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In Praise of Little Old Houses
by Richard Bruce Anderson
All around Southern California there are pockets of little old houses, most of them built before the Second World War. Compared to the millions of homes in the suburban sprawl, there are not a lot of them, since the Southland was rather sparsely populated before WWII. But most older cities have them – two- or three-bedroom, one-bath cottages with small yards and a single car garage, built in the 1940s and earlier. They’ve been considered unfashionable for many years. But those little old houses are looking more desirable as housing prices have skyrocketed, and they have charms that more conventional homes do not. If you’re thinking about buying a house, you might consider looking in an older section of town.
My wife and I are looking for a little old house. We live in Santa Barbara, which is made almost exclusively of little old houses, so we have plenty to choose from. Budget constraints and other considerations seem to be leading us to the West Side, an old neighborhood that’s always been the least glamorous part of town. We want two bedrooms and room for an office, about 1,000 square feet.
The neighborhood on the West Side is very different from the “normal” Southern California settlement pattern. It’s laid out on a grid, with no winding streets or cul de sacs, and each house is different. I mean very different. Rather than being a variation on a simple theme, as in a subdivision, these are individual houses, built one by one, usually years apart. Each one has a history, beginning with the original builders. There are quite a few Craftsman cottages, but there are also Mission-style houses with flat roofs, and a rich, eclectic assortment of miscellaneous styles from all periods. The streets are narrow, and cars drive slowly. It’s easy to walk to downtown, if you have the time, or bicycle if you’re in a hurry. This is the way all cities were before the Second World War — diverse, and built to a human scale.
We experienced a bit of culture shock when we started seriously looking at these small houses. The idea of home ownership is the cornerstone of the American Dream, and we all have a tendency to think that our worth and “success” is measured by the size of our house. That belief is part of everybody’s cultural conditioning, and it has an insidious effect even on contrarians like ourselves. We found it hard to imagine living in half as much space as we have now, and frankly we wondered what our friends would think.
We started feeling better about the down-sizing idea when we began seriously examining the houses we found attractive. My wife is an engineer, and with an engineer’s systematic approach to problems, she made scale drawings of some floor plans on graph paper, along with top views of our furniture. She cut out the “furniture” in to-scale pieces, and color coded it. Moving these pieces around on the floor plans, we “rearranged the furniture.” We saw how the couch and the love seat would go in the living room, saw how our bed would fit in a smaller bedroom; we redesigned the kitchen. And the interesting thing we found is that a 1,000 square foot house would fit us just fine, even though our present house is almost twice that large, because 1,000 square feet is all we really use. Our living room furniture in our present house, for example, is arranged in a way that works for us, but only takes up half the actual living room. The excess space we have now makes the house seem grander, but effectively it just lengthens the hike from the kitchen to the bedroom, and provides breeding space for dust bunnies.
The little houses on the West Side are more practical in many ways than our present abode. They’re easier to heat, cheaper to light, and easier to clean, simply because they’re smaller. Because they’re part of a real neighborhood, where we can walk or bike to the store, we won’t have to drive our cars as much (we might try living with only one car—unheard of, in Southern California). And they are surprisingly charming. Many of them contain architectural details like coved ceilings, wainscots and crown moldings that are found nowadays only in the most expensive of custom homes. And they are more affordable than anything else around.
Housing and urban design in general are starting to move in the direction of human scale communities, if not smaller houses. That can’t happen fast enough, because the energy to support the suburban settlement pattern won’t be around for long. But those of us who are already starting to simplify our lives and opt out of the mainstream preoccupation with material affluence don’t need to wait for the new world to be built. We have alternatives: we can choose to leave suburbia, to downsize and rightsize. We can resist the pressures of the culture, and start thinking about those little old houses left behind in the rush to the suburbs. It’s said that small is beautiful, and nowhere is that more likely to be true right now, than with our homes.
Richard Bruce Anderson is Senior Fellow at For the Future, a progressive think tank based in Santa Barbara. Email: rba@forthefuture.org.
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