House Lust Dispatches from the Frontlines of America's Obsession With Our Homes

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CHAPTER ONE MINE'S BIGGER THAN YOURS: POTOMAC, MARYLAND How Square Footage Became the New Scorecard As you walk in the front door of Steven and Tammy Goldberg's house, you can't help but stop and gasp at the foyer, with its 22foot ceiling and dual staircasesone curving up the right side of the room, the other up the left. A massive chandelier hangs overhead. Polished tilework sits underfoot. Peer between the stairs from the front doorway and you'll catch a glimpse of the family room, another twostory space with a fireplace that climbs to the ceiling. The first time people walk in the Goldbergs' doorway, they utter a nearuniversal reaction: "Wow." That single syllable, above all else, is what sells homes in the Goldbergs' neighborhood in Potomac, Maryland. "As soon as you open that door, you do the 'Wow' thing," says Rouhi Forghani, the sales manager at this development, called Potomac View. "In this community, needs are secondary. The first priority is to have a home where everybody opens the door and says, 'Wow,' so you can brag to your coworkers and friends, and you can throw a party and impress people." And if the staircases don't impress them, the size sure will. The Goldbergs' newly built house, one of fortysix that will someday fill this neighborhood, started out at 6,000 square feet. But then they finished the basement, bringing the total to around 9,000 square feet. Beyond the dualstaircase foyer, this home has a back stairway, four bedrooms, and...let's see...how many bathrooms? "Four upstairs, one on the first floorthat's fiveone in the basementno, two in the basement. So, seven. Right?" Tammy Goldberg says. We're sitting in Potomac View's model home with Pat Kirby, project manager for Toll Brothers, the company building this subdivision. "Six and a half baths," Kirby says, correcting her. "The first floor is a half bath." "Oh, wait, I have two half baths," says Goldberg, who's lived in the house just a couple of months. "Two half baths, right," the project manager says. "So I have four fullfive fulland two halves," Goldberg says, still sounding a little unsure. "One in the basement, and four upstairs. Five full." "Six full and two halves," the project manager says, suddenly sounding a little confused himself. "You have two in the basement." "No," Goldberg corrects him. "I only have one full bath in the basement. It's a half and a full in the basement. So five full and two halves." It's taken nearly twenty seconds to reconcile how many bathrooms there are in the house, and Goldberg chuckles at the ridiculousness of it. "We don't use all our bathrooms, that's for sure." As recently as 1950, onethird of American homes lacked complete indoor plumbing. Today in places like Potomac, asking a homeowner how many bathrooms are in her house can provoke something reminiscent of a vintage Abbott and Costello routine. If a house hunter checked the Potomac listings for the summer of 2006, he'd find that among the 259 singlefamily homes on the market, more than half160had five or more bedrooms, and 148 had four or more bathrooms. The bathrooms aren't the only things that have multipliedall around the house the space is getting bigger.