By Katherine Salant
Are you the type who likes a "what you see is what you get" kind of house? Or do you prefer the "endless surprises" type? And what's the difference?
The "what you see is what you get" house has a straightforward plan that is clear from the moment you open the front door. The layout is so familiar that you know it like the back of your hand--for example, the classic center hall colonial which has the dining and living rooms to either side of the front hall. Or, the house has a contemporary plan with few walls, so that the location of various functions like the kitchen and family room is immediately apparent.
By contrast, the "endless surprises" house unfolds as you walk through it. When you enter, you're not sure where the kitchen is, but pulled ahead by sunlight streaming in through strategically placed windows you soon find it. The house feels bigger than its square footage implies because you can see through the space you're standing in to the one beyond it. And, at every turn you encounter unusual details.
If the latter sounds intriguing, check out a house designed by Sarah Susanka, architect and author of the best selling "The Not So Big House," and several other books. Her demonstration house at last month's International Builder's Show in Orlando, Fla., is full of Susanka signatures, and it is easy to see why she has such a wide following.
You know the Orlando house is unusual, the moment you spot it in the distance. The multitiered, light green metal roof that is reminiscent of Frank Lloyd Wright and the bright red windows that jump out from the grey siding are not a common sight in any new home subdivision in America.
As you approach the front door, more details emerge, some of them unusual for Florida. Originally designed for a Minnesota couple, the house has a vestibule, a small chamber between the front door and the front hall to prevent cold drafts from coming into the heated living space every time the front door is opened. Most vestibules are modest, blink-and-you-missed-it spaces, but this one serves as a transitional "receiving" area filled with eye-catching Craftsman-styled details that hint at what lies ahead.
The maple floor has an inlaid geometric pattern of darker cherry. To the left is a stained glass window with wood sashes that are surrounded by darker wood trim. The lintel above a second window incorporates sea-green tiles. Below a strip of wood that runs around the vestibule just above the windows and doors, the walls are an earthen brown; above the strip the walls and ceiling are white. The solid cherry door that opens into the living areas has panels made of a darker red Brazilian ipe. You begin to think that you could live in this house a year and still discover details you hadn't noticed before.
Once inside the house proper, the light from the windows pulls you in several directions. Straight ahead are the stairs; to the right is the dining room partially visible behind a wooden lattice and a hallway leading to a private "get away room" that can be a home office; to the left a kitchen and a cozy "living area" with a breakfast nook tucked into one corner. Most people would probably call this an eat-in kitchen/family room, but with all the unusual detailing it doesn't look like any they might have seen before. One of the most unusual elements: the pass-through from the kitchen to the dining room. Ordinarily it's a small opening through which diners can see hands passing items back and forth. Here it's an enormous four by 6-foot opening which allows anyone in the kitchen to fully participate in the dining-table discussion.
With such engaging details and plenty of natural light streaming through the windows, it takes a while to realize that none of these rooms are very large. The space feels generous because of the way that Susanka has organized it. Unlike most eat-in kitchen/family rooms, which share a single rectangular space that can be taken in with a single glance, this one is joined to the dining area to make an L-shaped configuration. You can't see everything at once. To take it all in, you have to move through the space. From any one point you sense that there is more "just around the corner" and you never feel hemmed in.
Susanka also gets a lot of mileage by varying the ceiling height. It's higher in the center of most rooms, which makes them feel spacious, but low around the edge, providing a cozy-feeling perimeter that shelter the breakfast nook in the kitchen and window seats in several other rooms.
These lowered ceilings around the edges, known as soffits, have a practical function: they conceal the ductwork for the heating and cooling system. Ordinarily in Florida and many other places, the usual spot for the ducts is an unfinished attic space between the ceiling and the roof, but in this location, a significant amount of heat and cold is lost to the great outdoors. By placing the ducts within rooms, as was done here, the heat and cold stay within the house.
Susanka has long focused on energy efficiency, and this unusual ductwork is only one of many energy saving features in the house. Overall, the energy efficiency is about fifty percent higher than you would find in a house of similar size built to Orlando's energy code standard. This translates into projected heating and cooling costs that are astoundingly low-only $187 a year!
Some of these energy savers, such as the photovoltaic panels on the roof that convert solar energy into electricity, are pricey and uncommon in most places including Florida. But others are easily done on a conventionally built house, said Subrato Chrandra, a program director with the Florida Solar Energy Center, who collaborated on the show house. In Florida, simply choosing a light color for the exterior walls and roof and adding a roof overhang substantially reduces the amount of heat coming into the house. Because half of the heat gain in a house in Florida comes in through the windows, the other essential is a good window with a low emissivity (low e) glass and a low solar heat gain coefficient (SHGC), and nearly all window manufacturers now make them. Though Florida's climate is extreme, Chandra said these features would benefit homeowners across the southern tier of the US and farther north in more temperate areas with hot summers.
Would Susanka's house suit every household? With only 2,600 square feet and three bedrooms, some families might find it cramped. But for most households, the only drawback to this otherwise charming house is the lack of storage, the number one gripe of new home buyers today. To live in this "Not So Big House," you would have to own not so much stuff. There are built-in shelves in nearly every room for books and mementoes, but as is common in Florida, there is no basement or attic for bigger things. Most likely these homeowners will resort to the usual Florida-style solution: using one bay of the two-car garage for storage and parking the second car outside.
The Not So Big house is also not less expensive. As Susanka herself says, the idea is not spending less, it's spending differently. Instead of building a 3,000- to 4,000-square-foot house with four or five bedrooms, formal living and dining rooms for special occasions and an eat-in kitchen family room, she advocates a smaller one with fewer rooms that are used everyday and embellishing them with great details that enhance your life. It's a compelling argument, especially when you see the kind of house she advocates.
The sale price of this house is expected to be $1.2 million, but it's a demonstration house that's full of unusual features and high-end materials. A more accurate measure of her approach, Susanka said, is the Minnesota original, which was built in 1999 for $540,000 and would cost about $700,000 to $750,000 in today's market.
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