How much room you will need is a difficult question to answer. I suppose that it would all depend on your families temperament. According to some here, the ideal would be a house for each wife, and you would trundle off to each as it was required.
But for me, the idea is to live as a family, and I personally like my family around me. What gives me joy is sitting in the living room in the late evening with my wives, my dogs and my hot drink.
I have a moderate sized home with five bedrooms, one of which is a master suite that the eldest wife uses. My second wife took two of the bedrooms that shared a common bath room, and made a suite for her. We share a living room, a kitchen, a dining room, craft room (in one of the bedrooms) and breakfast nook. I also hope that by next summer I will complete a screen-in summer house, with its own kitchen and sitting room.
The last bedroom right now is sort of my writers studio, and it also has a spare computer in it so that I share the room with the second wife until we can get her a new laptop. The house is wired for data, and we also have a wireless network that eldest wife uses for internet access. At some point, I will move a bed in the studio, and that will then be my room, but for the moment, I share my eldest wife’s bedroom.
Eldest wife had a career in graphic arts for a large metropolitan newspaper, and is a PhotoShop® maven. She is currently working with a couple of gospel bands in designing album covers for their CD’s. So her suite has a computer/graphic arts set-up in it, and she spends much of her day working on those kind of projects. For her, it is a ministry in that she doesn’t charge for her work. I am currently sharing that bedroom with her.
Second wife’s studio is more private, as she needs a considerable amount of quiet time for reading and reflection. It is also set up as a teachers workshop where she can grade papers and work on lesson plans. But for the moment, she is working as a substitute teacher until such time she gets hired full time. As soon as she starts working full time, we will replace her broken laptop, and she can work on her projects there using the wireless network.
Among the future projects we have is building a large enough carport for our four vehicles, the screened summer house I talked about previously, enlarging the front porch and building a long lap pool. Those projects are waiting until we sell our first home. We are renting it out right now, hoping for a change in the market next summer, so it may be awhile before those projects get started.
The wives are discussing bringing in a third wife, but for the moment, it is more in the wistful thinking department. If that does happen, I think that the current house will have to be enlarged, or we will have to go find a larger home. A home with four suites in it is not very common, so we may have to build.
I know that some of the others in here have completely different ideas, and it will be interesting to see how they envision an ideal home.
~ rusty