Does size matter when buying a new home?

We have looked at loads of new homes on estates and in smaller developments and rarely do they provide the basic room sizes that we need or sufficient storage. These new houses are often “presented” to give an illusion of space with minimal furniture [e.g glass tables to pretend they take up no space] and dinky chairs and cabinets. When you actually sit down with a scale plan and try to plot your own furniture onto it you realise the bed will have to be up against the wall on one side, the wardrobes [and most of their contents] will have to be disposed of, and there is only one possible arrangement in the main living room if you don’t want to sit on top of the television. To make houses appear more spacious they are now going up into the roof space so there is no headroom for wardrobes, more stairs to be carpeted and cleaned, and a poky shower-room with sky-lights. Why is there this obsession with providing an en suite including a WC for at least one and sometimes two bedrooms in every new house? – This is a waste of space and it would make more sense to have a second main bathroom accessed from the hall or landing [anyway, who wants to go to the toilet in a cupboard opening off the bedroom in the middle of the night?]. Kitchens are often over-sized because there is a notion that they are also breakfast rooms [with tiny table & two little chairs “for illustrative purposes only”], or are social spaces “where you can converse with friends while preparing dinner”, and they are over-fitted with integrated appliances that you would not choose yourself and means you have to ditch your original fridge/dishwasher, etc. And do we all need a cooker-hood fitted as standard? – More waste. Sometimes there is a downstairs “study/4th bedroom”; we call it the telephone box because that’s about all its good for; it usually has a boxed-in stack pipe in one corner through which the bathwater runs and the upstairs toilets flush . . . most amenable when you’re having a quiet conversation!
Some new 4/5 bed properties have four WC’s, two baths, two showers, and four wash-hand basins plus two-and-a-half sinks, with all the attendant plumbing, so the house will be awash with cleaning materials “hidden” behind pedestals and resting on window cills [and don’t say it can go in a cupboard because [a) there isn’t one, and (b) that’s not what happens]. And then there’s “storage”: with any luck they’ve managed to leave a tiny space on one side of the hot water tank in an upstairs cupboard where you might just be able to slide in a miniature ironing board. Of course, the arrangement of tanks, valves, pumps, and pipes, means there is nowhere inside this cupboard where you can actually store all the bedding required for three or four beds plus your spare towels, and the other laundry when you’ve managed to find enough space to do some ironing. There might also be a crevice under the stairs where you should be able to insert the vacuum cleaner if you take the tubes off and put them in first and throw all the accessories in afterwards; that is so long as you don’t have a Henry or a Vax because the tiny hatch is made just one centimetre too small to take it. Never mind, every time the meter-reader calls and crawls inside you can ask him to have a look for that special nozzle you can’t find. And where are you supposed to put your small collection of DIY essentials, a few tins of paint [Not needed! New house], the suitcases, the floor mops, brushes and other paraphernalia that modern society cannot exist without? Oh yes, . . . the garage. And where is that? It’s either round the corner in a battery with someone else’s car parked in front of it or it usefully takes up more than half the frontage of the house with an up-and-over door that you can only open if you move the car forward onto the pavement and which has a one inch air gap all round it when closed. You could try putting the car in the garage but it will soon be obvious that (a) it’s too short, (b) it’s too narrow so you have to crawl out through the tailgate, and (c) you can’t close the garage door unless you drive in backwards [which means you can’t crawl out through the tailgate . . .].
Other than that, all new houses are marvellous, the perfect accommodation for sophisticated living in the 21st century. We aim to emulate the really smart set who keep half their possessions out of sight in a storage facility ; so chic! so spare!

There is a lot of comment about houses we are building today being smaller than what we have built in the past, but there are also fewer people living in them. The average number of people per dwelling is currently around 2.25 compared with around 5 in the 1920s and 3.5 in the 1950s, so they might well not need to be as big. Perhaps we should be looking at space per person? And do larger homes fit with our need to reduce carbon emissions?
@markoliver_