We want less house (and no, we're not minimalists)
Somewhere between the kids' toys taking over the living room and the realization that you have a guest bedroom nobody has actually slept in since 2022, a lot of us started having a thought we weren't totally sure we were allowed to have.
What if I just... wanted less house?
Not in a Marie Kondo, capsule wardrobe, nothing-on-the-counters kind of way. Just in a — this doesn't quite feel like my life — kind of way. Like the space you're in was designed for a version of your family that doesn't really exist.
I've been noticing this feeling everywhere lately. And then my friend Lauren moved from a nearly 3,000 square foot suburban house into a 900 square foot city condo — with her toddler, her husband, and a small dog — and I had to get her on the podcast to talk about it.
From 3,000 sq ft to 900 (and she doesn't regret a single square foot)
Lauren Naderi is an interior designer and someone I've known since we were ten years old. She's also, as it turns out, one of the most intentional people I know when it comes to how she wants to live — even when that looks nothing like what she thought she wanted.
A few years back, she and her husband did what felt like the right move: the suburbs, the four-bedroom house with the playroom and the backyard, all the boxes checked. She loved the house itself. She put real work and thought and taste into that space.
But something wasn't sitting right. They were far from friends and family. Everything required a drive. Their neighbourhood was a brand-new subdivision still figuring itself out — great house, but not much community. And there were rooms they never used that just slowly filled up with stuff.
So they made a decision that made everyone look at them a little sideways: they moved into a condo. Under 1,000 square feet. "900 on a good day," Lauren said. With a toddler.
"We'd do it again," she told me. "Ten out of ten."
It's all about having the right things.
Here's the thing about Lauren that makes her story interesting: she is not a minimalist. She will be the first to tell you this. She recently took five pairs of pants to the tailor in a single trip. Her tailor had opinions.
But her philosophy is that smart storage beats square footage. When you're working with a smaller space, you stop filling rooms out of habit and start making intentional choices about what actually belongs in your home. You get creative with cabinetry. Everything gets a home. You stop accumulating by default.
And it turns out a lot of what we accumulate is just stuff filling space we weren't really using anyway.
The condo they live in now is designed so that everything has a place. The rooftop is theirs. They walk to get their bread. Her parents are down the road. Her daughter found a school she loves. And tshe doesn’t miss he rooms that used to quietly collect junk in the suburbs.
"It feels like we're living so much more intentionally," she said.
Wanting less house is actually about…
The "want less house" feeling and Lauren's non-linear career path and basically everything we talked about in this episode are all different versions of the same question: what do I actually want, versus what was I told to want?
Lauren went from advertising to holistic nutrition to corporate to interior design. On paper it looks like she couldn't make up her mind. In practice it looks like someone doing the real work of figuring out what actually fits her life — as a mom, as a creative person, as someone who needs flexibility and meaning in her work.
The suburban house was the same. The right choice for a lot of people. Not quite right for them.
I think more of us are starting to give ourselves permission — slowly, a little awkwardly — to ask that question out loud. And then actually do something about the answer.
Listen to the full episode
This is Episode 143 of All Figured Out, and it's the debut of what I'm calling the yap format: less structured, more real, Lauren and I just talking about what's on our minds. We also somehow ended up in a twenty-minute conversation about pull-on pants. Lauren makes a genuinely compelling case.
