Take a big piece of land and put a big, sprawling structure on it to call home and all is good.
It has been so since the big guy with the club expanded to the biggest cave.
But here's a list of reasons why we need to ban all future mansions in favour of a similar-sized home that sprouts upwards rather than sideways.
- People in large mansions secretly find them a pain in the ass as there's a load of time-and-energy consumed fetching the phone you forgot in your bedroom, or the socks you seek in the laundry room. It's a ton of useless hiking.
- Walking by an empty room - and you've got a ton of 'em in a mansion regardless unless you've got 20 kids - is a depressing experience and invariably makes you feel lonely.
- If you have kids you never see them in a big house, as they're always in their little hotel room bedrooms.
- A study (Nice of you not to link to it- Chimples) indicates that square footage is the single most overrated happiness factor.
- A sprawling house gobbles up lots of land would otherwise have been used for nature, stuff like woods, gardens, rabbit patches and dirt bike races.
Those seeking to own huge houses can still get what they want in terms of square footage. But it would be in the form of a building with a 1,000 square foot footprint that rises to up to 10 storeys.
Here are the advantages.
- Shorter walks around the home, as the furthest you'll ever have to stroll is to the elevator and back.
- You want a 8,000 square foot mansion with enough room for your hula hoops, cross country skies, book collection and pool table? No problem, just put your stuff on another floor.
- Outside your home will sit verdant patches of grass, flowers and babbling brooks, freeing up precious land and making the area pleasant for your neighbours to pass by.
- If you want to downsize, you can easily convert the vertical mansion into a multi-unit apartment or condo building by renting out the other floors.
- Smart elevators can be rigged so unauthorized people could not enter your home and would be there waiting with your smart phone command.
So hello municipal zoning authorities.
Click print on this post and collect it from your ink jet to bring to your next meeting.
Time to say no to all new sprawling mansions and yes to more sensible structures with smaller footprints.
For one thing, Quebec's steadily-declining birthrate has essentially eliminated the need for large mansions and even the once-common "country homesteads" which, generations ago, existed to house sprawling families as well as domestic staff.
ReplyDeleteLikewise, as in Canada, many of the old, massive housing estates in the U.K. have long since been transformed into museums, schools, hospitals, etc., simply because any remaining members of the original owners could no longer afford the increased taxes and the upkeep, eventually moving elsewhere for more practical reasons.
Today, the notion of only one or two people living in a large house consisting of seldom-used rooms and often including an adjacent, expensive-to-maintain landscape is extravagant to say the least.
Walking through Westmount and other such affluent districts, one is tempted to suspect how many of the residents are still truly wealthy enough to actually afford maintaining such a lifestyle. Surely more than a few of them are deep in debt--perhaps even close to bankruptcy--yet reluctant to sell out for fear of losing their "social status".
Just for interest, I read somewhere that in highly congested areas of London, England - the big craze these days is to build down - not up. In some cases they are adding 3 or 4 floors of space down below the main property. Who knows – maybe the very bottom floor could serve as a living space; and a bomb out shelter at the same time?
ReplyDeleteThe downside (pun: sorry) to "living down" is the real threat of flooding due to heavy downpours and water main breaks--as unfortunately happens too often.
ReplyDeleteAvoid basement apartments!