Cramped for Space? Try the Taj Mahal

I was just looking through the Washington Post's front page, and they linked to this article about the new houses people are building.

Mansions for Commoners.

While I would like a little more space than my 850 feet for two people, for one its plenty. And if the second person isn't a roommate, it works perfectly well. Well, aside from the small kitchen, but, it doesn't need to be all that large.

Granted, I prefer the city life to being way out in the 'burbs. That's me. But, even if it was right in the city, what do you do with 25,000 square feet of housing space? Not that long ago, that amount of space meant that you were extremely rich & had to entertain; you had servants. Now its "everyone" except that then you have to do all the labor parts yourself. One person said that it took an entire weekend to clean the house. Yes, that's how I want to spend my weekends: cleaning.

Many in my family have "larger" homes. They are nice homes. In the 3-4K square foot range (I think). I don't like them. They are too big for me. On the other hand, seeing a family of 4 living in a 1 bedroom apartment on the Upper East Side is a bit too cramped. I figure for my comfort realm, I need 500-750 sq ft per adult, and 250 sq ft per kid, so even a large family, with 3-4 kids would seem about right in a 2000-2500 sq foot house.

I grew up in a, to me, average pre-war house. 3 BR, 1.5 BA, half semi-finished basement, decent kitchen, living room, and dining room. None of my friends had anything substantially larger. Maybe my parents felt cramped. I didn't, for all 15 years I lived there. The house we moved to after that always seemed a bit too large. 4BR, 2.5 BA, unfinished basement, LR, DR, kitchen, den, family room. What happened was that we had rooms we didn't use. In particular, the living room.

I think what's going on is that as we get into bigger houses, we don't LIVE in more of them, we just COLLECT stuff in more of them.