Marianne Cusato believes finding the right house isn’t about tallying up square footage and gushing over granite countertops.

It’s about figuring out how you want to live.

She helps house hunters do that with her new book, “The Just Right Home: Buying, Renting, Moving — or Just Dreaming — Find Your Perfect Match!”

Cusato is a home designer touted for her work on the Katrina Cottages, compact homes originally intended for people left homeless by Hurricane Katrina. She’s also passionate about matching housing to needs, not just desires.

Her book helps readers figure out all the nuts-and-bolts issues involved in a home search, from determining whether renting or owning makes better financial sense to sizing up a street.

She helps them take some of the emotion out of the process by leading them to think logically about such issues as what they want in a neighborhood, how they’ll use the home and how well a house functions.

She even offers tips for updating the home you’re in to make it easier to stay there.

“The Just Right Home” sells for $12.95 in paperback.