Small talk

1 Sizing Strategies. Many people come to the design table with a smaller square footage in mind, either because of budget constraints or because it’s what they have their hearts set on. Achieving that benchmark may seem like a matter of creating some smaller spaces and clustering them together, but it’s a bit more complex.

“I think a lot of people come in with the intention of a small home, but then they don’t want to sacrifice the third bedroom, or the library or the office,” observes Derek Hurd, principal at Gravitas, a custom-home design firm based in Garden City, Idaho. Thinking about how large (or small) these rooms