Small, Not Tiny

The Goldilocks question: what's just right for real homes?

This letter is part of Design Dispatches, design-forward essays exploring how spaces (both indoors and out) are shaped, why design choices matter, and how the built environment influences the way we live. You can easily adjust your email preferences anytime to skip this section and still receive all the other stories, reflections, and design inspiration from The Whiskey Porch.

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Hello my lovely readers.

Welcome to the porch. Come on in, stay awhile.

Today we’re talking about what makes a home comfortable. Somewhere between “bigger is better” and “tiny is virtuous,” most of us are tentatively asking the same thing:

“What’s just right for real life?”

In my last Design Dispatches post, Smaller, Simpler, More Beautiful, I explored why extremes tend to fail us - why more space doesn’t always mean more ease, and why radical reduction can create its own kind of strain.

Today is about the what. Not a manifesto. Not a square-footage debate. Just clarity.

When you imagine a smaller home, what do you hope it gives you more of -time, calm, beauty, freedom?

Somewhere between too much and too little: our front porch at Juniper Hill Cottage in northern Arizona

Our culture loves extremes. Oversized homes on one end. Tiny homes on the other. Both are highly visible, highly symbolic, and highly polarizing.

But most of us don’t actually live - or want to live - at the edges.

Most are looking for a home that feels:

• lighter, but not fragile

• simpler, but not cramped

• beautiful, but still cozy

That’s the missing middle. And it’s where “small, not tiny” lives.

Call it the Goldilocks question if you like - not too much, not too little, but just right for the way life actually unfolds.

Have you ever felt caught between “too much house” and “not enough room to breathe”?

Tiny homes are ingenious. I mean that sincerely. They are brilliant exercises in efficiency and constraint. Rather romantic really.

But here’s the distinction that matters:

Tiny homes optimize space. Right-sized homes absorb change and embrace life.

Most people don’t need a home that requires constant optimization.

They need a home that can handle guests, illness, work shifts, aging bodies. A home that flexes with evolving relationships and families expanding and shrinking - without becoming a daily performance.

Tiny living works best when life is stable and predictable. For many others, it becomes rigid. Every item must justify itself. Every disruption creates friction.

And friction isn’t the same thing as simplicity.

Where in your life do you need flexibility more than efficiency (or square footage) right now?

“Small, not tiny” isn’t a number. It’s a set of priorities.

A right-sized home focuses on proportion, flow, and livability - not just reduction.

It tends to have:

• Rooms that can change roles without collapsing

• Circulation that respects the footprint, rather than wasting it

• Quiet, integrated storage for what you actually use and need

• Clear thresholds - an entry moment, a porch, a garden gate - that let the home live a little larger

• Spaces that earn their keep, instead of sitting idle or over-specialized

• Space in the budget for fewer, but better details

This is the difference between a home that looks efficient on paper and one that feels generous day after day.

Which spaces in your home work hardest for you - and which ones fight you?

Goldilocks says that this is just right for an evening porch sit. Juniper Hill Cottage in northern Arizona.

Every home is a set of tradeoffs.

The trouble with trends is that they pretend there’s a perfect answer. There isn’t. There’s only a better fit for real life.

Often that means:

• fewer rooms, but better ones

• a smaller footprint paired with stronger indoor-outdoor living

• less storage, but smarter storage

• simplicity that allows flexibility, not rigidity

If you’ve ever walked into a home and thought, “It’s small, but it feels right,” you’ve felt good tradeoffs at work - proportion and thoughtful design doing more than square footage ever could.

“Enough” isn’t a moral achievement. It’s a design outcome.

A right-sized home doesn’t ask you to perform restraint or prove virtue. It simply supports you - comfortably, reliably - through ordinary days and inevitable change.

In my next post, I’ll get practical: how smaller homes succeed or fail based on circulation, storage, thresholds, and flexibility - the unglamorous details that make rooms earn their keep.

For now, I’ll leave you with the Goldilocks question to ponder:

What would be just right for you - not in an ideal life, but in your real one?

In the next Design Dispatches letter, I’m planning to explore Living Smaller, On Purpose. On deciding what’s enough before life decides for you. I’ve got that planned for two weeks from today.

Thank you for being here with me.

With contentment & possibility,

P.S. These letters are meant to be a conversation, not a conclusion. If you’re wrestling with what “small, not tiny” means in your own life, I’d love to hear where you are in that thinking.