A Better House, Not a Bigger One
Invest in high-end materials and workmanship rather than simply in square footage.
Synopsis: While everyone else on Naples Island was tearing down little beach cottages and replacing them with hulking, two-story residences, Sigrid Simonson and her husband chose to rebuild the small house on their lot to the same diminutive size. Built with intelligent design and quality materials, the house meets the couple’s every need — and does so stylishly.
With the friendly face of a suntanned surfer, our contractor, Tony Hunter, looks approachable. That might explain why so many total strangers felt free to offer their opinions about the one-story house he was building for my husband, Bob Manwaring, and me. “Where is the second story?” and “Are they crazy?” were two common queries Tony fielded on an almost daily basis during the construction phase.
No one can remember the last time a permit was issued for a one-story house in our neighborhood. We live in a small island community in southern California, where the typical lot size is 30 feet wide by 80 feet long. With no room to expand laterally, two- and three-story homes are being built to replace the smaller ones that once lined our tiny streets and canals. As a result, some of the funky charm that characterized our neighborhood is being lost.
We moved here several years ago, into a 680-square-foot former rental home not much larger than a double-wide trailer. It not only was small, it felt small. It wasn’t long before we—like our neighbors—started planning to replace the house with one better suited to comfortable year-round living.
Bob and I spent many months contemplating what size house to build. We are empty-nest baby boomers with no grandchildren in the foreseeable future. The common wisdom was to build a home with maximum resale value, should we wish to move. But did we need all that space? And could we afford the quality workmanship, appliances, and materials we wanted if we built a larger home? The cost of home construction, we knew, follows a simple formula of dollars per square foot. With a specific budget in mind, we calculated the cost of building a home with high-end workmanship, materials, and appliances. The answer was soon obvious: we could build the house we wanted if we kept it small.
Uncertain of what to do, we invited Charles Lane, a local realtor and dear friend, over for a glass of wine and described our dilemma. His advice was simple: Build the house you want to live in.
So as an exercise, we made a list of exactly—and only—what we needed to live and entertain:
➤ One room to “live” in with multiple doors opening to the outside.
➤ An open kitchen with a big island (which could also be used for things other than food preparation).
➤ One bedroom large enough to accommodate a king-size bed.
➤ Two bathrooms, one with a deep tub.
➤ Well-organized closet space.
➤ A dining area large enough to seat our long-running dinner group of eight people.
➤ A small home office with room for a computer and space to pay bills, etc.
For more photos and details on how this house satisfied all the above requirements, click the View PDF button below.
