Rethinking Home: The Quiet Power of Enough
In Australia, homes have been getting bigger for decades. What was once a modest three-bedroom weatherboard with one bathroom and a backyard is now often a sprawling multi-zone house, packed with extras - media rooms, walk-in robes, butler’s pantries. Somewhere along the line, scale stopped being a luxury and started being the baseline.
But this didn’t happen by accident. It was shaped - slowly and quietly - by a system of policy settings, lending habits, building industry practices and cultural storytelling that taught us to equate housing with status. Bigger became better. “More” became normal. And the idea of “just enough” started to feel like a compromise.
The truth is, we’ve come to expect too much from our homes — and from housing more broadly. We expect them to perform as financial assets, family headquarters, status markers, and future-proof investments. As a result, the homes we’re building are more expensive, more energy-hungry, and less adaptable to how people actually live today. They take longer to build, cost more to run, and leave little space - literally and figuratively - for change.
And yet, the push for more continues. Developers and builders are incentivised to maximise returns, which often means maximising floor area. Buyers, anxious not to lose in the property game, feel pressure to keep up - opting for features they may never use just to avoid falling behind. First-home buyers face the impossible choice between location and space. Cities get pushed further out. Streets get emptier. Infrastructure gets strained.
But there’s another way of thinking about housing - one that isn’t built on scarcity or speculation, but on sufficiency.
The design idea of “enoughness” offers a quiet kind of rebellion. It asks a simple but radical question: what do we actually need from a home? Not in the abstract, but in the daily reality of living, caring, resting, and growing. Enoughness suggests that a well-designed, modestly sized home - one that prioritises light, flexibility, and comfort over footprint - can do more to support life than a bigger house ever could.
A modest miner’s cottage made from bark and timber in country Victoria. Built with necessity, not aspiration — a quiet contrast to today’s housing expectations.
Image courtesy of the State Library of Victoria.
It’s not about austerity or minimalism for its own sake. It’s about clarity. About designing homes that respond to climate, community, and human needs rather than defaulting to the oversized, over-specified norm. It’s about homes that give back - with space to breathe, time to live, and energy left over for the things that matter.
We’ve been conditioned to believe that a smaller, simpler home is a failure of ambition. Maybe it is an act of rebellion. A way of pushing back against a housing system that’s locked too many people out and burdened too many others within.
The future of housing in Australia doesn’t have to be defined by scale. It could be shaped by generosity - not of square metres, but of thought. By design that’s intelligent rather than indulgent. By homes that support us, not stretch us.
Enough is not a compromise. It’s a choice. And in the current housing climate, it might just be the most powerful one we can make.
References
Productivity Commission. (2021). Housing Affordability and Supply. Retrieved from https://www.pc.gov.au
Australian Housing and Urban Research Institute (AHURI). (2020). Understanding housing market dynamics. https://www.ahuri.edu.au
Australian Bureau of Statistics. (2022). Building Activity, Australia, Dec 2021. https://www.abs.gov.au
Newton, P. (2019). Resilient Urban Futures: Housing, Planning and Climate Adaptation. Springer.
Kennedy, A., & Trott, D. (2023). “Enoughness.” Architecture Australia. https://architectureau.com/articles/enoughness/
Grattan Institute. (2022). Making housing more affordable. Retrieved from https://grattan.edu.au
AHURI. (2023). Policy options for housing affordability. https://www.ahuri.edu.au