My last house was quite a bit bigger than current one, but id didn't have any more space. Sure, the master bedroom was huge, but that just meant there was that much floor space to walk across to get from the bed to the bathroom. There was a "great room", which had a dining room table on one side (mostly unused, except to collect junk), and an empty living room on the other side. Separate family room adjoining the kitchen (knee wall separating them), where TV was. Only useful feature was a full sized basement (which collected a bunch of junk), and 2 full baths upstairs.
Current house still has 3 bedrooms, they are a bit smaller though. And 1 1/2 bath.
I would also add in the usable space (number of usable rooms). Many houses come with a formal dining room combined with a formal living room (often called the great room); they then have a family room that flows into the kitchen. Add in an oversized master bedroom, and you have quite a bit of square footage but not really anything you can do with it that you couldn't do with smaller houses.
Having more rooms and more division between them is part of why older houses feel bigger to me.
Modern ones also do some really stupid stuff with square footage. One house we owned had a massive master suite the size of the entire 2-car garage (it was over it) plus some more carved out for the bathroom, but without any dividing walls or doors (even the [large] bathroom was just an open, wide doorway entry, no closing doors). It was huge, but also not quite big enough to divide into multiple spaces with furniture and rugs or whatever without it looking and feeling weird. A kind of awkward fake-luxury size. And it was a front-back split with a living room in the lower part alongside the entryway, with a fireplace and big window... the layout of which made it almost impossible to set up actual living room furniture in a decent way, so we basically didn't use that entire room and used the basement instead.
The house could have been a solid 500 sqft smaller and felt just as large, with some tweaks to the design. Nearly every other house we've owned, aside from one very old one (by American standards-1910s construction), had similar issues with large areas being wasted for one reason or another, due to how they were designed.
I think the "open floor plan" trend is mostly to look impressive in photos and to get that "wow" factor when you first walk in. In practice, as commonly realized at least, it's terribly wasteful of space and makes houses feel smaller, because it's harder to get a wall between you and someone else, than it is in older houses. Harder to furnish, and arrange furnishing properly, too (not enough wall space, more backs of things visible)
[EDIT] I'd actually liken the open-floorpan trend to the haphazard McMansion appearance of the outside of houses. One thing I've noticed looking at lots of houses over the years is that nice, big, older houses, or newer ones built with balanced and regular exterior layouts, tend to look smaller on the outside than they actually are—or, put differently, McMansion-style houses look much bigger than they actually are. They're loud, and deceptive. Open floor plans are like that for interior space.
The problem is that a lot of larger houses simply have larger rooms. For example, I have a the living room and dining room sharing a large rectangular space with a vaulted ceiling. Then, there is another rectangle which has the kitchen at one end, and a family room at the other (separated by a tile / carpet boundary, and a partial knee wall). So in effect I only have two rooms on the main floor. And the upper story has 3 bedrooms (two normal size, and a large master bedroom). But the master bedroom has too much wall space covered with windows, or interior doors, so there isn't much space to put furniture (but you have a lot of floor space in between).
The only area that was actually any use (for things like a lounge, office, etc) is the basement (a large open space that I split up with walls). All in all, I'd rather have less total square footage of floor space, and more wall space.
The houses are bigger but they don’t necessarily have as many rooms. Some people seem to want big open spaces, giant bathrooms and closets, massive kitchens etc. I personally favor a flat I once had where the kitchen was about the size of a modern walk-in closet, and had a door, and was far from the dining room, and there was a bathroom so small that once you got in you’d consider it a miracle they managed to put a sink and a shower and a window and a door in there. And there were four bedrooms so my wife and I each got our own rooms, which was awesome.
Make your kids share a room and limit how much crap they accumulate. My brother and I grew up in an 1,100 square foot house with our parents and never felt cramped. (On the flip side, if you don't aggressively limit crap accumulation, a substantially larger home will feel small. Our house is about 2,800 square feet, and we're looking to finish the basement and add another 800 because everyone has too much crap.)
In terms of layout, big bedrooms and big bathrooms account for a lot of square footage but don't add much utility. Our main floor bathroom is the size of a small bedroom, and we got furniture in it so we could store some of our crap.
I was about to make the same comment. It's amazing how much the layout affects the usability of the space. I hate, hate, hate those huge master bathrooms and walk in closets because they eat space. Also common where I am: large hallways and entryways that could have been part of a room instead, and an open seating area at the top of the stairs. (What is that even for? Why not just make it an enclosed office. I don't want to hang out on a couch at the top of a stairway). Older 1300 sq ft houses often feel just as spacious as new construction that is 2000 sq ft because they have no wasted space.
Smaller bedrooms, smaller kitchens, smaller every room. My grandparents' house's rooms were small in every direction, but the entire house still fit a dining room with room for 8 (snuggly), family room, living room, kitchin, bathroom, and multiple bedrooms.
We live in an 1140sqft house, just 2 of us. With just 1 (small) bathroom it is less than ideal, particularly when we have guests, but it works -- just. It is basically a box of a house with 3 bedrooms, a living room, a kitchen, and a place to eat. There is no "extra" space aside from the rooms -- no wide hallways, no sitting areas, no extra horizontal surfaces to put junk.
Of course, we have more space than we "need" -- 2 additional bedrooms. But, again, they're just large enough for what they do. 1 has a guest bed (and not any room for anything else, really) and the other is an "office" which is handy during covid-19 for sure.
If we had kids, there would be room for them to sleep, but no playroom, for example. Our laundry is in the garage, as is our "workout room". That space is not counted in the official size of the house, because the garage is converted.
I grew up in a 4000sqft + finished basement house. It was a wonderful home and created a ton of memories. But there were rooms that we just never used. I remember going into rooms just because I haven't been in them for 6 months. Reflecting on that contributed to my significant shift in priorities.
I just bought my first house which is about half that size and even then it feels too big at times. But it's a house I can afford. Being mortgage free by 39 means I get the flexibility to decide what the next act of my life will be about (spoiler: my kids). All it cost me was, I guess, a pool, a hot tub, an extra car, etc.
1) We recently moved from a 80m² flat to a ~145m² house, plus 50m² of basement (860 -> 1560+540 sqft). We had a lot of stuff but it fitted well. Now the house is already equally full with things, but the only non-house-related item we got that takes up more space than before is the super automatic coffee maker. Thinking about it, this is because the actual living rooms did get only marginally bigger: A lot of the additional space is "hidden" because now each of us has a room of their own instead of a shared office. Which, for us and our relationship, is a tremendous boon.
2) Most of things we rarely use derive their value from being available on-demand. Especially for maintenance and repairs: When we rented a flat, all these tasks were the duty of our landlord. Now owning an older house of our own means we have to do that, and often having the proper tools & materials available is a huge boon. The most bulky item: The ladder for cleaning the roof rails. And then there is about a palette of various building materials I still need for all the necessary repairs/maintenance/improvements that we need to do.
We ended up in our current house because my wife wanted a large enough dining room, a spacious kitchen, and a guest room.
The kitchen is much bigger than necessary, though certainly nice to use. We do use the dining room a lot, but only for eating as a family and not entertaining much, unlike how she imagined. What we had in smaller houses would have sufficed.
The guest room was used once, and may never be used again as a guest room. The people she imagined would stay end up staying in hotels instead. It would have been cheaper as a proportion of the cost of our house to buy a cheaper house and to set that money aside and pay for hotels for our guests ourselves.
A lot of the open concept houses around here use enough space for four rooms for one big one. Usually kitchen + dining area + a single living room easily large enough to be two. If you're lucky you have one other room in the public area, designated by design as a dining room (distinct from the merely-yards-away dining area!), and if you're super lucky it's at least got three walls rather than just being designated by flooring and maybe like one pillar.
More rooms is nice if you don't like being on top of every single other person in the house all the time, without having to go to your bedroom (aren't we supposed to only go there for sleep, for sleep-hygiene reasons?) to escape. In recent houses this means using ~3x the space you actually need to accomplish that, mostly by adding a room or two in a finished basement, because the main public area's gigantic, yes, but also entirely open.
It's also very nice to be able to contain messes. So nice. One large shared living space plus kids means no part of your house ever doesn't look like shit without heroic efforts or paid help.
> it's much more common for newer homes to have more bathrooms than older builds of similar size which obviously erodes living space.
Newer homes also seem to be kitchen heavy, and have larger closets (and also bedrooms), all of which reduces shared (and, but for the bedroom part, total) living space with the same square footage.
We do have another room, that's slightly larger but it's a bit bleak. And weirdly it's a more fussy room to furnish. The smaller size is better in the winter. The old brick terraces aren't that warm. In large houses people can gravitate to smaller rooms for that reason. Personally I'd like a large room that I could bring the furniture in from the sides. Lucky to even have a house to live in to be honest, so can't really grumble.
It's interesting; growing up we had a 'great room' type large room setup, and we artificially divided it into a dining room and living room with furniture because doing without a dining room for holidays and guests was unthinkable, even if we didn't use it in every day dinners.
I guess the current owners of that house probably just enjoy the large room.
Media/theater rooms, library/study/office, formal dining room (probably a complete waste of space 90+% of the time, admittedly—I turned ours into the library/study), dedicated play room so the kids' shit doesn't take over the rest of the house (in smaller houses this may just be a second, less-public den/living-room area, probably mixed with the media room concept). Separate bedroom for each kid plus a spare bedroom if you can manage it—spare room, if present, may double as an office if space doesn't allow a dedicated room for that. Big bathrooms and closets that allow one's morning routine to be conducted entirely outside the bedroom proper (handy if partners don't wake up at the same time, plus makes tidying easier) and feature things like large tubs and big two-person showers. Entertaining spaces/bars, usually separated from the bedrooms as much as possible, probably mixed in with the media room/theater concept if space doesn't allow them to be separate. Exercise rooms. Those last two are often in a finished basement. Workshops. "In-law" suites (basically a 1-bedroom apartment), often in the basement. Usually several, but not all, of these things are present in a (by today's standards) mid-size or larger suburban house. Bigger houses may have all or almost all of them.
I've seen wine cellars (climate controlled, not legit caves) and steam/sauna rooms in houses that were large but not zomgwtf large, so those might be present in the middle-upper range of McMansions depending on the preferences of the owners.
Real monster houses that go beyond those may have mansionesque crap like ballrooms, elevators, indoor pools, et c., but then you're approaching or exceeding 7 figures even if the house is in the middle of no-where, so that's actually rich people with poor taste (or maybe they really do have large dance parties on the regular? Who knows. And indoor pool—I mean, if I could easily afford that, yeah, of course I'd like it) not middle-class people trying to imitate the rich.
Plus, remember, these giant houses usually have 3+ car attached garages (you'll have trouble selling a newly-constructed house with fewer than 2 garage bays in the US 'burbs these days—older houses sometimes have only one, or none, though) and maybe another bay around back if the basement is walk-out. Those make them look bigger than they are, as far as living space goes.
Not advocating/defending any of this, just providing an answer to the question :-)
Current house still has 3 bedrooms, they are a bit smaller though. And 1 1/2 bath.
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