The Square Footage Trap: Why Bigger Homes Aren't Always Better

We have an interesting obsession with square footage in the U.S. and Canada. When people describe a house, one of the first things they tell you is its size: 2,500 square feet, 4,000 square feet, or perhaps 10,000 square feet if we are talking about a luxury home. Size has become synonymous to value, even though anyone who has spent time inside enough houses knows that two homes with exactly the same square footage can live completely differently. I’ve worked on large houses that somehow never seem to have enough useful space, and much smaller homes where almost every square foot earns it keep. After more than thiry years designing and renovating homes, I have become far more interested in what a house does with its space than how much of it appears on a real estate listing. A poorly proportioned living room can be difficult to furnish even if it’s large. A huge kitchen can involve far more walking than a small one. An impressive entrance can consume a lot of square feet while providing nowhere convenient to put a coat. Meanwhile, a modest mudroom that properly handles shoes, bags, jackets, and the daily arrival of a family may contribute more to everyday life than a room three times its size..

If you want a good example of why size can be misleading, look at the two rooms that are often among the most expensive to renovate: kitchens and bathrooms. A bathroom may occupy only 50 or 100 square feet, yet almost every inch can involve expensive work. There is plumbing, waterproofing, tile, lighting, ventilation, cabinetry, countertops, glass, fixtures and skilled labour, all compressed into a relatively small space. Kitchens operate on the same principle at a larger scale. Cabinets, appliances, electrical work, plumbing, stone countertops, lighting and custom details can make a kitchen one of the largest investments in a renovation even though it occupies a fraction of the total house. But these rooms are expensive for another reason: we use them constantly. A badly positioned bathroom vanity can irritate you every morning. Insufficient kitchen counter space can make preparing dinner unnecessarily difficult for years. Poor storage means repeatedly bending, reaching, searching and moving things out of the way. When I am allocating a renovation budget, I would rather spend money solving these functional problems than use the same amount simply to make another room larger. The value of a room should not be measured only by its dimensions or even by what it costs to build. It should also be measured by how frequently you use it and how much influence it has on the way your day unfolds.

There is a point at which additional space stops solving problems and begins creating new ones. An oversized kitchen island may look impressive in a photograph, but if it is so wide that you cannot comfortably reach across it, its usefulness starts to decline. A massive bedroom can feel strangely empty unless furniture is added simply to fill it. A living room that is too large may push people so far apart that conversation becomes less comfortable. Long hallways increase walking without necessarily contributing anything meaningful to the experience of the house. Larger homes also require more flooring, more lighting, more furniture, more heating and cooling, more cleaning and eventually more maintenance. None of this is an argument against large houses. I have designed large homes where the scale was entirely appropriate because the owners entertained extensively, had large families or genuinely used the space. The problem begins when size becomes the objective rather than the result of understanding how somebody wants to live. During the planning stage of a renovation or new home, I think every room should have to justify itself. What happens here? Who uses it? How often? What furniture belongs in it? How does it connect to the spaces around it? A room that cannot answer those questions may be consuming expensive square footage without contributing very much to the life of the house.

This is where function becomes part of what I call Silent Software™: the collection of environmental conditions in a home that quietly influence the way we think, feel and behave. We rarely wake up in the morning consciously analyzing whether our house is functional. We simply experience the consequences. We walk an unnecessarily long distance between the refrigerator and the counter. We carry laundry across the house because the laundry room is in the wrong place. We pile things on a chair because the bedroom does not have enough useful storage. We avoid sitting in one part of the living room because the furniture arrangement feels awkward. Eventually these behaviours become normal, and we adapt ourselves to the house instead of asking whether the house should have been designed differently. Good function removes some of that friction. Frequently used things are stored near the places where they are needed. Circulation feels natural. Furniture fits the room rather than fighting it. Spaces can accommodate the activities they were intended to support. None of these decisions is particularly glamorous on a set of construction drawings, but their effects are repeated every day. Beauty attracts our attention when we first walk into a room; function determines how we feel about living there five or ten years later.

One of the advantages of renovating an existing home is that the house has already given you years of information about what works and what does not. The dining room may be used three times a year while the kitchen feels crowded every evening. A spare bedroom may have become permanent storage while there is nowhere comfortable to work from home. An older Vancouver house may have a collection of smaller rooms designed for a way of living that no longer resembles the life of the family occupying it. This is why renovations aren’t about simply making homes bigger. Sometimes an addition is absolutely the right solution, but before adding square footage I try and find out whether the existing square footage is being used intelligently. Removing a wall, changing a doorway, borrowing space from an underused room or redesigning the relationship between the kitchen and adjoining living areas can sometimes transform how a house functions without increasing its footprint at all. This is particularly important in expensive urban markets, where every square foot represents a substantial investment. If you already own the space, the first question should be whether you can make it work harder. A thoughtful renovation can effectively make a house feel larger not because its exterior walls have moved, but because more of the space becomes useful.

We tend to associate luxury with abundance: bigger kitchens, larger bathrooms, enormous closets, more bedrooms and more square footage. There is certainly pleasure in generosity of space, but after decades of working inside people's homes, I think there is another kind of luxury that is much easier to overlook. It’s opening a drawer and finding exactly what you need. It’s having enough counter space where you actually prepare food rather than ten feet away. It’s walking into an entrance that can comfortably absorb everyone arriving home at once. It’s having a living room where six people can talk without shouting across an enormous empty space, a bathroom where two people can get ready without getting in each other's way and a bedroom that feels calm because storage has been thoughtfully considered. These things rarely appear in the real-estate description, yet they are what people experience day after day. This is why I believe function deserves to be considered as seriously as beauty when designing or renovating a home. The most expensive room in your house may indeed be one of the smallest, but the most costly space of all may be square footage that you paid to buy, build, furnish, heat and maintain without ever really using. A well-designed home does not need every room to be large. It needs every room to have a reason for being there and to do its job well.