At a time when many people aren’t able to do their work from home, and when many others do not have the luxury of home at all, a home of any kind is a blessing. But quarantine also means that small elements of home design can have significant consequences. The experience of shelter-in-place will be greatly shaped by the type of place one has to shelter in. How much room you have, how many rooms you have, whether you have a dishwasher or a washing machine or internet, whether you have an area in which to exercise or be alone or be together or cook or get fresh air—those factors will now take on even more weight. When home is everything all at once, escape and confinement at the same time, its utility becomes more acute. And so do its shortcomings.

“It’s like we just got moved to a different planet,” Sarah Susanka, an architect and the author of the Not So Big House series, told me this week. “But it looks the same.”

Susanka’s area of expertise is the intersection of architecture and psychology: the ways people convert the buildings they live in—structures of wood and metal and stone—into homes. She has advocated, in particular, for homes that resist the bland assumption that bigger is better, treating function, instead, as a core value. Many homes have not embraced that approach; that becomes especially evident in quarantine.

Homes, whatever their size or their layout, are constructed to be part of an ecosystem. They make assumptions about the way their eventual residents will interact with the affordances, and the economies, of the outside world. They assume, generally speaking, that people will commute to work (hence, in suburbs and rural areas, the abundance of driveways and garages). They assume that people will live much of their life outside the home. And they assume that the home’s residents will, as a consequence, have access to goods produced elsewhere: groceries, games, cleaning supplies. (American refrigerators are the size they are because their designers made informed bets about how often their owners would visit a grocery store.)

Apartments in cities make similar assumptions, but in reverse: They assume that the city itself is a meaningful extension of whatever square footage a dwelling might offer. They treat the home as what it often will be, for the resident: one place among many in the rhythms of a day.

Read: We’re finding out how small our lives really are

Neither scenario accounts for what many Americans are experiencing right now: home as the only place. Home as the everything. The confinement can pose, for some, a direct danger. Jacoba Urist, writing about the “tiny apartment” trend in 2013, noted that large amounts of time spent in enclosed spaces, particularly if those spaces have several occupants, can be a source of stress—especially for kids. A child-protective-services worker recently sent ProPublica a list of worries she has about the people in her care: “that my families will literally run out of food, formula, diapers. That some of them may die for lack of treatment. That some children may be injured or harmed through inadequate supervision as their desperate parents try to work. That stress may lead to more child abuse.” Gwyn Kaitis, the policy coordinator for the New Mexico Coalition Against Domestic Violence, noted in the same piece that “violence increases when you have circumstances such as unemployment and isolation.”