Marni: How has the American house changed since your first book came out? This week, I took the pleasure of speaking with Susanka again to ask what she thought had changed since she turned a critical light on the bigger-is-better building mentality. “It means not as big as you thought you needed, and designed and built to suit the way you live.” “Not so big doesn't necessarily mean small,” Susanka said. Her message in a nutshell: Bigger is not better. In fact, many in the industry credit Susanka, whose own home is in North Carolina, with having the single most profound influence on the American home in the past 20 years. There is nothing not so big about her impact. “I thought part of the population will love this, but it will be a small-scale footnote to the housing industry.”īoy, was she wrong. “I could not have imagined how the mainstream marketplace would embrace my ideas,” said Susanka, when she and I caught up on the phone last week. Nine books later, with more than 1.5 million books sold, no one is more surprised by this than the author herself. By May, 1999, “The Not So Big House” was already in its seventh printing, her work was on the cover of Life Magazine, and, as we spoke, she was on her way to appear on Oprah. Seven months earlier, in October, 1998, Sarah Susanka’s first book, “The Not So Big House” (Taunton Press), hit store shelves. Sixteen years ago this month, while covering real estate for the Los Angeles Times, I interviewed a little-known architect on the verge of becoming a household name.
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