October 2026
“I would gladly live out of a nutshell and count myself a king of infinite space.”– Hamlet, Shakespeare
“Prediction is very difficult, especially about the future.”― Niels Bohr
When my parents built the their house when I was little, I watched a sort of slow motion mistake play out. My Dad designed the house for what he had and needed at that time. What he had was 2 small kids and a wife and that was it so he designed the house that was perfect for them. He designed 2 small kids rooms and a large mezzanine so you could always see the kids from everywhere.
Fast forward a decade or more and what started to happen is I became a tall large man and I stopped fitting in the 3m X 3m kids room. I later got married and had my own kids and suddenly trips home I’d need to fit my own wife and kid into that same 3m X 3m kids room because there weren’t any other rooms in my parents house. Later my parents eventually did a bit of an extension and increased the room to 3m X 5m so it’s much larger now and works well today. But for a long time it didn’t.
Also what happened is his parents became older and needed taking care of. They moved into our house in the ground floor guest room but suddenly the mezzanine that was perfect for watching small children created a situation where for adult children and grandparents, nobody had any privacy from each other. I think this real estate design is actually one of the reasons my Mum and her mother in law didn’t have the best relationship because they could never escape from one another within the same house. Plus because of the mezzanine they were almost always within earshot of each other.
This real estate design choice ricocheted throughout our lives with all sorts of second and third order effects. Twenty-five years later I understand something about the house that I never understood them. My Dad designed what he loved and needed then but didn’t see the future coming. But by the time the future was there, he couldn’t change the house as fast as life had demands on it. The house filled faster than he could keep up with it, teenagers and their friends, then with grandparents who moved in when they grew too old then with the overflow of three generations worth of lives.
But you could in a sense see it coming if you thought about it for long enough. Eventually children grow up to become teenagers and then adults. The ageing process demands space. So here is one of the most boring and most reliable pieces of advice I own that few people take into account. When it comes to housing, always get more space than you need by a lot. Not more prestige, not more fittings, not a better suburb than you can afford. More space. The logic is about prediction and the impossibility of it.
A house is a container you buy today for a life you’ll be living in decades time and the growth rate of a life is unknowable in exactly the way I’ve written about startups being unknowable. You cannot predict the second child or the twins. You cannot predict the parent who needs to move in, the business that takes over a bedroom, the pandemic that turns the dining table into two offices for two years, the dogs, the hobby that needs a shed, the kid who boomerang home at 25.
You don’t know what the future holds but your house is going to be a mechanism that contains it all. Nobody’s life plan includes these but every actual life trajectory includes several. When you buy exactly enough space for the life you have, you are making a precise bet that nothing will change which is the one bet about the future with a 100% documented failure rate. I believe people always need more space than they think they will.
The asymmetry of being wrong is brutal in one direction and trivial in the other. Have too much space and the cost is higher rates and a room you don’t dust often enough in a house that you paid too much for relative to what you need at the time. Have too little and the cost is moving house and moving house is the single most expensive transaction pattern in life. In housing you want to transact as infrequently as possible because the cost to transact are so high. Stamp duty, real estate agents, selling costs, conveyancing, removalists, the months of disruption, easily $100,000 in pure friction on a typical family home, incinerated that is never recoverable.
Even if it means it costs more today, you should always try to pay tomorrows prices today and buy the larger house earlier in life. Because if you don’t, the house you don’t know you’ll need yet grows in value and by the time you need it you may not be able to afford it. I’ve seen this pattern play out in friends lives more times than I can count. Housing is one of these fields where you always want to frontload costs because costs are always moving in one direction, up. Construction and land is always appreciating in value.
People who don’t buy earlier end up paying for the space anyway just at the new market price in the future, plus six figures of friction. The extra bedroom you bought upfront is the cheapest that bedroom will ever be. Space, bought early, is a premium against the most predictable surprise there is, which is the growth of your family and your life.
But honestly, the deepest version of this isn’t financial, it’s emotional. If you have more space, you have more room for good things to grow into that space. Space is the mechanism that allows that growth to happen. The spare room is what lets the grandparents come. The big living room is why the cousins Christmas happens at your place, why the grandkids stay over, why the friend who needs a place to stay during their divorce have somewhere to land.
Without the space, there’s no way for those unknown unknowns that are good to enter your life while the known knowns that are bad like cost and cleaning are a small price to pay for that upside. But in trying to avoid that price people accidentally remove that optionality on their own future. You just can’t really see it when you are transacting and without it you close off those doors unknowingly.
With more space you also unknowingly avoid all the problems that you can’t see coming from not having enough space. That’s the lesson my Dad learned the hard way and I got to watch growing up but it’s an important life lesson that you should avoid if you can. The growth is going to happen whether you want it to or not, the amount of space you have is just an indication of whether or not you’re prepared for it. Life is a one way direction on the demands for space. Don’t close doors. The life will come. Get more space.