This lucidly written and well-illustrated book examines how the effort to create the appearance of spaciousness in individual dwellings has shaped middle- and upper-class housing in the United States. While recent real estate trends mean that fewer and fewer “middle-class” buyers can afford much spaciousness of any kind, in this book Isenstadt engagingly traces the role and desirability of spaciousness in American housing design. It joins earlier books whose authors have also tried to find larger patterns in the North American residential environment, notably those of Sam Bass Warner, Gwendolyn Wright, Robert Fishman, Kenneth Jackson, Margaret Garb, along with many others. In Streetcar Suburbs: The Process of Growth in Boston, 1870–1900 (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1962), Warner emphasized the importance of new transportation technology in changing American residential patterns in the nineteenth century, while in Building the Dream: A Social History of Housing in America (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1981), Wright looked at the importance of domestic ideologies. In Bourgeois Utopias: The Rise and Fall of Suburbia (New York: Basic Books, 1987), Fishman situated American suburban patterns in their larger Anglo-American cultural context, while in Crabgrass Frontier: The Suburbanization of the United States (New York: Oxford University Press, 1985),...