(MCT) — CHICAGO — Soft-spoken Sarah Susanka wouldn't seem to be the "I told you so" type, but ... well, she told you so.

For more than a decade, the architect has campaigned for houses to be built smaller but better. Her basic message: Figure out how big a house you need, and then subtract about a third of the square footage. Good design will make up the difference.

Lots of people caught on right away: Her wildly popular series of "Not So Big" home-design books earned her practically a cult following, and her publisher says she has sold more than 1 million books.

In the meantime, however, builders generally nodded politely and shrugged, continuing to put up ever-larger homes as fast as the public would buy them — which, not so long ago, was very fast, indeed.

Times, as you may have noticed, have changed. And the idea of smaller-but-smarter houses is starting to get more respect, Susanka says, a bit incredulously. These days, when her phone rings, it's likely to be a home-building company seeking her counsel on what to offer wizened consumers in post-recessionary America.

"I went to the International Builders Show in January, and honestly, it knocked my socks off," she said. "It" was not the giant home-building trade show itself, but the ubiquitous message there — from pollsters, designers, product manufacturers and the builders themselves — that the American home was now trying to get "right-sized."

"I never imagined that I would find the party line suddenly being what I wrote about for the last 10 years," said the architect. "Suddenly, the mass market seems to have embraced smaller, better design."

But the real mass market, she knows, is the people who own existing houses — many of which, they tell her, lack the warmth or the practicality that she pushes in her books. They want to remodel, they say, but not on a grand scale.

Thus, her eighth book, "Not So Big Remodeling: Tailoring Your Home for the Way You Really Live" (Taunton Press, 330 pages, $32), co-written with architect Marc Vassallo. It aims, she says, to help homeowners make smaller remodeling gestures, or, in her parlance, "Not So Big moves."

Susanka's buffet of remodeling solutions leans toward less expense and less disruption of daily life. She places them in three Not So Big categories: working within the existing footprint; creating room "bumpouts" that extend the space by a couple of feet; and smallish, cost-effective room additions.

A few of her strategies:

Go ahead, lower those ceilings. Considering that we've just come through an era when it seemed like no ceiling could ever soar high enough, advising someone to lower theirs might seem like design blasphemy.