Sharing a bathroom with my kids · Nov 12, 10:15 AM
Last year before my daughter went off to college, we were standing by the sink brushing our teeth. I asked her if she ever felt deprived not living in a big house like those of some of my clients—with a big master bath and individual baths for each child—where she didn’t have to fight for a sink. I was surprised to hear her say no. We talked about it and agreed that, in fact, our nightly ritual was the best of all worlds; in her words, it was like camping without having to go anywhere.
People need closeness. Why else do we congregate in the kitchen at parties? Why else do we always choose the tiny, packed restaurant over the big empty one? We are social creatures and we want to be close.
There is no need in re-stating what has already been so eloquently written by Sarah Susanka in her Not So Big House books. What I want to talk about is what living in smaller spaces does for families. When our children were young we lived in a tiny bungalow, full of light. There were four little rooms downstairs and an attic in which an average adult could only stand at the very middle under the peak, but which when refinished, made an ideal environment for our two oldest toddlers. You could speak to anyone anywhere in that house without ever raising your voice. That, unfortunately, created a problem in our next house, in which everyone continued to assume they could address anyone, anywhere without leaving where they were, if they just raised their voice a little! But there was a family closeness bred in that place which has always remained. While today our house is larger, it is in those nexuses such as the bathroom shared by my wife and I with two of our children, or the tiny breakfast room where we gather each morning and evening to eat that we really interact and indeed, are socialized.
Today we seem, more and more, to build big houses, not for ourselves, but for our stuff. There is something wrong with that. When clients come to me with pictures of houses and places they like, so often they are of little cottages, rooms with lots of windows, and cozy spaces. They tell me they want that feeling—- only bigger. But you can’t GET that in “bigger”. Light doesn’t penetrate very far in a big house; big spaces aren’t cozy; and 4,000 square foot houses don’t feel cottagey.
Most of us have fond memories of a first apartment or first house, but can’t imagine living in a place so small again. I suspect part of that nostalgia has to do with the freedom that came with not being burdened by all the stuff that now fills our lives. I know that is the case for me. The first place my wife and I shared was a tiny little two-room flat in New Haven, with a closet for a kitchen. All of our stuff fit into that tiny little place. I built some neat shelving that housed all of our special things, and we felt like we were living in luxury. We WERE living in luxury—the luxury of not being burdened by a lot of Accumulated Stuff.
— David Peabody
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