A life in numbers
I’ve always lived in small spaces – I’ve never loved the idea of excess space or rooms that are only used occasionally. And for some reason, which I don’t really understand, I can remember the size of almost all of them.
I grew up in an inner-city cottage: 110 square metres, which at one point fitted six humans, two Labradors and a cat. Later, there was the apartment in Freemans Bay ‘Star Flats’, a roomy 72 square metres and two bedrooms, which felt like a palace after the 1960s 48-square-metre shoebox I lived in before that, and it felt positively gigantic compared to my one-bedroom London council flat. Two bedrooms! A separate laundry! The luxury!
For a while, I rented a villa in Grey Lynn
– at 140 square metres, it’s the biggest house I’ve ever lived in. I barely had the furniture to fill it, which was probably a good thing because then we moved into our place, which started out life as a 62-square-metre bach and which we eventually extended to a positively roomy 103 square metres. (At one point, we had one bedroom to house two small children, two adults and one large black dog.)
It still doesn’t feel small. Maybe we’ve become good at editing, though there is a tonne of storage and I am a firm believer in the idea that you shouldn’t buy stuff unless you really like it and it’s really well made. Keeping the footprint small, whether you’re furnishing or building, means being able to invest in a few really good things, rather than lots of generic things.
As the houses in this issue show, living small means living better – and it also means making use of land that might otherwise be impossible to develop, which is why we’ve run a ‘Hidden Density’ special featuring clever urban homes on sites you might never think could fit a house. That’s the key really – if you only build what you need, you invariably find you don’t need much.