Only the ideas are big

SO you’ve arrived. Good career, clean credit, growing family. It’s time for a better house, which for most people means a bigger one. Watch out, says author and architect Sarah Susanka. “They can be bigger without being better.”

In the last eight years, Susanka, 48, has become a kind of mini-industry on what she calls the “not so big house.” She advises spending money on craftsmanship instead of square footage to have an aesthetically satisfying house, in which all rooms are used and built-in details allow for a life of organization, ease and comfort.

With her down-to-earth, real-people approach to architecture, Susanka has won a staunch following among design professionals as well as regular folks -- and she’s become a passionate proponent of her cause, says Los Angeles architect Marc Appleton.

“Sarah’s one of the few architectural voices that has managed to penetrate the popular press in an extremely significant way rather than just talking as a professional to other professionals,” he says. “She’s made it an attractive proposition to scale back from extravagant and overindulgent houses that seem to garner most of the attention and has refocused everyone on the fact that smaller can be just as beautiful.”

Susanka’s obsession with residential space started at age 14, she said on a recent trip to Los Angeles. That’s when she moved from England to California with her mother, a renowned ballet teacher, and her father, an industrial designer. They settled in a 2,400-square-foot ranch-style house in Rolling Hills Estates, where her parents still live.

She noticed a huge difference in the way people in England and America used -- or didn’t use -- the rooms in their homes. “In England we had many rooms and used every inch of space. We lived in our living room and ate in the dining room three times a day.”

In Palos Verdes, she says, people gathered in their dens and family rooms. There were huge chunks of space rarely used.

The girl just couldn’t understand it and has spent her career figuring it out. First as head of her own architectural firm in Minneapolis for 16 years, then as the bestselling author of five books, her newest, “Inside the Not So Big House.”

As soon as she opened her own firm, Susanka says, she realized that most folks have no idea what architects do. If they wanted an addition, a remodel, or a new house, they went directly to a builder.

So she decided to promote the idea that architects can solve house problems better than anyone else and began giving lectures at local home and garden shows. “It was something no other architect in Minnesota would have been caught dead doing at the time. It was considered declasse,” Susanka says.

Maybe so. But those shows introduced her to hundreds of middle-class, middle-income Midwesterners, all looking for home improvement experts and ideas. Using photos of projects her firm had completed, Susanka and colleagues offered wisdom to anyone who stopped to chat and for a reasonable hourly fee, they’d come to your home for a consultation.

Her basic handyman philosophy -- no job too big or too small -- netted her firm a full schedule, she says, and her expertise grew with every attempt to turn less space into more and make it comfortable and satisfying.

Susanka, who now lives in Raleigh, N.C., says she also realized quickly that most people have the misunderstanding that “anything really beautiful was probably unaffordable” -- as untrue then as she believes it is now.

That, she says, was the beginning of the “not so big house” idea. “You take dollars out of just bigness, out of square footage, and put them instead into the quality and character and usefulness of the space.”

After years of dealing with design, she felt she had lots to say. So she landed a publisher (Taunton Press) and wrote her first book, “The Not So Big House,” using photos of work done by her firm. “That first book shot up to the top of Amazon’s bestseller list in the first two weeks. It changed my life forever,” she says.

Asked to lecture around the country, and determined to write more books, she decided to leave the firm and concentrate on her literary and public speaking life. “I couldn’t be a full-time architect and a full-time author and lecturer,” she says. She didn’t stop designing houses, exactly -- “I just am not available to be hired because I’m so busy with everything else.”

Some people misunderstand Susanka’s theories to mean that big houses are bad or small ones are better. “Untrue,” she says. Size is not the point. Whatever size you need or want, just make sure it has the floor plan and built-in architectural specifics that create “a sense of comfort and soul in a house to which people respond. And that comes from detail and design, rather than sheer size.

“Build about one-third less square footage than you planned for, but build it at a slightly higher dollar cost per square foot, in order to get the character and quality of the space you want,” Susanka says in her slight British accent.

Spend that one-third on architectural details that will make the house totally responsive to your family’s needs, she says. This can involve entire walls of built-in cabinets; bookcases; specially designed niches built into walls for work, hobbies or built-in desks; window seats -- even removal of interior walls.

It can mean lowering a ceiling in a room or part of one or heightening by exposing rafters. These are all special projects that most builders and remodelers don’t ordinarily take the time or spend the money to do, she says. These details create a “sense of more-ness” -- more usefulness and more beauty, she adds. Things people respond to, but don’t exactly know how to achieve.

For architects, she says, the word “detail” means design features that are sometimes so subtle the average person doesn’t realize they’re there. They are built into the house. They are not cosmetic, she says. “Details are the things that if you could turn your house upside down and shake it, they wouldn’t come loose.”

A house on a densely built residential street west of La Cienega Boulevard and south of Pico Boulevard is one she calls an example of space with quality and character -- “the kind of house that, if it had no furniture, would still seem warm and appealing. It’s all in the shapes and sizes of the spaces,” she says, and in those ever-recurring details.

The house that Susanka uses photos of in her new book belongs to architect Douglas Teiger and his wife, Sabrina. They’ve added a second floor to the original one-story, two-bedroom, 1,300-square-foot Spanish-style ranch house, which they bought in 1998. Now it’s a 2,700-square-foot, four bedroom house with the first-floor space rearranged, although its footprint is unchanged.

In the remodel they turned the living room in the front into an art gallery, with sculptures on the burnished wood floor and Douglas’ canvases on the walls. It is a serene, uncluttered space that visitors first encounter and one in which their boys, ages 8, 6 and 3, are welcome to race around. Now the family room, at the rear of the house, truly is the living room, Sabrina says.

At the back of the ground floor is the side-by-side family room and kitchen, one big room really, which faces the backyard and pool through a wall of glass. “It’s our everything room now, where we live, relax, welcome friends. This one sectional couch [cocoa washable suede] is it for the whole downstairs. Our home isn’t about what we have but about who we are,” says Sabrina.

The house is full of niches, nooks and variations, which give a sense of coziness and identity, she says. An entire wall, floor to ceiling, in the family room is filled with built-in cabinets and a desk.

Susanka points out Sabrina’s “office” -- a desk and storage space with a low ceiling that sits in a niche built into the glass wall that looks out on the backyard. The hallway leading into the family room has a lower ceiling than the family room. “So you are walking toward the light, which is not just a near-death experience but also a very sound architectural principle,” she says.

The architect wishes people would start thinking of home not as rooms but as “a sequence of places where various activities occur. It’s a way of thinking about space differently. Don’t think living room. Think place to drink coffee and read paper, place to play piano, whatever you really do or want to do in that space. Frank Lloyd Wright called it breaking out of the box. We’re so confined by our labels that we can’t actually design for the way we really live.”

With her clear gaze, bell-like voice and low-fashion look that inspires trust, Susanka would probably be a big hit on the right TV show. She’s refused offers. For now she is not willing to dabble in TV or design houses that reflect the spirit of her books because she’s too busy with lectures and -- two more “Not So Big House” books, she says.

Then she will break with her own tradition in two big ways. For a new publisher, Random House, she will write a book that’s not about houses at all. It will be called “The Not So Big Life,” and Susanka says it will tell why one might opt to cut a smaller but richer swath through life -- a path less public but more profoundly satisfying to the soul.

Bettijane Levine can be reached at bettijane.levine@latimes.com.