Bigger, not better

I’ve freely admitted in this column that I’m addicted to home improvement shows. There isn’t a home makeover show I don’t like, except maybe “Deserving Design.” It just seems so cheesy to me. It reminds me of the old “Queen For a Day” show, where the contestant with the most pitiful story wins a new refrigerator. By all means, give someone in need a new kitchen appliance, but don’t exploit her misery for ratings, you know?

Anyway, a show I’ve recently discovered (or Tivo discovered for me) is “House Hunters” and its younger sister, “House Hunters International.” 

On these show, a homeowner is looking for a new house with certain amenities within a price range, and a real estate agent shows them three possibilities to choose from. The options are reviewed endlessly, as if the producers have judged the viewers to be slow learners. The audience is kept in suspense until the very end, when the buyer’s choice is revealed. Sometimes it is a surprise. Most of the time, I’ve stopped caring after the choices have been presented for the seventh time.

This week, I had a revelation while watching a family decide among three $600,000 houses with five bedrooms and four bathrooms: to Americans, there is no such thing as too big. The family in question had three children and a large dog and were cramped in their four-bedroom home and had been making do with kitchen countertops that were not granite and a pantry that was tragically small.

When the mother assessed the kitchen in a new 4,200-sq.-ft. house, she looked across the expanse of a huge drive-through, eat-in kitchen and pronounced it “too small.” This stay-at-home mother of three young children who admitted she seldom cooked, required an island so she could keep an eye on the kids while she heated up the take-out. 

The master bedroom of this mansion spanned two area codes, but it was, again, “kinda small.”

I can’t recall which mega-house the family chose, but I remember that it had a shower bigger than my bedroom. 

After watching this celebration of excess, I watched an episode of the international version. On this show, families in places like Budapest, Kingston, and Hong Kong look for new digs. Their “must-haves” vary with the locale. In Budapest, adequate hot water is a plus. In Kingston, an outdoor living space is a priority, and in Hong Kong, a kitchen with room for more than one person is a winner. 

The couple apartment-hunting in Budapest could have fit their entire place in the “tiny” kitchen rejected by the Americans. The places they saw were 400-700 sq. ft. Anything above 800 sq. ft. was a palace. A kitchen with a dishwasher drew sighs of ecstasy. Yet, the final scenes in both the domestic and international versions show satisfied homeowners happily ensconced in their new houses, regardless of the size.

Are we Americans spoiled? Do we have inflated expectations of our housing needs? Are we showoffs? Yes, yes, and yes.

Or maybe we need all that space to house our 60” plasma TVs.