Sarah Susanka has a new book
Sarah Susanka has a brand new ebook popping out in mid-February, Not So Big Remodeling. You can pre-order it on Amazon in anticipation of its launch. I can not wait to get my fingers on it. To make it simpler, my friends at Amazon have a hyperlink right right here.
Sarah Susanka is an architect and accidental way of life guru and it began with the 1998 launch of her ebook The Not So Big House.
Susanka's paintings isn't how-to and the houses and design concepts she discusses aren't some thing maximum humans can do themselves. What she advocates but, is a philosophy that calls to me just like the Sirens called to Odysseus. I am powerless to withstand her ideas, totally powerless. Unlike the Sirens inside the Odyssey though, Susanka's not calling me to a bad stop. Rather, her paintings is a awaken call and a undertaking to me and every other innovative professional out there to reacquaint ourselves with the basics of why we do what we do. I mean, at the cease of the day, my task is to help people stay extra correctly.
Efficiency for me method that the folks that name on me come far from the revel in with a domestic that higher displays who they're. They get a kitchen, a lavatory, or an entire domestic that that now not only displays how they live now but will help them live better as their lives progress. It's my task to come up with ideas that enable families (by any definition) to come collectively, to live peacefully, to grow, to have fun, to be quiet. It's my job to offer human beings with an area where they belong. I can consider no better way to spend my days.
I work mostly in renovation. So more regularly than not, I'm handed some builder's idea of what the Good Life is:
Ugh. Well, that picture's an exaggeration, they may be in no way pretty as horrific as that. I imply have a look at that thing. It's a garage with a residence attached.
Anyhow, the philosophy of domestic that Sarah Susanka espouses is the absolute opposite of the photograph above. Her take on home building; and together with her new e book, domestic reworking; is that human beings must build better and no longer build bigger. A home need to be constructed for the benefit of its inhabitants and no longer for the benefit of its associates. Comfort, detail and space must trump square toes. Empty, soulless square toes beget empty, soulless people. She doesn't come out and say that, but I may not hesitate to. But what she does come right out an say is that somewhere alongside the course to the typical four,000 square foot new American domestic, some thing vital's been lost. Vaulted ceilings for the sake of vaulted ceilings do not make for a glad domestic. Sterile, impossible to supply, so-known as gathering rooms aren't an area wherein human beings will want to accumulate if their sole attribute is being huge for the sake of being massive. More is not better, it is simply extra.
Susanka needs now not only architects, designers and developers to begin questioning and operating towards satisfactory over amount, she wants the general public to start disturbing it. I invoke her name on a totally ordinary foundation and I owe a number of whatever fulfillment I've enjoyed to her. I didn't want The Not So Big House to point me in a direction or to rouse something in me. Her e book landed in a few fertile soil once I were given my hands on it way back when, permit me inform you. But what her books did and keep to do is assist me realise that I'm now not by myself in wondering the things that I do approximately home. Susanka's achievement has brought me some clearly first-rate clients through the years, humans primed and prepared to head, excited at the prospect of dwelling Not So Big. So Sarah, despite the fact that I've never met you, thanks and congrats for your new ebook.
