We Keep Building Bigger Homes – Yet We Still Live Our Lives in Just a Few Rooms

From Overcrowding to an Almost Endless Pursuit of Square Metres

Anyone who grew up during the 1950s or 1960s probably remembers a very different attitude towards housing. A home was first and foremost supposed to function. Families needed somewhere to sleep, prepare meals, eat, wash, and spend time together. Children often shared bedrooms, the living room might be reserved for special occasions, and the kitchen was the natural gathering place. Homework was done there, family problems were discussed, newspapers were read, and coffee was shared. In many households, the kitchen table was the most important piece of furniture in the entire home.

Since then, something remarkable has happened. As economies improved and housing construction became increasingly industrialised, we began demanding ever-larger homes. Overcrowding had to be eliminated, which was both reasonable and necessary. More people gained their own bedrooms, central heating, and modern bathrooms. We gained better hygiene, greater privacy, and levels of comfort that earlier generations could scarcely have imagined. It was one of the great social achievements of the post-war era.

But the development did not stop at providing people with sufficient living space. Gradually, the size of a home became a measure of personal success. More square metres became almost automatically associated with a better life. An additional bedroom, a larger living room, a separate dining room, a home office, a guest room, and preferably another bathroom became increasingly desirable features. In parts of the world, the housing market evolved into a competition over size, with houses growing larger even as families became smaller.

In Sweden, the average residential floor area in 2025 was 42 square metres per person, according to Statistics Sweden. Among people living in owner-occupied detached houses, the average was 48 square metres. Older people living alone generally have even more space per person, partly because many remain in houses and apartments that once accommodated entire families.

This certainly does not mean that everyone in Sweden lives spaciously. Overcrowding still exists, particularly among some families with children and economically disadvantaged households. But from a longer historical perspective, we have moved from a society in which living space was often scarce to one in which many households occupy considerably more space than previous generations.

And somewhere along the way, perhaps we forgot to ask the most fundamental question of all: What do we actually use our homes for?

When Researchers Followed Families, the True Centre of the Home Was Revealed

At the University of California, Los Angeles, researchers conducted an unusually ambitious project to understand how American middle-class families actually live in their homes. The project, Center on Everyday Lives of Families, involved 32 families in Los Angeles and resulted, among other publications, in the 2012 book Life at Home in the Twenty-First Century: 32 Families Open Their Doors.

What made the research particularly interesting was its methodology. The researchers did not simply ask families how they used their homes, because people's perceptions of their own habits do not always correspond with reality. Instead, they visited the families, photographed their homes, filmed everyday activities, studied floor plans, and recorded where family members spent their time throughout the day. The research generated approximately 1,540 hours of video footage and nearly 17,000 systematic observations.

The result was an almost archaeological portrait of modern American family life. Researchers could see which furniture was actually used, where family members gathered, where conflicts developed, where children did their homework, and which parts of the house remained largely empty during ordinary weekdays.

The findings were revealing. The kitchen turned out to be far more than a place where people prepared food. It functioned as the family's command centre, where everyday logistics, conversations, work, meals, and spontaneous encounters converged. This was where life happened, often with several activities taking place simultaneously.

Bathrooms, meanwhile, emerged as particularly heavily used spaces where the needs of different family members frequently collided. Researchers described them as bottlenecks in everyday life. That does not necessarily mean bathrooms ranked second in a statistical comparison of time spent in different rooms, but they played a disproportionately important role in determining how smoothly family life functioned.

The contrast with other rooms was striking. Formal dining rooms, dedicated sitting rooms, and some large bedrooms were used much more sporadically. Homes could contain carefully furnished spaces where family members spent very little of their active daily lives.

The pattern is easy to recognise far beyond the United States. How many homes have a large dining table used mainly on holidays, a guest bedroom where nobody has slept for months, or an elegant living room containing the most expensive furniture while the family still prefers sitting around the kitchen table?

There is, of course, an important distinction between measuring where people spend their waking hours and measuring their total time at home. Once sleeping hours are included, bedrooms naturally become some of the most frequently occupied spaces. But that is precisely what makes the UCLA research so interesting. It tells us something about how a home functions as a social and practical environment, rather than simply where people happen to be during a 24-hour period.

And perhaps it reveals something architects, housing developers, and estate agents should be thinking about much more seriously.

We Do Not Just Buy Homes – We Buy Imaginary Versions of Our Future Lives

Why do we continue demanding larger houses and more rooms when so much of our daily existence remains concentrated in a limited number of spaces? Part of the answer is obviously practical. Children need privacy, working from home sometimes requires separation, and visiting friends and relatives need somewhere to sleep. But there is also a deeper psychological dimension.

We do not simply buy homes for the people we are. We buy them for the people we imagine we are going to become.

We picture long dinners with friends around a large dining table, relatives spending the night in the guest bedroom, and peaceful afternoons reading in a dedicated study. We imagine a home office where we can work without interruption, perhaps even a fitness room where we will finally begin living the healthy lifestyle we have been planning for years.

There is nothing wrong with those ambitions. The problem arises when our imagined lifestyles begin influencing the design of our homes more than our actual behaviour.

A dining room used five times a year might occupy 15 or 20 square metres that must be constructed, heated, furnished, cleaned, and maintained throughout the year. The guest bedroom might stand empty for most of the time, while the family squeezes around the kitchen table, which simultaneously serves as a dining area, workplace, and social gathering point.

That does not mean we should abolish guest bedrooms or separate dining rooms. A space can be valuable even if it is rarely used. Being able to welcome family and friends may mean a great deal. Quality of life cannot be reduced to counting the hours a chair or bed is occupied.

But surely we should at least be willing to discuss the relationship between the size of a home, its costs, and the life that actually takes place inside it.

During the 1950s, a Swedish living room could sometimes function as a formal room that families were reluctant to wear out through everyday use. It contained the better furniture, perhaps a display cabinet filled with porcelain and a sofa reserved for visitors. Real family life happened somewhere else.

Today's equivalent might be the separate dining room, an exclusive lounge, or a second television room. We have modernised the interior design without necessarily changing the underlying mindset. We still create spaces for an idealised lifestyle that might exist only a handful of days each year.

Perhaps that is also why modern property advertisements reveal so much about our self-image. We are no longer simply selling houses and apartments. We are selling lifestyles, social status, and dreams of the future.

But everyday life rarely allows itself to be directed quite so elegantly.

A Larger Home Carries Costs That Rarely Appear in Property Advertisements

There is another dimension that makes this question more relevant than ever: economics, energy, and resources.

Every additional square metre must be built using materials that someone has manufactured and transported. It requires land, structural components, maintenance, and often heating or cooling. The larger the property, the greater its total resource requirements will generally be, although energy efficiency and building design obviously make an important difference.

For decades, we have tried to compensate for growing homes through more efficient technology. We install better insulation, heat pumps, energy-efficient appliances, and intelligent control systems. All of this is positive. But there are limits to how much efficiency can achieve if we simultaneously continue increasing the amount of space that needs to be supplied with energy.

What I find particularly strange is that discussions about sustainable housing so often begin with technology and end there. We ask which heat pump is most efficient, which windows provide the best insulation, and how solar panels should be configured. Much less frequently do we ask why the property needs to be so large in the first place.

And this is not merely an environmental question. It is also about our personal finances and, perhaps more importantly, our time.

A large home demands more than money. It needs cleaning, repairing, furnishing, and organising. More rooms mean more surfaces to maintain, more possessions to store, and often more problems to manage. Part of our leisure time is consumed by maintaining the very thing that was supposed to improve our leisure.

There is an almost philosophical contradiction here. We work harder to afford larger homes, which then require additional money, resources, and labour to maintain. Meanwhile, the most valuable moments in our lives might still take place around the same small kitchen table.

I do not believe the solution is to force people into smaller homes or romanticise the overcrowded housing conditions of earlier generations. Those conditions involved genuine limitations and serious social problems. But I do believe we need to distinguish between wellbeing and excess.

A home can be generous without being enormous. It can provide space for both companionship and privacy without requiring every conceivable activity to have its own permanent room.

Perhaps Future Homes Should Measure Quality of Life Instead of Square Metres

What if we began designing homes around how people actually use them?

It seems an almost obvious idea, yet it could change a great deal. Instead of automatically asking how many bedrooms a house contains, we could examine how effectively it serves different stages of life. How many functions can the same room perform? Can a workspace disappear when the working day ends? Can a guest sleep comfortably without requiring a permanent guest bedroom? Can the kitchen function as a natural social centre without becoming an impractical working environment?

Digital technology makes this discussion even more interesting. We no longer need separate rooms for many functions that once required dedicated equipment. Music, films, communication, work, and information can now be accessed through a smartphone or computer. Libraries, offices, and entertainment systems have partly transformed from physical locations into digital services.

At the same time, new technology could help us understand how homes are actually used. Privacy-conscious sensors, for example, could measure presence and movement between different spaces without filming or recording the people living there. With appropriate design, voluntary participation, and proper control over information, such studies could provide architects with far better evidence than traditional questionnaires.

But technology must never become an excuse to monitor people inside their own homes. The objective must be to understand how a building functions, not to control human behaviour.

We also need greater flexibility in residential architecture itself. We do not live the same way at 25, 45, and 75. Children leave home, working life changes, relationships end, and new family arrangements emerge. Yet we continue constructing homes that are often relatively difficult to adapt without extensive renovation.

Perhaps we should begin thinking of a home as a flexible environment that changes with the people living in it, rather than a static collection of rooms with predetermined functions.

Shared guest rooms in apartment buildings, communal workshops, bookable workspaces, and common social facilities are examples of arrangements that could reduce the need for every household to own every possible function individually. Such solutions will not suit everyone, but in certain circumstances they could give people access to more opportunities without requiring every individual home to become larger.

The question is whether we are prepared to reconsider our assumptions.

Because the value of housing is deeply connected to our ideas about ownership, independence, and status. Choosing to live in a smaller home can still be perceived as an economic failure, even when it is a deliberate decision that provides greater freedom.

Perhaps that is the perception we most urgently need to change.

Back to the Kitchen Table – Where Life Actually Happens

What fascinates me about the UCLA research is not really the discovery that kitchens play such an important role. Most people probably know that somewhere in the back of their minds. What is fascinating is that, despite this understanding, we continue organising and valuing our homes according to entirely different principles.

We are impressed by grand entrances, extra bedrooms, open spaces, and expensive materials. We photograph living rooms where nobody sits and carefully arrange dining tables before putting properties on the market. We invest considerable amounts of money in rooms intended to communicate a particular lifestyle, while real life often unfolds in just a few relatively ordinary spaces.

It is in the kitchen that someone talks about their day. It is where children ask questions, where morning coffee is shared, where arguments begin and are resolved, where plans are made, and where spontaneous conversations happen. The bathroom is another kind of essential space, not for social interaction but for the fundamental routines of daily life. The remaining rooms fulfil different purposes, but not necessarily in proportion to their size.

We should not draw overly broad conclusions from a study involving 32 American families. Their lives do not represent every household, and residential habits vary according to culture, age, income, family circumstances, and working patterns. But the research raises a question that extends far beyond those particular families.

Has the way we design and purchase homes genuinely followed human needs, or have those needs gradually been shaped by a property market that constantly wants to sell us something larger?

The housing reforms of the post-war period were intended to improve people's living conditions. That was a sensible ambition. But perhaps we have reached a point where additional square metres are no longer the obvious route to greater quality of life.

Because what actually makes a good home? Is it a house with five bedrooms, three bathrooms, and two living rooms, or is it a place where the people living there feel comfortable, secure, and free to live as they choose?

There is no universal answer. Someone with a large family, a home-based business, or specific practical needs may have perfectly legitimate reasons for requiring a larger property. But bigger is not automatically better, just as smaller is not automatically wiser.

Perhaps we should start evaluating the quality of housing differently. Not merely in square metres, number of rooms, or market value, but in how well it works for the people living there.

We have spent more than seventy years creating larger and more comfortable homes. In many respects, we have succeeded. But if the UCLA research tells us anything, it is that the most important spaces in a home are not always the largest, most expensive, or most impressive.

And perhaps real luxury is not having another room, but having the freedom not to need one.