IS ANYONE SMARTER THAN A TWO YEAR OLD?
Never mind the television show Are You Smarter than a Fifth Grader?, the question we’re wrestling with at Locus is “Are most homebuyers smarter than a two year old?”
On nearly all of our residential projects, we get to a phase near the end where, for any number of reasons, we put the project in a vise and squeeze the square footage down by 5-10%. Although there is the occasional reaction from clients concerned that they’ll lose something they’ve grown to love, we inevitably find the project gets better as it zeros in on the essence of what the client really wants and needs.
While this refinement process has been our experience at Locus and is no doubt common at other architecture firms, it hasn’t been the norm in the general housing marketplace. And while we thought the current economy had changed the trend for ever larger homes, a couple of recent experiences suggests it hasn’t and has us at Locus wondering if most folks are smarter than a two year old when it comes to buying, or building, a house?
After a bit of prodding from my spouse a few weeks ago, we accepted a dinner invitation with her sister at their new house. I just knew the visit would come with the requisite tour by my brother-in-law. And I was right. After arriving at the house, we moved quickly past the greeting niceties and I was whisked away through the labyrinth of rooms, one after another all decked out like a furniture showroom, yet eerily uninhabited. Just as he was about to put his hand on what I’d hoped to be the last doorknob of the evening, he turned to me and said “now this sealed the deal for us and we had to buy it.” He stepped aside to usher me in and, with satisfaction punctuating every syllable, continued “welcome to my BONUS ROOM.”
Fast forward to a few days ago. My not-so-little girl turned 14 and, at dinner, our conversation turned to discussing her early years. Like most parents, we had struggled to set good eating habits so she would learn how to eat a balanced, nutritious diet. When she was about two, my wife and I used a sneaky tactic to get her to eat the peas, carrots and beans that she pushed aside on her plate. We’d tell her, “just three more bites and you can have a BONUS BITE.” And it worked. She’d gobble up three bites of something she didn’t want, just to be rewarded with more of the same because she thought it was special. Although I’m sad to say that tactic no longer works on her, it seems the same can’t be said for a large selection of American home buyers as they gobble up more and more square footage without regard to need. “Welcome to my bonus room” might best be replaced with “welcome to the space I didn’t know I needed and doesn’t have a use, but boy am I happy to have it.”
Unfortunately, unlike vegetables, getting more house than you need isn’t necessarily a good thing.
