small houses: big ideas for today’s small homes

In this new collection of small houses from Fine Homebuilding magazine, the authors look at houses both new and remodeled, traditional and modern, urban and rural, by the water and in the mountains. The houses exude as much style as homes many times their square footage, and all are as big as they need to be to fit the liefstyles and aspirations of the people who live in them.

Houses include:

• bungalow on a budget
• magnificent mountain cabin
• family-friendly remodel
• garden cottage for low-impact living
• design/build delight in the desert
• little house on an urban infill
• modern Victorian in a mountain resort

With the growing popularity of small, micro, and tiny houses, it’s no surprise that the average house size is actually trending smaller in recent years. Between 1950 and 2009, the average American home soared from a modest 983 sq. ft. to over 2500 sq. ft., but now we’ve dropped back to about 2400 sq. ft. There are a number of reasons for this unprecendented reversal: economic (the Great Recession), demographic (family size continues to get smaller), and energy-efficiency related (smaller houses draw more frugally from the earth’s resources).