americans are searching for homes in unprecedented numbers. Yet when we look, the only tools we seem to have are those we find in the real estate listings. But a house is more that square footage and the number of beds and baths. In one of the wealthiest societies ever, many people are deeply dissatisfied with their most expensive purchase. ”

Quality vs. Quantity

I started reading her book and it all became clear. It wasn’t about making a McMansion big enough to house 25 people, it was about providing a home for the two people living there, and an opportunity to host the other 23 several times a year for parties. It was about deciding that when cost is a set number, quality and quantity are your two variables. You can choose to have a higher quality house with a smaller footprint that is more responsive to your needs, or you can choose to have more square footage with less quality and spaces that are more generic. For this couple, it was about quality.

When I start thinking about my forever-home, I want it to be in a rural setting where people are not out to impress, but to welcome. In both my home and my future children’s hometown, I want it to be a place that will feel cozy, welcoming and comfortable. I don’t want it feel like a typical McMansion: cold, extra large and built to impress its occupants and visitors.

Susanka says that she is not out to sell everyone a small house, and I’m not out to get everyone to live in a small town. But, I do want to illustrate that not everyone is happy in that comfortless house or that impersonal city. Just because you can afford to buy and maintain that massive house, does not mean you are happy. What does make me happy is attention to detail and feeling like I belong to something bigger than myself. For me, a small town does just that. For me, living in a rural community gives me the best ratio of the Quantity-Quality-Cost triangle. In this specific triangle, cost and quantity may be lower, but the quality is worth the quantity sacrifice.