Tough times necessitate serious cost-benefit analysis. SUV sales were the first to tank. Now monster homes are lingering on the market longer than usual, and it isn’t just the economy that’s scaring buyers. While it’s true that spreading your wealth over a two-acre Rosedale lot like so much caviar may, in the current climate, be a touch unseemly, there’s more to it than that.

The seeds of this trend preceded the latest economic dip. The real motivation—and the reason the trend may ultimately graduate to movement status—is aesthetic. “It’s almost like small, well fit, is the new big,” says Bill Mockler, a partner at Drawing Room Architect Inc., one of the firms favoured by the top end of the market. He’s completed 10 pint-sized houses, mostly in Forest Hill and Rosedale, in the past five years, with budgets ranging from roughly one to six million. “I think people are understanding that fewer things, exquisitely executed, are better than many things ordinarily executed,” he says. “The really hip clients are getting that big is over.” A typical configuration eschews the living room altogether, morphing it into a combination library–media room. Mockler spends a good deal of time studying yacht design and boutique hotels to cull ideas for small, scrupulously put-together spaces.

André D’Elia and Meg Graham of the architectural firm Super­kül Inc. began to make compact spaces one of their specialties when they realized it was an underserved market. In early Octo­ber, they completed a 900-square-foot laneway house at 40R Shaftesbury Avenue for the artist Elena Soní and her husband Jorge, a psychiatrist. And last January, they designed a gallery-home space near Dundas and Beaconsfield for writer Larry Gaudet and his wife, curator Alison Smith. With 1,200 square feet of living space, it’s slightly bigger than the Shaftesbury house, but Gaudet and Smith have two kids. They say it’s more than ample.

Early adopters of less-is-more living swear by it. Brigitte Shim and Howard Sut­cliffe, designers of the country’s most remarkable piece of residential archi­tecture in the past decade—Rosedale’s enormous Integral House, commissioned by U of T math professor James Stewart—have lived with their two kids in 1,350 square feet since 1993. It jibes with their minimalist sense of style. In a way, it’s a return to a simpler era. In the pre-walk-in-closet 1950s, the average three-bedroom house was 1,500 square feet. Sizes crept up over the next four decades, topping out about three years ago at 2,400.

A recent Canadian Mortgage and Housing Corporation report predicted that while sales of single-family dwellings will continue to drop, condo prices in Toronto, despite the enormous supply, will rise right through 2009. Whether at the high or low end, as urban density becomes both an ecological and economic necessity, boom-era megaplexes—like Heather Reisman and Gerry Schwartz’s legendary 17,000-square-foot Rosedale shack—are just not on.

Related:
• Demolition Derby: McMansions are migrating south. Is the age of the reno dead?
• Before the Fall: In these lean times our appetite for excess has finally bitten us in the butt