North Carolina & The Not So Big House
27 years after publishing, Sarah Susanka's book is as relevant as ever
The Not So Big House will be featured at the CITYBUILDER BOOK CLUB event at Press Coffee and Crepes in Raleigh, on Wednesday, April 23, 12 Noon. Come join the community.
Sarah Susanka’s The Not So Big House, first published in 1998, started a quiet revolution.
It challenged the “bigger is better” ethos of American homebuilding, offering a long-overdue alternative: smaller, high-quality homes that prioritize comfort, beauty, and functionality and meaning over sheer square footage.
The message resonated. The book sold nearly a quarter-million copies in its first year and launched a nationwide movement that influenced homeowners, architects, and builders alike.
I had the good fortune to meet Sarah when I was starting out as a builder. She had recently moved to Raleigh from Minnesota, and a mutual friend introduced us knowing that we both had ambitious ideas for housing and shared a frustration with the status quo. I have lost touch with her over the years, but her work—obsessing over how architecture affects the human spirit—has always stuck with me.
Sarah’s thesis is elegant in its simplicity. I couldn't locate this exact quote, but the following statement is the principle I remember most from my engagement with her:
Instead of building a 3,000sf house for $150/sf, build a 1,500sf house for $300/sf, and you’ll live better, be more inspired, and be happier.
When I ran Trinity Design Build, we conveyed this value set to clients all the time. In fact, for years we would give clients Sarah’s books and say, “Read this. This is what we are about.”
For me, The Not So Big House was the first real shot in the war against what I’ve come to call data supremacy. The book arrived just as the internet was hitting its first boom. The general vibe was that technology could (and would) solve everything—it would boost productivity, streamline our lives, make us more joyful (all with less effort, of course). The unspoken promise was that anything important could be measured and optimized: joy, purpose, motivation, love. Human existence was being reduced to inputs and outputs, which was exhausting.
The housing bubble that followed only made the problem worse. In the pre-bust run-up, the only things that seemed to matter were the quantifiables: how many bedrooms and bathrooms? What was the square footage and the comparable sales?
Markets were frothy. Meanwhile, architectural quality fell off a cliff.
Sarah’s book flipped that script.
She made the radical argument that quality should always come before quantity. And, judging by her sales, people agreed. Her book held up a mirror to the things that really matter in a home: human-scaled design, flexible spaces, thoughtful detail, and a home that reflects who you are, not who you’re trying to impress.
“Beauty and soul don’t come from size,” she wrote, “but from the details that bring a house to life.”
Years before McMansion Hell popularized the critique of bloated, inauthentic homes, Susanka was already pushing back on that culture. She gave people permission to want something else. To want something better.
That’s why the book still matters. It was a pièce de résistance against the financial, technological, and algorithmic obsessions of the day.
For Gen Y and Z, who now find themselves in another moment of existential housing crisis, also engulfed by burgeoning technologies, The Not So Big House message is more urgent than ever.
You can see the younger generation’s frustration, which is palpable. Our housing is bland and machine-printed. Our furniture is the same. Our clothes? Same. Food? Same. Little is hand-crafted or real. Life feels overwhelmingly inauthentic. At a certain point, what is left that is identifiably us?
This is why we should care about design. We should use it as a tool of identity and place. Prairie, Southern Traditional, Farmhouse, Low Country—these aren’t just architectural styles. They’re expressions of who we are and where we’re from.
As North Carolina densifies, there will be a burgeoning demand for smaller spaces—some by choice, some by need. However, as the younger generations shift lifestyles from their suburban upbringings, the need for smaller and more meaningful places appears to be endless.
“Live in a house that expresses who you are,” Susanka urged, “not who you think you should be.”
That’s the deeper call embedded in The Not So Big House—a movement to make homes that matter, and places that matter. And that work is hard. It pushes against a planning, political, and lending machine designed to replicate yesterday’s mediocrity day after day.
But the light is still there—still beaming out from the pages of that little book, now almost 30 years old, with one groundbreaking idea:
Build better, not bigger.
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Sarah Susanka is the best-selling author of nine books, including The Not So Big House, Home By Design, and The Not So Big Life, which collectively have sold well over a million copies. Her books provide the language and tools for homeowners to bring their own dreams of home to life.
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I found this book in the donation bin in my condo building just two days ago! Great find, I tell you