Angela Mollard: The unexpected upside of downsizing
I was a reluctant downsizer. But as our home space contracts and we can no longer escape to distant rooms, our hearts have suddenly stretched, writes Angela Mollard. Bigger doesn’t always equal better.
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I was dreading moving house. We were downsizing from a large family home with multiple rooms, separate floors and storage galore to a rundown cottage with sloping floorboards, peeling wallpaper and a single toilet.
I predicted self-pitying tears (me) and sulkiness (my two teenage daughters).
But a month on in the gherkin green fibro house we call “the grotto” we are happier than ever.
And I’ve worked out it’s because the house is so small we’re spending far more time together.
Whereas my teen-typical daughters used to disappear to their bedrooms, now they join me in the sun-lit kitchen cum diner cum office. We laugh at the shoebox-sized sink, collectively lament the absence of a dishwasher and speculate how long it might take for a dropped pea to roll from one side of the kitchen to the other.
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The girls are borrowing each other’s clothes (half their belongings are in storage), laughing at the idiosyncrasies of a 1950s kitchen and are in competition as to who can ingratiate themselves to the fluffball of a cat two doors up. I feel as if shrinking their home has stretched their hearts.
Living here has reminded me of a tiny studio flat I had in London. Fresh from a breakup, I moved into the top floor flat in thrumming Chelsea, just a few doors down from Bob Geldof.
The shower was so small I hit my arms on the side when washing my hair and the sofa bed had to be folded away to gain access to the kitchen. But I was happy. My bolthole was a skip from the famous Kings Road and I quickly befriended the next-door neighbour who invited me to drink wine on his roof terrace overlooking the skyline.
After decades of materialism which has seen us chase bigger homes, bigger cars, bigger holidays, bigger breasts — in fact, bigger everything, I’m noticing a return to small. The average Australian home has decreased in size over the last 20 years to an average 190 square metres in 2017, down 2.7 per cent on the previous year.
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Anecdotally, I’m also seeing more intergenerational living. I watched as one of my former neighbours transformed her home so she could share it with her son, daughter-in-law and grandchildren while my brother and his wife have just built a home which includes accommodation for his ageing in-laws. The Tiny House movement is booming, Marie Kondo has guided us in getting rid of our mountains of “stuff” and agenda-setters like my mate Sarah Wilson are urging us not to buy so much crap in the first place.
Small and sustainable is no longer weird and niche as captured on the TV series The Good Life, rather it’s emerging as a key factor in a happy and healthy life.
Last week I heard Ikea Australia’s Head of Interior Design, Tiffany Buckins, discuss the huge changes afoot in how we live. By 2050, 68 per cent of us will live in urban areas and most will be happy to forfeit size for their ideal location. Community, a sense of belonging and places outside our homes will contribute more than “space” to meeting our emotional needs. As she says: “We can now find a feeling of home no matter where we are.” Naturally, Ikea is responding to these changed circumstances and last week announced the launch of its first piece of robotic furniture — an all-in-one solution that transforms a bedroom to a walk-in closet to a workspace and living room.
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While “small” is a necessity for me right now, I can see how it might become addictive. It feels nurturing, contained and almost “anti-status”. The spaces are for use rather than show and what they lack in scale they make up for in cosiness. After years of sleeping 20 metres from my daughters I’m now sandwiched in a room between them. I love hearing the youngest getting ready for a night out with her friends and the older calls me in to chat when I’m walking down the hall. This is how families used to live before McMansions and seven-seater cars became a measure of success. It’s what they looked like when everyone had to help with the cooking and the housework and before portable devices and “social” media turned houses into a series of individual Wi-Fi- connected cocoons.
I wonder if smaller homes might be part of the solution to our mental health crisis. For decades we’ve marched to the beat of materialism but the handbags and shoes and paintings and fancy furniture hasn’t fed our souls. Alain de Botton speaks of home as any place which harmonises with “our own prized internal song” which is why cafes and gyms and gardens often feed us more than our houses.
With a renovation planned I intend to stay small. Not too small, because those Americans who feature on Tiny House Nation living in two square metres are clearly mad or have done a lot of therapy. But being close to my girls these past few weeks has felt like sitting round a campfire.
It’s time we broke out the marshmallows.
Originally published as Angela Mollard: The unexpected upside of downsizing
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