 |
Review by Roxanne Button, AIA, MRAIC, LEED AP
Published by Taunton Press/AIA, 2007
 It’s a
bit tempting to put this book into the same category as Real
Simple magazine and all those “anticlutter” reality
shows and to compare it to Sarah Susanka’s Not So Big
books. The images and the message of The Simple Home: The
Luxury of Enough are very similar: think about how you live
and then find (or design) a home that fits. Live with less, buy
only what you need, and stop filling too many rooms with too much
stuff. Instead of giving us one more “downsize and
declutter” book, authors Sarah Nettleton and Frank Edgerton
Martin focus on an underlying design philosophy and how 21
homeowners interpreted it differently. The stories are told
eloquently through words and gorgeous photos, everything from
secluded cabins to urban row houses all used in their own way to
illustrate the same fundamental ideas.
This book isn’t just about reducing square footage. These
houses range from fewer than 1,000 square feet to more
than 4,000 square feet, and the square footage is not identified
for all. The authors stress that it’s more about the quality
of a space matching the owners’ quality of life. Not everyone
needs a family room, living room, and bonus room, all with vaulted
ceilings.
The book is organized around six paths to simplicity: Simple is
Enough, Simple is Flexible, Simple is Thrifty, Simple is Timeless,
Simple is Sustainable, and Simple is Resolved Complexity. Most
houses could have fit into more than one category because they
illustrated more than one path well. The first chapter, "Simple is
Enough," talks about fitting a space to its owners and its
context. The San Francisco town house has a small refrigerator
because neighborhood stores are close by. The house in Minnesota
has storage for winter gear, not needed in the southwestern houses.
"Simple is Flexible" is about multiple-use spaces and being
creative with what you’ve got so that it can adapt to many
activities. Why have a huge dining room to host one large family
dinner a year? One home has a wide hallway which doubles as a
dining space when needed.
"Simple is Thrifty" focuses on keeping building costs in line but
it also looks at environmental costs. Here and in "Simple is
Sustainable" are where sustainability creeps into the conversation,
particularly with respect to local and healthy materials. Nettleton
asks, “When do you know you have enough?” Sustainability
is a thread that runs throughout the book. A few sidebars address
green design, and it’s called out in those houses made from
local or recycled materials, like the small house in Chicago and
the Red Beach House.
"Simple is Timeless" is a mix of historic and contemporary styles
and addresses appropriateness to place. "Simple is Resolved
Complexity" puts emphasis on distilling things down to the
essentials. Not all the houses are as sparingly decorated as the
one on the cover, the Hudson Valley farmhouse that rivals Shaker
homes in its simplicity. Some are filled with furniture and
overloaded bookshelves, so the definition of “simple”
seems to be an individual one.
Roxanne Button, AIA, MRAIC, LEED AP, is an architect at Cannon
Design and one of the firm’s sustainability
leaders.
|
