Think On It

Living room

November 10th, 2007

NY Times

Everybody has his own idea about how much space it takes to be happy. I live alone in 100 SM or 1000 SF and I need another room for all the messy things I like to do but whose messes I can’t live with. My daughter is used to living in an apartment much bigger than my house with two balconies and is looking for an affordable real house that doesn’t feel squished. Another friend here recently moved into a two story apartment so much smaller than her old one that she had to buy a flat TV. We’ve all heard about the 10,000 SF houses the young and successful require in the big city suburbs.

But what if you want to live in the heart of a city where real estate costs as much as white truffles? What if you want to rear several children in the middle of London or New York and you don’t have and can’t get you hands on four million bucks? I find these stories inestimably more interesting than all those beige marble quasi-palaces in Architectural Digest.

And here they are. Three biggish families in three expensive cities, with three different ideas about how to get living room. They are really different from each other, too. The only things they have in common are kids and urban souls.

My only complaint is that they didn’t say enough about the kitchens.

Entry Filed under: Beauty

6 Comments Add your own

1. eg | November 12th, 2007 at 3:33 pm

I’m glad I don’t have to live like that. And they didn’t look much like cookers.
2. admin | November 12th, 2007 at 5:45 pm

I surmise that in expensive cities and bunches of kids, someone has to be cooking. Ever picked up the check for four in London? It could pay your mortgage.
3. Meg | November 12th, 2007 at 8:33 pm

I found those articles fascinating, too. All three families made some interesting choices, but it seemed as if because they HAD a budget, they wanted to seem more budget conscious than they really were ($700,000 is not exactly a pittance for a renovation, and I suspect that was the lowest budget of the 3). Even so, in the locations they live in, having a budget forced some interesting design choices. I, too, would have liked a gander at their kitchens.
4. admin | November 12th, 2007 at 9:09 pm

Oh, a new name! Welcome, Meg.
Thing is, for those cities that’s a tight budget. That’s what I used to do. When city dwellers tell you they have $500,000 and they think it’s a lot, they haven’t looked into what it costs to arrest elevators, get demolished materials out and carried away, dumping fees, and believe me, a thousand other things you don’t deal with on a quarter acre in the suburbs. Most building also restrict the hours of work, so there are more days that workers and trucks have to be parked for as much as $16 an hour. Owner has to pay those things, whether they see it as a line item or not.
5. Meg | November 13th, 2007 at 11:29 pm

I was thinking about that, a bit, and trying to sort out what was simply cost-of-living difference between cities, and what might have been the families feeling as if they were on a tight budget because they knew people with substantially larger budgets (does that make any sense?). You’re right, though, cost-of-living differences shouldn’t be overlooked. I remember looking for a flat in London and actually crying because it was so insanely expensive for really horrible places in bad locations- and that was closing in on 15 years ago.
6. admin | November 14th, 2007 at 9:47 am

I think when a 3 bedroom coop sells for 4 million, the standards change all up and down the line, although clearly the line doesn’t get as low as, say, where I live.

When eg tells me about the “bargain” places she’s found, I choke.