Rating: 
Summary: Interesting, if not especially original concept
Review: The Not So Big House forces one to reevaluate what is truly a"dream home." Is it a house with empty square footage or onewith charm and character? I agree with many of the reviewers that the book features only one home style--the quasi Frank Lloyd Wright style obviously favored by Ms. Susanka. I like the Prairie Style, but it is certainly not appropriate for most regions of the United States. I would appreciate seeing examples of Colonial, Farmhouse, and Victorian styled Not So Big Houses. While I enjoy the blond trim and floors and white walls of the featured homes, that monotonous interior style is certainly not for everyone. It would help if dimensions for each of the featured rooms and houses were given. Many look large, but I'm not sure if that is due to the photography, the architecture, or just the room dimensions. This would help people see how much square footage is required to achieve the effects illustrated by the book. Additionally, Ms. Susanka refers to a special quality associated with these houses, but she seems to have trouble articulating exactly what that quality is. The Not So Big concept is not really all that innovative. These houses are rearranged, upscaled, and two-storied ranch houses popular in the 1960s and 1970s. Many of these ranches did not have "formal" dining rooms and had fairly open living areas. Like these ranch houses, Not So Big simply eliminates the dining room and reorganizes the living room under the moniker of "Away Room." Eliminating only the dining room does not reduce square footage by much. I would not want to throw away the dining room for one very important reason: cleanliness. The family dining area collects school papers, magazines, notices, newspapers, bills, etc (which are conspicuously absent in the photographs in the book). If the dining room is gone, suprise guests (which are fairly frequent at our house) would be forced to dine in the clutter of the kitchen. The dining room provides a quick, clutter free place to dine with guests, even if it is just an informal meal of sandwiches. Otherwise, the homes and concepts illustrated are attractive and fairly practical, if expensive. While these are out of the range of the typical home owner, who must settle for paint-grade finish trim, flat, textured drywall ceilings, and fiberboard doors, they do give one ideas for future upgrades and projects. Overall, an attractive book that wins the reader over to small homes.
Rating: 
Summary: You'll enjoy it, even if you can't afford to hire her
Review: There's a healthy amount of evidence that even those with unlimited budgets and the ability to live anywhere they wish get a raw deal from current real estate development practice. This book is about thinking out of the box - out of spending money on making your house beautiful instead of simply massive. I've checked out a lot of open houses and seen more than a few of the homes she criticises in her book - and she's dead to rights in saying modern architectural practice is too big, too overwhelming, too sterile. Frankly, in my case, I don't care about sustainability or environmentalism or any of that stuff -- the big houses just feel chilly-cold. If you want to learn how to build a warm house at about the same price as a cold and impersonal one, well, this is a fabulous book.This book has been criticised for concentrating too much on high-end homes. I don't think this is fair, because she does an exceptionally clear job in her section explaining why some homes are expensive to build while others aren't. She walks us through three homes, low, mid-range and expensive, explaining how the detail quality changes. Now, admittedly, she obviously loves the really expensive, high-end, $ 175-500 a square foot masterpieces she profiles. But she has empathy for those of us at the low end, and I think most readers will walk away from that section enlightened, if a little wistful. I'm afraid I'm one of those hapless low budget folks, but I still loved her book. It has great ideas for any budget. But, in the final analysis, remember this: 'tis better to build at $ 50 a square foot, then not to build at all - as long as you're not kidding yourself about feasibility.
Rating:
Summary: Thank you Sarah Susanka!!!
Review: This book has overhauled everything I thought I knew about houses (which I'll admit wasn't much to begin with). I used to think I someday wanted a big giant house in the burbs with soaring ceilings and giant entry ways. Now I want a small little cottage in the woods with an away-room and built in benches under round art-glass windows.
This book belongs in every American home.
Rating:
Summary: Not so small!
Review: This book is chock full of good ideas about how to maximize space in a house. It also makes you really think about how you spend time--i.e. live--in a house. That's the good news; the bad news is that Ms. Suska's idea of a "small" house seems to start well over 2,000 sq ft (although she does tantalize you with a one-person house built by another architect in her practice). The other problem with this book is that virtually all of her not-so-big solutions would be really expensive to build. If you're looking for a book to guide you in building a new house, this probably isn't it unless you're kin to Bill Gates.
Rating: 
Summary: A Valuable Primer, and Fun To Just Flip Through
Review: This pleasing-to-read, pleasant-to-look-at book offers a tantalizing glimpse of what is possible when trying to make every square foot count in a home, without compromising practicality or comfort. The homes featured in here are, for the most part, neither sprawling nor overly ritzy; however, many plans will require some serious construction or renovation on an existing home. So if you're looking for some pointers on how to make your own Not So Big House seem Not So Small, but without tearing out a wall or two or adding an extension . . . well, you're bound to be a bit frustrated as you ooh and aah in these pages. But fair enough -- it's an architecture book, not a decorating book. To this end, Susanka still provides plenty of sound advice and information on the importance of making little things count, from acoustically isolated rooms to the need for private space, and what it means to Look At The Diagonal of A Room. She also points out how to make a good use of light, and how to determine what your REAL needs are when purchasing a home, as opposed to your PERCEIVED needs. If you're out shopping for your first home -- or are building another -- you'd be hard pressed to find a better primer on what to look for if you're trying to make your space matter. In fact, the homes shown in this book are so much fun to look at that it is sometimes difficult to give each home the time and space that it deserves. Susanka's text is so lively, and keeps things moving so quickly, that you're often left to do a double-take as you wonder whether you're going to get to see other rooms in the house to help pull the whole thing together. Sometimes you do, other times you don't. There are also times when it would have been helpful to see the individual floorplans for some of the houses shown in here. Again, for some we do, and for others, we just get the layout of the rooms in question. There are instances when readers are offered a glimpse of an intriguing room, and then get to see it several times from a number of different angles at a number of places in the book -- and unless you're paying close attention (I finally caught on, in one instance, because of a row of displayed plates that kept showing up), you're not always aware you're seeing the same room from a different perspective. A more consistent use of floorplans might have made things just a bit easier to negotiate. It might also have been nice to have been given just a bit more indication of how much some of these innovative uses of spaces actually cost the homeowner. There's really only one jarring moment in the book -- really, now, wouldn't any architect worth his or her protractor know that television's most famous fictional architect is named MIKE Brady, and NOT Robert Brady? (Susanka misquotes the lyrics to THE BRADY BUNCH theme, too. Ah well.....) But this is all nitpicking, really. Susanka meets her goals in writing this book -- it really IS "A Blueprint for the Way We Really Live" and you will likely find something in here that catches your fancy. Check it out, and leave it lying around for some casual inspiration.
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