The smaller house is an imperative for more and more people today. Architect Paula Baker-Laporte and her husband, builder Robert Laporte, cofounders of the EcoNest Company, are arguably the leaders in this movement in Santa Fe for the past 15 years. Baker-Laporte is the author of Prescriptions for a Healthy House, a columnist for the Santa Fe Real Estate Guide, and a teacher for the Building Biology Institute based in Clearwater, Fla. She was interviewed recently at the EcoNest compound in Tesuque.

Tell me about this house.

This is our house. It's the Peregrine model and it's 1,470 square feet, with two bedrooms and two bathrooms. We also have a meditation room, a sunroom, and a sauna.

It's timber-framed and the walls are earth plaster on the outside, 12 inches of clay and straw mixture, and earth plaster on the inside. The solid walls give it a different acoustic quality. This house doesn't have an echo like a frame house.

Robert changed the way I saw built space by just inspiring me that this could be done with natural materials. The crafted timber frame is not something you often come across in the desert Southwest. This is white fir from Harry Morrison [Quality Wood Products] in Chama. He harvests trees sustainably.

It's basically yellow in here. Very peaceful-feeling.

The Building Biology principle is color in accordance with nature. If you look in nature, there are no monotones there. So by using natural pigmentation, you can see that the wall is lively; every square inch has several tones in it. That's how we're used to seeing color in nature. A lot of what we do in modern construction is very monotonous: paint.

What are you using for the stem walls?

We have used Faswall and we are starting to use more trench footings, like Frank Lloyd Wright used, so we don't have big stem walls and we're using less concrete.

How has your use of materials evolved in other ways?

It's changing all the time. We found that on some windbeaten sites, the clay plasters are pretty challenged and so we've been using a product called KEIM, a company that's been around for 130 years in Germany. It's a coating that can function like stucco or a clear coating.

For my personal evolution, if we were doing this home again, I would eliminate most of the concrete slab, I think. There are some parts that have no concrete, like the sunroom, which is flagstone on gravel; and the two bedrooms have earth floors.

If you want to build like this, you have a lot of things against you. A small home does not appraise the same way as a home with a lot of things I consider pretty useless, like an attached, 3-car garage or five bathrooms. Secondly, if you want to use natural materials, you have to know how to use them and how to live in such a house.

How is your business going?

In response to many calls we receive, now our office is providing designs and Robert leads workshops. The builders in these various places have trained with us, so we have a network of affiliates. We thought we could train good builders and they'd have work, and we can concentrate on what we like.

What's that?

Well, the design office has created several stock plans, because we like the idea of being less exclusive. Everyone should have a well-designed house. Robert has a vision of creating a "model T." The concept is building a basic EcoNest that can have a second story added and wings added at any time, but the basic core is modular clay/straw that could be built in conjunction with an apprenticeship training program that he has already developed.

You said your house is on the market. Where are you going?

We're not sure. Robert's huge interest now is really doing a more formal school of natural building crafts, so we really need a farm to do that.

A farm in what sense?

I love growing food. It's kind of a food and shelter thing we want to do, and I'm interested in teaching people about food and shelter together. I've just done a new lecture and I compare architecture to Michael Pollan's new book In Defense of Food. His bottom line is "Eat food" and by that he means food, not products. If it comes in a box and advertises it's healthy, it's not food, it's a product. So eat food, not products, and not too much, and mostly plant.

And with architecture, it's the same. For me, what I'm learning is craft homes, not too big, and mostly plant and mineral, and for the exact same reasons.

Minnesota architect Sarah Susanka, the author of The Not So Big House: A Blueprint for the Way We Really Live, Not So Big Remodeling: A Better House for the Way You Really Live, and other books.

The Not So Big House first came out in 1998, and this idea of thinking about smaller houses was somewhat revolutionary — or at least the logic behind it had been overwhelmed by decades of marketing for large homes.

That's right. What I heard from so many people was that they knew there was something missing in all the houses and house plans they were looking at, but they couldn't articulate it.

Wright's Usonian house, dating to 1936, you describe as incorporating human-scaled spaces created with natural materials, and with an emphasis on interior detail and livability rather than sheer space.

That's a really good illustration: this is not something new, but it's something that didn't make it all the way into the public psyche. There are an awful lot of people who see Wright's work only as a particular style.

Is sustainability an important part of your message?

Well, for the people who are really attracted to this message, it's not like sustainability is an idea that interests them: it's a way of life. This segment of the population grasps that they are part of the planet. If you understand that, you automatically want to do what's best for the whole, and that is at the core of what I call the "not so big sensibility."

Are you still designing homes?

I've been doing a lot more writing and public speaking. I'm actually doing a house right now, the first I've done in several years, with the hope of being able to write the story of the making of the house.

I love design. The thing I do, which most people don't know I do, is sacred geometry; that's my next series of books. My design has moved to a new playing field.

What I love is I learning about the platonic solids. When you start to play around with these sacred forms — sacred because they're the most fundamental, and Plato used to say that God was fundamentally a geometer, and I can understand why he said that. As you start to play with these forms, you begin to see how everything is formed. With the Golden Mean, for example, you start to see how the generation of life is a geometrical characteristic of five. The number five starts to generate itself ad infinitum and you feel the roots and connections with all living things.

You're also the founder of the Maitrhea foundation, which is about sacred space and "inner listening."

Ultimately we need very little. At one level, sacred space is just you and your body. But while we're getting to that point where you recognize how little we actually do need, making yourself a wonderful place to be can be a step toward that recognition. I do believe that beauty has incredible worth in helping us see the value in everyting.

Realtor Michael Nicola is at work on a book titled Living Differently. He is interested in the smaller-home movement, and in a renewed focus on community.

I go back to Los Angeles as a younger guy when everyone wanted the big house and a lot of times they were trophy homes. I had my share of those. I once had the DeMille Wedding House. Now we come to 2009 and the world has changed. We're being pushed rather aggressively to consider what the word "enough" means. For some people, it's necessary and a matter of your philosophy of living, like for me as a Buddhist the word "enough" relates to the fact that you want to take what you need and leave some for someone else.

Are you seeing demands in this vein from your clients?

Back in the 1990s, Sarah Susanka gave people permission to think in terms of something smaller. Now there is no question we are seeing more people coming in looking for something smaller. Also, the folks who just left are from First National Bank of Santa Fe and they're looking at how to adjust their notions of wealth management and custom banking for the world we're seeing now.

So this is a major shift happening.

Yes, and it's what I see not happening in Santa Fe that makes me question my commitment to living here, because what I see is a community that's absolutely not getting it. We're not accomplishing the things here they are in other cities where officials are willing to entertain the notion of alternative ways of living. Look at San Francisco, Portland, Seattle, and Vancouver, and you can see stuff that's totally different.

I enjoy reading Malcolm Gladwell (The Tipping Point, Outliers) and one of the things he talks about is a group of people who moved here from Italy and established basically their own little city and the people who live there, regardless of whether they're heavy or thin or whether they smoke or drink, are living longer and more happily basically because they keep an eye on each other.

After the Second World War, everyone wanted privacy and expansive homes, and it kept getting bigger and bigger until like everything else it collapsed into a dead heap last September and everyone said, "Holy crap, now what do we do?"

Now what do you do?

All of a sudden, you look at the phenomenon of co-housing, which started here with Paula Baker-Laporte and The Commons on the Alameda, which to this day has been a brilliant success. There were three homes that recently sold very quickly in this [down] market. There are thousands of these projects going up around the country but because of what it's called, some people think of communes and so they can't see it for what it is: creating a nurturing personal environment that sustains people on an intimate level while still giving them privacy.

You also mentioned access to medical services. Are you thinking about the wave of baby-boomers who may prioritize that now?

Yes. What happened with the economy was that all of a sudden the people who were living aspirationally for the last 30 years — we'll get a second house, another car, and a third house — now they've lost half or more of their net worth and they realize they have to focus on what they need. Again, the concept of "enough" becomes pivotal.