Why is it so hard to find a home that’s big enough and small enough at the same time?

THE kitchen is so big it looks like you could park a private jet there quite handily, and still have space for a 7 Series BMW. The house also has a bar – not one of those hostess trolley affairs from the Abigail’s Party era, but a proper wooden counter with draught taps, parquet flooring and upholstered vinyl seating. In total, there is 8,700 square feet of space to play with and it all could be yours for €6.5million.

This is Ouragh, the Shrewsbury Road former home of property developer Seán Dunne and his wife Gayle Killilea, the price of which has been lowered by €500,000 to encourage potential buyers.

Looking at photos of it yesterday in the papers, it begged a very obvious question: just how much domestic space do we actually need?

Clearly, a property like this is a trophy, the physical manifestation of wealth, yet it pales in comparison with others – Russian oligarch and Chelsea Football Club owner Roman Abramovich has just been granted permission to extend his house in London’s Kensington Park Gardens to 20,000 square feet. By way of comparison, my house is 1,400 square feet, or just over 14 times smaller, and even that is too big for me.

Why? Well, like 23% of all Irish households, some 392,000 of them in total, mine is single occupancy.

Pain

The house in which I live alone is a bungalow. There is a small entrance porch that leads into one large room. The ceiling is standard height over the kitchen and dining room, but rises to a 21-foot apex over the relaxation space.

This was what appealed to me when I bought it; I loved the light and the height, the room to breathe, that it offered.

Of course, as I learned to my cost later, it is a pain in the behind to heat; if I arrive home after a couple of days away, the interior temperature at this time of year usually is at around eight degrees. It rises by a lazy one degree an hour when I turn on the heating, which means it takes 13 hours to reach a pleasant 21 degrees.

More often than not, I set the electric blanket to ‘scorch’ and just take to the bed and let it work its magic overnight.

Off the main room, there is an internal hall that leads to four bedrooms, one of them en suite, and this is where the problem arises. I don’t need four bedrooms.

Obviously, the biggest one is for myself, and a second is my home office, but for most of the year, the other two are empty, or occupied by washed bed linen and clean clothes I never seem to get around to sorting, and assorted junk.

The ‘junk’, mind you, includes a sweeping brush, the ironing board, the vacuum cleaner and so on, because the gifted architects who designed our homes in the bubble years often forget to include quaint little fripperies such as storage spaces; there is no upright cupboard in the house at all.

Over the course of the year, family and friends will come down to Co. Wexford to visit, and stay over, but otherwise no one ventures into the rooms.

I should sell up and buy somewhere smaller, but I like the space available during the day. I can watch television from the kitchen counter, where I eat at a stool. I am surrounded by stuff that arguably is unnecessary, but it is mine – my books, my CDs, my DVDs, other collectibles that are representative of my life. There is no reason to keep them, beyond sentiment, but we humans are nothing if not sentimental, and we like to mark our territory with things that reflect exactly who we are.

While I rattle around this four-bedroom house by myself, there are others with small families cooped up in two bedrooms, and many more who have no homes at all, which is why housing has emerged as a key issue in the General Election campaign.

Legacy

Put simply, there may be too few houses for the population, but there are more than enough bedrooms; it is just that the wrong people are matched to them.

The reason why is a simple one: we have been using pretty much the same template f or houses f or generations, and they were built that way because we had bigger families then.

The legacy of this, though, leaves us with houses entirely unsuited to individual needs. In your average two- storey property, the square footage of the upper and lower floors is identical. What that means is that in order to buy somewhere with generous living and entertaining space, you have to buy more bedrooms. The living room in a two-storey house by definition will be smaller than that in a three-bedroom house. If you want a living room, a dining room, a kitchen, downstairs bathroom, utility and study, chances are you won’t have room for all unless you also agree to five bedrooms, even though you don’t need them.

With single occupancy on the increase – through widowhood, divorce, and just by choice – it is time to address the situation creatively. I could buy an apartment but I don’t want to live in a block, hefting groceries up in the lift from the car, or up the stairs when the lift in broken.

I don’t want my outdoor life confined to a poky balcony with a half-dead conifer in a terracotta pot and a set of wind chimes that drive everyone else crazy.

Even if I did decide to go for a two-bed apartment, they don’t build them as big as they used to. In one I know, the counter space available for preparing food measures a risible 70 centimetres by 70 centimetres, and also is the same space needed to clear away unwashed dishes. The washing machine is in a cupboard, under the stairs to the duplex above.

Growing

Now, for much of Europe, this is a perfectly normal way to live. In London or Manhattan, a 700 sq ft apartment would sell for over €1million, or even more depending on the location.

Maybe we need to get our heads around that and, in a country with an ever-growing population, accept that the way we used to live is not how we will live in the future.

Certainly, new and reduced permitted minimum spaces for Dublin apartments suggest that is the way we’re going, and mostly via IKEA.

As for me, well, maybe I’m old fashioned, but I still want a front door on a street and not on a corridor. I want a garden for the summer, and a shed full of stuff I never will use. I want shelves stacked with canisters of WD40 for hinge emergencies that never will arise, and I want a space to keep sticks that someday might be useful for stirring paint.

I’d like a utility room so I don’t have to turn up the TV volume when the washing machine enters the spin cycle, and a space for a desk, a computer and my reference books.

And if some clever developer and architect teamed up and gave me all that, but with just two bedrooms attached instead of four, I would buy the house in a heartbeat.

If I consequently vacated the house I now live in, it could become what it always should have been, a place full of happy kids running around, roaring and shouting, with a garden where they safely could let off even more steam.

Everything I love about it comes down to just one big room.

That is a very small ideal that seems impossible to achieve without also getting two unneeded bedrooms. I don’t want a trophy home – like thousands of others, I just want a big small house.

In that, at least, I am not alone.