ARTICLE 22

I’m an Architect. Sometimes My Job Is to Tell You Not to Build.

It almost feels like another lifetime ago.

I guess it kind of was. I’m getting dangerously close to 40 now, so apparently I’m allowed to start saying things like that.

When I was younger and living in New York, I bounced between a few apartments. Two of them have always stuck with me because, without realizing it at the time, they taught me a lot about how space actually works.

The first was near Van Cortlandt Park in the Bronx.

It was big, especially compared with the apartment I would move into later on the Upper East Side.

And yet the smaller apartment worked better.

A lot better.

Looking back, that contrast taught me something I still think about today:

More square footage does not necessarily mean more usable space.

And that is why, when someone tells me they need an addition, my first instinct is not always to start drawing one.

Sometimes they absolutely need more space.

Sometimes they just need the space they already have to work better.

The big apartment that never really felt big

The Bronx apartment had plenty of square footage.

On paper, it should have felt spacious.

But the layout was strange.

There was this oversized hallway where I eventually put my desk. It was too wide to feel like a normal hallway, but not wide enough to become an actual room.

It was just there.

It counted toward the square footage. I was paying rent for it. But it wasn’t really doing anything.

The living room had almost the opposite problem.

It was large. Almost large enough to comfortably have both a living area and a dining area.

Almost.

And sometimes that word is what makes a room frustrating.

A space can technically have enough area but still have the wrong proportions. Maybe it is too long and narrow. Maybe circulation cuts through the middle of it. Maybe the doors and windows land exactly where the furniture wants to go.

You can have a large room and still spend years moving the sofa around wondering why nothing ever feels right.

Then there was the elevated 1 train.

The apartment sat right next to it.

You didn’t exactly need a schedule to know when the train was coming.

You could feel it.

Every so often the place would start rumbling enough that it felt like a small earthquake had been worked into the daily routine.

Eventually you get used to almost anything, but it taught me something homeowners do not always think about when looking at floor plans:

How a space sounds matters almost as much as how it looks.

A room can be beautiful and still be exhausting if you hear traffic, footsteps, plumbing, mechanical equipment, or the rest of the house all day.

And then there was the kitchen window

The kitchen had enough room for a small round high-top table.

There was a window too.

Unfortunately, the view was basically the neighboring building and someone else’s bedroom.

Opening it was not always an improvement.

Depending on the day, the “fresh air” came with a pretty strong dumpster smell from below.

So you could be standing there making eggplant parm, smelling garlic, tomato sauce and melted cheese...

mixed with what smelled vaguely like a dead animal.

Nothing complements eggplant parm quite like notes of dumpster.

It is funny now.

At the time, not so much.

But there is actually a design lesson buried in that ridiculous combination of smells.

Having a window is not the same thing as having a meaningful connection to the outdoors.

What is outside that window matters.

The view matters.

The light matters.

Privacy matters.

Fresh air definitely matters.

A rectangle of glass on a floor plan may technically be a window, but that tells you very little about what it will actually feel like to live next to it.

Getting outside was another story

The building had a courtyard.

So technically, I had outdoor space.

But if I wanted to use it, I had to leave the apartment, walk down five flights of stairs, and make my way outside.

There is nothing wrong with that.

But psychologically, the courtyard never really felt like part of the apartment.

It was somewhere else.

I did not fully appreciate that distinction until I moved to the Upper East Side.

Then I moved somewhere much smaller

There were three of us living there.

German and I were in architecture school together, and we shared the apartment with another roommate.

It was definitely smaller than the Bronx apartment.

The layout was a little unconventional too.

There were two bedrooms on the upper level with one common kitchen and living area between them. Then a spiral staircase dropped down to German’s room below.

German and I are both drummers, so naturally he had his drums down there with him.

The place had character.

But more importantly, it worked.

German had enough room downstairs for his bed, his stuff, and his drums.

My bedroom had enough room for my bed and a drafting table.

The common area was not enormous, but there was enough room for a table where the three of us could sit down and eat.

Nobody had a ton of space.

But everybody had the space they needed.

That is a very different thing.

The rooms knew what they were supposed to be

Looking back, that may have been one of the biggest differences between the two apartments.

Very little space felt left over.

The bedrooms were bedrooms.

The common space was where we gathered.

The kitchen and eating area were together.

German had his own zone downstairs.

Everyone had somewhere they could retreat to.

Architects sometimes use the word adjacency, which sounds much more technical than it really is.

It basically means:

Are the things that should be near each other actually near each other?

Where do you eat compared with where you cook?

Where is the bathroom compared with the bedrooms?

Where is storage compared with where you enter the house?

Where are the noisy spaces compared with the quiet ones?

You can add hundreds of square feet to a house and still get those relationships wrong.

And when they are wrong, you feel it every day.

My fire escape taught me something too

My bedroom had direct access to the fire escape.

Calling it a balcony would probably be generous.

It was a New York fire escape.

But I could step outside.

If I wanted some air, I did not have to put on shoes, leave the apartment, walk through the building and go down five flights of stairs.

I could just go outside.

And if my bedroom door was closed, nobody had to come through my room to do the same thing. The apartment was on a lower level, and the main entrance tucked behind the stair also gave everyone else direct access outside.

So even though the apartment itself was smaller, the outdoors never felt very far away.

I think that made the apartment feel substantially bigger than it actually was.

Sometimes a room feels bigger because it doesn’t end at the wall

This is something I pay a lot more attention to now.

A room does not necessarily need to be enormous if it has a strong relationship with what is outside it.

Maybe it is a glass door opening onto a patio.

Maybe it is a porch.

Maybe it is a balcony.

Maybe it is simply a well-placed window framing a yard, trees, mountains or open sky.

Your eye continues beyond the wall.

The room has somewhere to go visually.

You have not added a single square foot.

But the experience of the space has changed.

I think of that as a kind of transparency between indoors and outdoors.

And it matters even in cold climates.

Living in Montana now, I am obviously not going to leave a patio door open in January.

But that does not mean the connection stops mattering.

You still see the landscape.

You still see the sky.

You still see snow coming down.

And sometimes you just want to open the door for thirty seconds and get some air.

When a house feels cramped, having immediate access to the outside can make an enormous difference.

Privacy isn’t just about walls either

There was another interesting difference between those apartments.

The Bronx apartment was larger, but I could hear the baby and the dog upstairs running around over the living area.

And, of course, there was the train regularly reminding me that New York City was very much alive outside.

The Upper East Side apartment had more people living in a smaller footprint, yet somehow everyone felt more separated.

I was right next to the bathroom, and I barely remember hearing toilets flushing or people moving around.

German had his drums downstairs.

Everyone could disappear into their own space when they wanted to.

That is another part of residential design that gets overlooked.

We normally think of privacy visually.

Can someone see into the room?

But there is also acoustic privacy.

Can you hear everything happening in the bathroom?

Can you hear the television from the bedroom?

Does somebody walking upstairs sound like they are coming through the ceiling?

Can one person stay up late without keeping everyone else awake?

A large house with poor acoustic separation can feel surprisingly crowded.

A much smaller house can feel comfortable when everyone has somewhere they can retreat.

One apartment had more square footage.

The other had better square footage.

That is the thing that has stayed with me.

Because today someone might come to me and say:

“We need another 500 square feet.”

And maybe they do.

But before I start drawing an addition, I want to understand what is making them feel like they need it.

Because “we need more space” can mean a lot of different things.

Maybe your house isn’t actually too small

Maybe the kitchen feels small because half of it is being used as circulation.

Maybe your living room is large, but every useful wall has a doorway or opening in it.

Maybe you have a formal dining room nobody uses while everyone crowds around the kitchen every night.

Maybe there is a hallway like the one I had in the Bronx, consuming a surprising amount of square footage without doing much of anything.

Maybe you have plenty of rooms, but nowhere anyone can go for privacy.

Maybe the house has almost no relationship with the backyard, so the interior feels more confined than it really is.

Maybe the storage is simply in the wrong place.

Every one of those situations can lead somebody to say:

“We need more space.”

But they are different problems.

Some are planning problems.

Some are circulation problems.

Some are proportion problems.

Some are storage problems.

Some are acoustic problems.

Some are problems with daylight, views and connection to the outdoors.

And yes, some really are square-footage problems.

The important part is figuring out which one you actually have.

This is why I want to know how you live

When I look at an existing house, I am not only interested in the dimensions on the plan.

I want to know what happens there on a Tuesday morning.

Where do you come in with groceries?

Where do the shoes end up?

Where does everyone naturally gather?

Which room never gets used?

Where do you go when you want to be alone?

Where does everybody pile up at the same time?

Where does the furniture feel awkward?

Can you see the backyard from where you actually spend your time?

Can you easily get outside?

Where does the house make normal life harder than it should be?

That information can tell me much more than the total square footage.

Because good residential design is really about understanding how people occupy space, not simply how much of it they own.

Sometimes the answer absolutely is an addition

I am not arguing against adding onto houses.

Sometimes more space is exactly what you need.

Maybe you need another bedroom.

Maybe you work from home now.

Maybe your family has grown.

Maybe the kitchen simply cannot become what you want within the existing footprint.

Then an addition may be the right answer.

But I would rather reach that conclusion after understanding the existing house than assume it before we even begin.

Because if 2,000 square feet does not work very well, adding another 500 square feet does not automatically fix it.

You might just end up with 2,500 square feet that still doesn’t work.

Only now it cost a lot more.

That’s where I think an architect adds value

An architect’s job should not simply be to take the thing someone asks for and start drawing it.

Sometimes our job is to question the request.

Why do you want the addition?

What problem are you actually trying to solve?

Could we solve it another way?

Maybe the answer is another 500 square feet.

Maybe it is moving a wall three feet.

Maybe it is relocating a doorway.

Maybe it is turning a room nobody uses into one the family uses every day.

Maybe it is adding storage exactly where all the stuff currently piles up.

Maybe it is connecting the living room to the backyard so a relatively modest room suddenly feels connected to something much larger.

And sometimes the most valuable advice I can give someone is:

You may not need to build as much as you think.

It feels like another lifetime ago now, but I went from that big apartment beside Van Cortlandt Park to a smaller apartment on the Upper East Side.

The smaller apartment had more people.

A spiral staircase.

A drum set downstairs.

A drafting table in my bedroom.

And a fire escape outside my window.

Yet somehow, it felt like we had more space.

I did not have the architectural language to explain it then.

Now I do.

Good design isn’t about getting the most square footage. It’s about getting the most out of the square footage you have.

And sometimes, as an architect, my job is to tell you not to build.

Michael Demetrios Frudakis, AIA, NCARB
Principal Architect