21 ms·

The McMansion Scale, Explained

291 points by OrwellianChild 10y ago

hueving 10y ago
Reminds me of Yelp reviews that slam a restaurant for its decor and don't mention the quality of the food.
- theothermkn 10y ago
  That would only be true if these were architectural reviews that praised the food prepared in the McMansion's kitchen but didn't address the architecture.
  - hueving 10y ago
    Most people buy homes to live in, not to look at and show off to other people. The majority of your interactions with your own home will be inside of it. None of these articles even acknowledge the fact that these might have nice interiors that offer more conveniences than a 1000 sq ft home built in 1932.
    - pavel_lishin 10y ago
      Many of those articles address that very thing, both specifically: http://www.mcmansionhell.com/post/151106172346/bergen-county-new-jersey http://www.mcmansionhell.com/post/151106172346/bergen-county... http://www.mcmansionhell.com/post/150776910526/encino-ca http://www.mcmansionhell.com/post/150776910526/encino-ca And in general: http://www.mcmansionhell.com/post/150597521816/mcmansions-101-revisited-aesthetics-aside-why http://www.mcmansionhell.com/post/150597521816/mcmansions-10...
    - theothermkn 10y ago
      It's not about "showing off." It's about whether the structures are inviting or alienating. It's about whether they contribute to the aesthetic of the neighborhood. It's about whether their exteriors sacrifice form for a cheap veneer of ostentation. The elements of McMansions are borrowed, ineptly, from better classes of buildings and then mangled and jumbled together. They make a vague visual promise of quality, and their intent is to be sold. Buildings should, instead, function inside and out to support the life and activities of their residents and those residents neighbors and visitors. The visual function of architecture is not decoration; Architecture uses a visual language that conveys the uses of structures to the community at large, as well as the residents (in a home) or patrons (in a business or public space), so that society can function. And, to say that these homes are not bought to be looked at nor shown off is incredibly naive. The point of them is aesthetics, and that's part and parcel of why they're such travesties. It's why they are degenerate. They're the kind of thing that can only pass to someone who is uprooted from their own culture and history, cannot even rely on even a folk understanding as a guide to what works or does not work architecturally. These are degenerate homes, sold to the degenerate mass of déclassé and rootless consumers.
    - wott 10y ago
      If those are not made for showing off, I don't know what they are made for.
    - nommm-nommm 10y ago
      McMansions are actually made for showing off to other people as well as living in. The whole point of a McMansion is a pseudo-status symbol. If you actually read her blog she actually does critiques the interiors as well.
- rabboRubble 10y ago
  She does talk about quality of materials in other posts in addition to the failure to use / design / construct with those cheaper materials. She's a hysterical writer. Highly recommend poking around her site for a bit. She's changed the way I look at real estate.
  - deleted 10y ago
    [deleted]
harryh 10y ago
dupe of a dupe: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=12754592 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=12754592 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pRtVMLwh6mY https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pRtVMLwh6mY
- deleted 10y ago
  [deleted]
hogrammer 10y ago
Meh. People have the right in the United States to buy property and build houses on it. One man's "ugly" is someone else's dream home. I also suspect there's some envy here.
- partisan 10y ago
  Does the author feel better after writing generating all of this negativity? I don't feel better reading it. I live in the opposite of a McMansion, but if I had a choice, I would prefer to live in a large house where I can have some space that is my own. I wouldn't give two shits about what someone thinks about the appearance of the house. There are those who view success as a large house, nice car, a nice lawn, with kids running around in the back yard. There are people who view success as living in the city, childless, dining out, paying ever increasing rent as your badge of honor. The old American Dream concluded with you seeing the fruits of your labor in your possessions and the successes of your progeny. It was full of traps and the ways to fail were many, but there was some sort of blueprint to having something at the end of it all. The new American Dream is really just like a dream. You wake up and you have nothing to show for it and you barely remember it. You ate good food, drank good drinks, hung out with friends, went to that awesome show. All these great experiences. But you paid for them, in high rent, untold thousands on cabs home, expensive meals, artisanal trinkets, the right clothes, concert tickets. And the next day, they are memories. And then at some point, you are old, you age out of the lifestyle, and then out of your job and suddenly you have nothing left. Which of these American Dreams is better?
  - nommm-nommm 10y ago
    This is an extremely bizarre comment. Research suggests that spending money on experiences brings lasting happiness and spending money on material objects does not. Not wanting to own a huge house doesn't mean being childless or childfree. Most Americans have children sometime in their lives and even many who can't have children would like to have had them. Consumerism is still alive and well in America. Does one really age out of enjoying eating, drinking, and companionship? Does hitting a certain age mean you suddenly want to sit around the house alone eating bland food and staring at your accumulation of stuff? Enjoying going out and doing things at the expense of a long commute, two SUVs, and huge house doesn't mean you spend 100% of your money and have no budget. I enjoy all those things (too much) and still save half our income and we max out our 401(k)s and IRAs. If I had a smaller income I'd adjust my spending, I certainly did when I was a student and also when I was very poor. If I wanted to buy a McMansion once I age out of companionship and having fun I certainly can afford to do so at that time. Personally, material possessions bring me a lot of anxiety and I'd like to own as little as possible to reduce my anxiety level. I don't want to "[see] the fruits of [my] labor in [my] possessions."
dietrichepp 10y ago
This article is best juxtaposed with articles about image synthesis: * Wave Function Collapse image generator https://github.com/mxgmn/WaveFunctionCollapse https://github.com/mxgmn/WaveFunctionCollapse * Image Synthesis from Yahoo's open_nsfw: https://open_nsfw.gitlab.io https://open_nsfw.gitlab.io * Generative Adversarial Text to Image Synthesis: https://arxiv.org/abs/1605.05396 https://arxiv.org/abs/1605.05396 Put another way, when I look at the McMansions at 10 on the scale, it looks to me like the kind of output you get when you just feed a bunch of pictures of houses into a neural network without feeding in any of the cultural or aesthetic context. Things like the large garages and roofs look like the efforts of constraint solvers working with inputs that are out of bounds. In a sense, that is exactly what happened.
- internaut 10y ago
  I agree, I think that is literally the case. The part of the human brain that deals with 'unified logic' or whatever you want to call it, is visibly absent because it is not there. It was never employed to make those decisions, I think we should be asking broader questions about why not because I believe it to be a societal issue and not a recreational one. This aside it is worth noting that in days of old they had 'style handbooks' (because they built idiot things in the old days too) to guide them in keeping overall symmetry. I don't think that solves for everything but it would have prevented the worst atrocities. Just like an anti-patterns or patterns book really.
  - jimmux 10y ago
    So these houses are the architectural equivalent of The Homer. http://simpsons.wikia.com/wiki/The_Homer http://simpsons.wikia.com/wiki/The_Homer
- disconcision 10y ago
  this is a really good comment. i was going to refer to the 10s as literal 'dream houses', in that they remind me of the places i'd wander through in my dreams, especially when i was younger: nonsensical, sometimes phantasmagorical amalgams of the homes of friends, hotels, historical buildings, and any number of other places i was dragged as a kid.
carsongross 10y ago
I was recently struck by this house, offered by Sears in 1921: https://oklahomahousesbymail.files.wordpress.com/2012/10/sears-saratoga-1921.jpg https://oklahomahousesbymail.files.wordpress.com/2012/10/sea... What's crazy is the price: $47,085.20 in todays dollars. This is with all finishing materials (including stained glass) & delivered (no cement or bricks). It's an amazing house, and any old schlub could order it from good ol' Sears. Something very bad happened in architecture around world war 2.
- Turing_Machine 10y ago
  The "something bad" that happened was that VA home loans became available, and many returning servicemen took advantage of them. However, the maximum amount was small ($2,000 at first). Whether this was actually "bad" or not depends on whether you think it was better to keep returning veterans in crowded, archaic housing, or whether it was better to let them have a modern house (with modern wiring, plumbing, etc.) that doesn't conform to your personal taste in the year 2016. Note also that your 1921 Sears house doesn't include electrical wiring, plumbing, or heating.
  - carsongross 10y ago
    Well, given the post WW2 built environment... Yeah, I'm gonna call it something bad. But this is the problem, I suppose. It's obvious that the fractal complexity, materials, beauty and craftsmanship of older buildings is vastly superior to what even rich folks can afford today, but we have to sit around and argue about taste and air conditioning, rather than figure out what the hell happened.
    - Turing_Machine 10y ago
      Off-the-rack clothing doesn't match the materials, beauty, and craftsmanship of a bespoke Savile Row English cut suit, either, but neither does it cost $3-5,000 a pop. I personally like having more than one set of clothes to wear. I also like air conditioning when I'm in a hot climate and central heat in a cold one. Electricity and running water are also nice.
bertiewhykovich 10y ago
I'm not sold on this. Some of the criticisms levied seem valid, and there's /some/ sensibility to the scale -- but the whole thing smacks of a post-hoc attempt to define why McMansions are in poor taste in non-socioeconomic terms. It's sufficient to just say "McMansions are tremendously wasteful symptoms of American decadence" -- but that might be psychologically hard if you've spent years in architecture school learning how to design status symbols for the upper classes.
- danharaj 10y ago
  Architecture has rules of composition like any other craft. McMansions shit all over them. There's nothing post-hoc about calling them shit. A McMansion only look sensible and aesthetically pleasing if you try to imagine one as a well designed house covered in tumors. The fact that they are an example of American decadence stems from the fact that they are cargo culting opulence.
  - Turing_Machine 10y ago
    "McMansions shit all over them." How is it any of your business? The people who buy them like them. Their tastes are not yours, and they're the ones paying the bills.
    - 542458 10y ago
      There's an entire post on how, aesthetics aside, mcmansion-style houses are rife with problems. The tl;dr of it is that they're a very bad investment, massively energy and co2 inefficient, maintenance intensive (due to large size and low-quality materials) and often have badly cut corners. There's also a final point about the size being isolating, but that's a bit more subjective IMHO. http://www.mcmansionhell.com/post/150597521816/mcmansions-101-revisited-aesthetics-aside-why http://www.mcmansionhell.com/post/150597521816/mcmansions-10...
    - danharaj 10y ago
      It's my business in the sense that I can have an opinion about how ugly their house is and I do. There's nothing more to it. It's not like I think McMansions should be illegal because they are ugly, although I don't see what's fundamentally unjust about a community not wanting eyesores in their neighborhoods if enough McMansion haters congregated in one place. There are other reasons why they suck that a sibling comment mentioned. I don't believe just because aesthetics involve personal preferences that we can't discuss them and come to common conclusions regarding the good and the bad. Aesthetics are very important to me as a programmer, for example, and I am an unhappy programmer if I cannot write pretty code for whatever reason. I certainly wouldn't want to be a programmer if I couldn't write pretty code as often as I do. Crunch time hurts me twice: the extra work, but also the resource constraints that mean I have to satisfy beauty in code. If I didn't care about what is beautiful and what is not, I would feel like a very flat person. If that makes me an asshole then, well, I mean I wouldn't disagree.
ars 10y ago
Interestingly the higher the number the more I like the house. The low number ones are boring and plain. The high number ones are interesting to live in.
- bkyan 10y ago
  Me, too!
- pavel_lishin 10y ago
  I hear there's an ancient Chinese curse about living in interesting-something-or-other. I don't think it was houses, but I bet they'd have adjusted it if they'd seen these.
  - joncrocks 10y ago
    https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/May_you_live_in_interesting_times https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/May_you_live_in_interesting_ti...
- tracker1 10y ago
  From the exterior, the modernist in the #1 block was my favorite, and the Suburban Craftsman in the #2 block my second... most of the rest I find less appealing. I also tend to like more Colonial and Victorian era looks as well. That's just me though, that said it doesn't have to be a particular style to be good looking... it's about balance, scale and style. It's too easy to go over the top in very bad ways. I've also seen some nicer garage integrations, usually with the garage entry to the side, which allows for a better balance... If the house is too small, then a separate garage or different integration can work.
- UweSchmidt 10y ago
  Can you generalize what exactly it is you like? How many small pointy roofs and different kinds of windows do you like? Is there an upper limit on how disney it can look, if we expanded the McMansion scale to 20 in photoshop? Can you appreciate a reduced style in other things, say, the original Google.com or the first iPod?
bkjelden 10y ago
Any valid critiques the author may have are completely lost in the contempt and pretentiousness of her writing style. Additionally, I am incredibly skeptical of her ability to judge the quality of a house's construction based on a single exterior photo.
- erikpukinskis 10y ago
  Funny, I thought the author is mostly correct, and also chucked quite a few times at the silly writing. To each her own.
  - ghaff 10y ago
    I basically agree with her while cringing at a lot of the academic jargon around design language. I do believe that consistency of style in architecture is a thing while recognizing that homes are in service of how people use their interiors.
- Turing_Machine 10y ago
  Presumably the people who actually buy the "McMansions" don't think they look all that bad. Otherwise they'd buy something else, right?
  - flukus 10y ago
    Or they buy what they can afford.
    - Turing_Machine 10y ago
      That too, in which case sneering at them is plain ol' snobbery. No one is making McMansion haters buy one or live in one. Me, I can't imagine why anyone would willingly live in San Francisco or New York City, but people obviously do. I just don't feel the need to write snobby articles criticizing them for their lifestyle choices.
      - 10y ago
tomcam 10y ago
It's really bad when people idiotically think they should be able to put the house they want on their own property. What a bunch of tools.
- stephen_g 10y ago
  Where does the author advocate banning terrible houses? She's just explaining the features and design ideas that make this kind of architecture so distasteful - not telling anyone what to do...
  - zip1234 10y ago
    She doesn't even get into the main thing (in my opinion) that makes them so distasteful--car dependency for everything. Having lived in that situation vs a situation where I was in a smaller house, but walking distance to town, I much preferred the walking distance house. Being in a subdivision a half mile into a windy 25 mph road is not such a fun experience.
    - initram 10y ago
      She very often talks about how attached garages make houses much uglier, and ruin the aesthetics in a lot of cases. Check out the rest of her articles!
      - Turing_Machine 10y ago
        I like having a place to keep cars, tools, and sporting equipment. I suspect the people who buy these houses do as well.
        siidooloo 10y ago
        The issue isn't that they have garages. The garages are randomly placed. They look glommed on.
        nommm-nommm 10y ago
flukus 10y ago
So tiny houses and large mansions are the same on this scale? What does the author think mansion means?
- stephen_g 10y ago
  The scale is supposed to be a scale of the quality of the design. Neither tiny houses or well-designed mansions qualify as 'McMansions'.
  - flukus 10y ago
    The quality is only the "Mc" part of "McMansion" though. and Mansion implies large house. Edit: > Neither tiny houses or well-designed mansions qualify as 'McMansions'. Yet they're on the McMansion scale.
    - dpark 10y ago
      Yes, at the bottom of it.
    - eyelidlessness 10y ago
      It establishes a baseline as a frame of reference.
siidooloo 10y ago
I think some commenters are missing the point. The issue isn't that the houses are big. Mansion vs McMansion is like the difference between a gadget made out of aluminum and a gadget made out of plastic covered in silver paint.
bbarn 10y ago
The hate for attached garages.. Doesn't the author realize how incredibly useful, and unsightly, they are at the same time? I have a rented garage a half block away in the city, and a basement full of all my random projects, that I would only dream of being able to stick in a garage next to my house.
- ghaff 10y ago
  Yep. My cars move out of the garage in the summer and I have all sorts of sports equipment and in-progress projects there. The cars need to go back in (for plowing reasons) in the winter and stuff gets packed away or winched up. But garages are pretty much essential for a lot of people.
  - stass 10y ago
    It does not have to be attached though.
    - ghaff 10y ago
      Useful though in the winter.
    - brightsize 10y ago
      Or visible from the street.
      - lostlogin 10y ago
        While I don't like garages that dominate the front of a house, paving a route around you section is wasteful and potentially dangerous in terms of small kids playing etc. I'd far prefer almost anything to acres of concrete.
      - ghaff 10y ago
        The street is where you're typically driving in from though. So, barring a garage at a lower level at the side of the house or something along those lines, moving a garage around to the back (non-streetside) of the house probably involves building more driveway and otherwise dedicating more space to cars.
pkamb 10y ago
I'd like to see a similar blog for the terrible "modern" homes currently being built. Count the exterior materials! Cinder blocks, fake artisanal barnwood, neon-green door, neon-orange corrugated metal, exposed concrete, yellow windows, reclaimed shipping container...
- internaut 10y ago
  In particular anybody who reclaims a shipping container has not done the math. It's an idea that sounds good or affordable but it takes a lot of money and expertise to make that work properly even if the container was free. It would make considerably more sense to acquire a large cardboard box.
  - TheSpiceIsLife 10y ago
    Never mind making it work properly, just slap them together as per http://www.examiner.com.au/story/380795/one-mans-container-is-another-mans-home/ http://www.examiner.com.au/story/380795/one-mans-container-i...
    - internaut 10y ago
      If you are not concerned with the difficulty of running plumbing/electric, you still have thermal bridging through steel at 400 times the conductivity of wood. The people who use steel framing often thermally isolate thin strips of metal, not the entire wall. The insulation job the guy says he hasn't done yet, he's going to find out he'll need to insert a cavity air gap. If he chooses to stick it with a gap as external sheathing to save space he'll still need to contend with condensation on this very conductive surface. If he goes for passive house level air tightness and internal smart vapour barrier he could be fine but somehow I think he's just winging it which means water vapour will condense inside his house and not be able to dry out. Hello mildew and everything he owns will rot. You can build with shipping containers, but you've got to really know what you're doing. tldr; A guy spent 50k+ to put his house inside a heatsink. This looks environmentally friendly but with the probable dehumidifier requirements it is probably much worse than regular building.
Animats 10y ago
There's a long history of this problem. Bletchley Park Manor House[1] meets most of the criteria listed for a 9th or 10th level McMansion. Three or more window styles. Turrets. Bad columns. Faux balcony. Patchwork masonry. Roofline soup. Oversized pediments. Oversized transoms. House is out of scale. They avoided the two-story entrance. It's not big enough for one. (I visited before it became a big-time museum, and had a guide who was more into the architecture than the cryptanalysis.) [1] https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/8/82/Bletchley_Park_-_Draco2008.jpg https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/8/82/Bletchle...
- arkitaip 10y ago
  It looks like something you would find at an amusement park.
  - wott 10y ago
    I remember reading that the building of the Disneyland in Europe was more costly than the one in the USA because they had to use real materials and kind-of-real construction processes, for customers are used to real historical stuff everywhere and would be shocked by bad quality replicas; whereas plastic and crude fake construction was okay for Americans, they would not bat an eyelid.
- Maarten88 10y ago
  An even older example: Palacio da Pena, Sintra, Portugal http://www.neverendingvoyage.com/the-fairytale-palaces-of-sintra-a-photo-essay/ http://www.neverendingvoyage.com/the-fairytale-palaces-of-si...
  - mattkrause 10y ago
    But...that's old. It's almost inevitable that old buildings evolve in strange ways. According to the wikipedia article, it was a monastery, cathedral, and palace. Parts were hit by lightning and rebuilt; I'm sure others also needed repairs from other disasters, wear-and-tear, and changing usage. The fact that an old building ends up like that doesn't mean that new buildings should start looking like that. Imagine if someone said "this legacy code is an absolute mess, so this new project can be a spaghetti-coded disaster too!".
omegote 10y ago
As an european who has never visited the US, I'm totally unfamiliar with this kind of buildings, other than seeing them in TV Shows like Family Matters or Full House. Also, almost every single american woodworking YouTube channel is recorded in a garage of one this kind of houses. I find them huge, yet their popularity makes me think they're pretty common, maybe even affordable?
- swah 10y ago
  I wonder how are the houses in some places in Germany, for example? They also love their cars and have real winters...
  - pluma 10y ago
    The average German lives in an apartment or multi-family house. On the country side there are still a lot of fully detached houses but they're either mostly "old" (i.e. built or fully renovated after the war) or built to a different standard (Germans generally consider drywall a cheap substitute). But of course that is also changing. Also, building your own house is not as affordable as it seems to be in the US. Germans have a stronger aversion to taking out loans and banks often want a significant down payment. From what I've seen few home owners actually park their cars in garages though. Recently carports (basically sunroofs) have become pretty popular but most people seem to park their cars in the driveway as far as I can tell. We just clean them more often, I guess.
    - MK999 10y ago
      what kind of multi-family house? Side by Side duplex? Up down duplex? Quadplex? Something else?
      - taejo 10y ago
        I don't know what the averages are, but I'd say in towns the most typical are terraced houses with four or five floors - sometimes that's one apartment on each floor, sometimes two.
zuminator 10y ago
Fun, but I'd find this information more useful if juxtaposed with an analysis of the livability and practicality of the various McMansion species. After all, a person spends a lot more time inhabiting the home as opposed to looking at it, so ultimately the inside is a lot more important than the outside. As a few people already noted, attached garages may be generally ugly but they're useful. Can one say the same about multistorey windows and entryways, lots of dormers, large columns, random multiple window styles, etc.? Do these things add aesthetic or practical value to the house for the people actually residing in them? Or are they mere eyecandy for tasteless consumers but in the end add nothing to the enjoyment of daily living.
- usrusr 10y ago
  Individual house dissection do go into detail about how the outside is reflected on the inside, to bad effects. See this one for example: http://www.mcmansionhell.com/post/149128564511/mclean-virginia http://www.mcmansionhell.com/post/149128564511/mclean-virgin... It's even more chaotic on the inside than on the outside. The Homer Simpson car without wheels.
- Jean-Philipe 10y ago
  She actually spends at least half of her compliments on the inside of those houses. Reading the blog before commenting might be a good idea.
fuqted 10y ago
Thanks for sharing this blog. She is funny, and this is putting words to feelings I've had. That said, what she constitutes as negative, 'McMansion' traits largely seem to be based on how she feels about the house as a whole. http://www.mcmansionhell.com/post/149284377161/mansionvsmcmansion?is_related_post=1 http://www.mcmansionhell.com/post/149284377161/mansionvsmcma... >Mansion vs McMansion Immediately you'll notice the 'mansion' has a faux balcony, useless pillars and void throwup; all traits she claims to despise. Scroll down to the example of a New Traditional house (which is a beautiful house) and it's clearly a house that, in her terms, has no concept of mass; it's all roof! I get what she's saying, but still. She should at least be consistent with the individual traits she dislikes.
- Rumudiez 10y ago
  Design and architecture aren't matters of opinion – "disliking roofs" isn't a thing and is not her point. Combinations of various features lead to different dynamics, which can be beneficial or harmful to the overall appearance or impression given by the object. So when she says the house is "all roof," it's not that she dislikes roofs in general; it's that the roof dwarfs the rest of the house, making it look small and insignificant. Imagine wearing too large of a suit, or putting your TV in front a movie theater screen.
  - dlubarov 10y ago
    The thing with roofs is that if you get substantial snowfall in winter, practicality demands a steep roof pitch, otherwise melted snow will drip through the shingles. A high roof pitch necessary makes the roof more prominent. From a reverse image search, the two "more roof than house" photos (both in the 8 section) seem to be from Sandy Spring, Maryland and Gaithersburg, Maryland. In general, the author seems to think that builders should place more value on architectural merit rather than practicality, maintainability and cost. Obviously most homebuyers don't share her priorities.
    - Rumudiez 10y ago
      Living just miles away from one of the places with the heaviest annual snowfall in the world (Cascade mountain range in WA), I don't know if what I'd call a steep pitched roof is what you'd call a steep pitched roof. There are other considerations to what makes a roof appear large. I'm not an architect, but as a designer I can at least point out that meaningful horizontal rhythm and the creation of positive and negative space through effective use of roof lines, dormers, and chimneys can all help make any practical roof space feel more utilized and be less eye-catching. A good designer or architect can uphold "good taste" while accommodating real world constraints; it's one of the defining differences between those fields and fine art, and a requirement of anyone performing critique.
kzahel 10y ago
There is a great podcast released a few days ago by 99% invisible interviewing the creator of the site: http://99percentinvisible.org/episode/mcmansion-hell-devil-details http://99percentinvisible.org/episode/mcmansion-hell-devil-d...
pjc50 10y ago
As a Brit, I'm struck by the size of almost all of those houses; so much money deployed in the service of so little taste. Of course, we're not safe from it either in the UK, but usually on a smaller scale of cheap apartments and faux-Tudor suburbs.
- te_chris 10y ago
  I was thinking the same as someone living in London. What do people do with all this space?
  - sotojuan 10y ago
    The US is a big, big place. Between the coasts there's plenty of cheap space that to this day remains unused. People have become used to being able to buy larger and larger houses for decades. It's just American culture. I can't answer what people "do" with all the space... but friends of mine lived in houses like these and it's not like there was an unused room or ignore backyard. Everything was used.
  - alistairSH 10y ago
    Not much, in my experience. Or, it might be more accurate to say the space is used for the detritus of middle-class living. I own a moderate 4 bedroom home, 3 of which are "vacant". 1 was my son's, but he's an adult and moved out. 1 is the guest room and used sporadically. The other is overflow for the now-too-small master closet. The dining room is used a few times each year for holidays and parties; we could easily do without. The 2-car garage is filled with too many bicycles, kayaks, utility trailer, large toolbox, etc. We're actively purging with the goal of moving to a more "urban" area sometime before retirement. I put urban in quite because we might find a nice small town instead of a major city, but the goal is a small rowhome or flat in a walkable area. With about 70% less stuff.
  - bagacrap 10y ago
    Have lots of kids and hobbies. An entertainment room, a room for the kids, 5bd/5br, a massive garage for bikes, water skis, snow skis, jet skis... These things take up space. When I was buying a house I was advised that I'd never regret having too much space. That wound up being false but I did find that I had no problem filling up said space with junk. (Largely explaining the overwhelming success of Amazon.)
Dowwie 10y ago
This is architectural trollery unleashed on the innocent masses, the kind of information that just makes homeowners feel bad about their property but does little to change things. The mcmansionshell crusade is analogous to developers publically complaining (trolling) about perfectly functional, stable source code that isn't as idiomatic as it could be. Unlike real property, source code is a hell of a lot easier and more likely to be improved when the criticism is compelling. Homeowners, on the other hand, won't upgrade. They literally have to just "live with it".
- minikites 10y ago
  So then why even have aesthetic guidelines about architecture? Why don't we all just live and work in cuboid structures with perfectly square windows spaced at uniform intervals?
- Jean-Philipe 10y ago
  I think you missed where she points out non-aestetical flaws of those McMansions, like cheap materials, water damage, covered-up measuring mistakes, wasted space.
  - Dowwie 10y ago
    yes I did
ssharp 10y ago
A lot of this McMansion stuff has trickled down into smaller homes, in the 2000-3000 square foot range. I think the term is neo-eclectic. Multiple roof lines, no two windows looking the same, lacking symmetry, front-facing three car garages, three or four different types of materials on the outside (siding, shake shingle, brick, etc.). These houses also suffer the same fate as many McMansions, where the house takes up a massive amount of the lot and you get houses stacked on top of each other with very small backyards[1]. Almost all of the new houses I see being built are using this style. I'm looking into building a house and in my area and it's impossible to find a builder advertising their plans online who don't use this style. So if you want to deviate from this style of house, you have to start working with an architect to draw something up or try and find your own house plans. I'm not saying this is a terrible burden, just that it's hard to get something more traditional "off the shelf", so to speak, and many people building a house don't want to go through that much of a process. I'm looking to build my house a rural lot in the 5-10 acre range, so fitting into neighborhood aesthetics isn't that crucial to me, but many places people build, it's going to look ridiculous to place a traditional cape cod amongst all the neo-eclectic stuff. [1] Small backyards and closely built houses work well in city neighborhoods but seem to be in conflict with why many people move to the suburbs -- to have more space. I'm not sure the desire to live in such compact lots. Certainly the developers like the small lots because they can squeeze more houses onto the acres their developing on. However, I'm probably an exception because people build these types houses on these types of lots in troves.
- Broken_Hippo 10y ago
  > I'm not sure the desire to live in such compact lots. I do understand the small lots to an extent - adults don't actually use their yards very often especially in climates with cold weather half the year. Yards are a lot of work if you live in a place where you have to care for it. Inside space = usable space for many folks. I'm truly no different in this respect. I'm a low yard-use person and despise things such as grass mowing. I might go outside with a laptop or a book occasionally, if the space is private. Which to me, is truly the most horrible thing about these neighborhoods. Some of them merely have walking space between the houses, and it cuts down on privacy. To me, that is the main reason to have a yard - a buffer zone between me and my neighbors. I'd be quite happy with the rural lot you describe, but I don't think the folks moving to the suburbs view it as such.
mschaef 10y ago
Every time this site come up on yc, I I always have the same impression... I like what the guy is trying to do to improve architecture, but it just seems so mean spirited in execution.
- oe 10y ago
  *girl (http://99percentinvisible.org/episode/mcmansion-hell-devil-details/ http://99percentinvisible.org/episode/mcmansion-hell-devil-d...) It's mean but well deserved.
rayiner 10y ago
I love this article as social commentary. I grew up in McMansion hell--the DC suburbs. My parents live in a McMansion. The architectural critiques capture not only what I hate about these houses, but about the attitudes of many people here. They have a general air of being better than the rest of the country by virtue of education and an upper middle class income. They're intensely image conscious but don't have exposure to real wealth, so they buy and build houses with features like fake windows. They're bad with money: Median household income in Great Fall VA is about $200k, while the median house price is about $1 million. The owners of most of these McMansions are extremely leveraged.
- CPLX 10y ago
  As I was reading the first half of this comment I was thinking, I'm going to ask him if he means Great Falls, or Potomac, and then you said Great Falls. I think your armchair analysis is spot on. Am from Montgomery County myself for reference.
- ssharp 10y ago
  Did you grow up in the McMansion? Were the schools mostly kids that came from these upper-middle class families? I'm curious because I flip back and forth between wanting a good school district for my kids and wanting to expose them to a little more socioeconomic diversity. Just curious your thoughts on growing up in that type of area, particularly around education and socializing with other kids.
  - tom_b 10y ago
    If it is an option for you geographically, look around at college town school districts where maybe there is some remaining socioeconomic diversity (e.g, the whole school district isn't made up of employees of the university). My kids are in a school where more than half the kids are non-white and around half the kids have low socioeconomic status (SES) based on free/reduced-price lunch numbers despite our district being high-SES compared to other districts in our state. We have a good base of racial diversity although that diversity is mostly Hispanic (dual-language school). A teacher at our elementary school once said that socializing across SES normally happens only if parents make a point of providing opportunities for that to happen with the kids. Kids have lots of birthday parties at local parks - I've attended several of these gatherings where the kind-hearted bilingual parents switched over to English so that I could be a part of the conversation - while my kids are bilingual, I am a typical American and only speak English. As both a parent of participants and as a coach in youth sports, I'll say the rec leagues sometimes provide good opportunities for that mixing of different SES kids. It often falls apart though - we have youth sports leagues where the participation and lost opportunity costs due to heavy practice/travel time seem to screen out low-SES kids. It's kind of funny, but my family basically lives in small-town America but has wound up in a better school district in our state that also has some racial and SES diversity in the population. It's working as both a good school district and opportunity for kids of different SES and race to grow up together. Longer term, problems with affordable housing are probably going to blow some of these opportunities away.
martythemaniak 10y ago
Perhaps this is a good thread to ask: Does anyone have book recommendations about how and why houses are built? For example, this blog talks about siding (EIFS, vinyl, stucco), but I'd like to learn how these are made, relative costs, how they respond to different climates, how they're actually constructed etc. I'd like to learn about all different aspects of houses, for example, why are foundations just poured concrete, vs using stone? What are the advantages of brick vs stone, etc.
- deleted 10y ago
  [deleted]
- pjc50 10y ago
  http://diy.stackexchange.com/ http://diy.stackexchange.com/ might be a good place for those questions. Stone is expensive, hard to transport, and difficult to shape. Concrete is stone you can pour, although you need to keep water away from the embedded steel reinforcement. UK houses tend to be brick and US wood due to relative costs in those countries.
  - bkjelden 10y ago
    /r/homeimprovement on reddit can have some bright spots too. As a general note, house construction varies a lot throughout the US due to the climate variances. E.g. someone moving to the bay area from the midwest is going to find the insulation in houses there comical. Here in Colorado we have almost no vinyl siding (because of the increased UV exposure, I presume), and mold is less of a concern than elsewhere. Full basements are the norm in the midwest, but rare in Texas and nearly impossible in Florida.
owenversteeg 10y ago
The author rightfully hates on pre-lawsuit EIFS, but I know it's improved quite a bit. Does anyone know how good EIFS is these days? As far as a quick Google tells me, post-lawsuit EIFS is a magical building material from the gods that can quite literally withstand hurricanes and missiles [0] but I imagine reality is a bit more nuanced than that. [0] http://www.architectmagazine.com/technology/products/revisiting-eifs-the-once-maligned-cladding-system-that-may-help-architects-meet-new-energy-codes_o http://www.architectmagazine.com/technology/products/revisit...
jessaustin 10y ago
Incidentally, I find TFA to exemplify a "McWebsite". The interesting primary content is totally dominated by the massive "More You Might Like" footer with four more entire McMansion articles sandwiched in together, including all original images and graphics. Meanwhile Chrome is pegging at 500k for this one page. Lose the four-car garage please!
jessaustin 10y ago
I'm not surprised to see the higher end of the scale feature lots of oversized eave returns. I am surprised TFA doesn't mention this everyday horror of ostentatious suburban living. A classical eave return is only appropriate when of classical dimensions.

291 points by OrwellianChild 10y ago

hueving 10y ago

Reminds me of Yelp reviews that slam a restaurant for its decor and don't mention the quality of the food.

theothermkn 10y ago
That would only be true if these were architectural reviews that praised the food prepared in the McMansion's kitchen but didn't address the architecture.
- hueving 10y ago
  Most people buy homes to live in, not to look at and show off to other people. The majority of your interactions with your own home will be inside of it. None of these articles even acknowledge the fact that these might have nice interiors that offer more conveniences than a 1000 sq ft home built in 1932.
  - pavel_lishin 10y ago
    Many of those articles address that very thing, both specifically: http://www.mcmansionhell.com/post/151106172346/bergen-county-new-jersey http://www.mcmansionhell.com/post/151106172346/bergen-county... http://www.mcmansionhell.com/post/150776910526/encino-ca http://www.mcmansionhell.com/post/150776910526/encino-ca And in general: http://www.mcmansionhell.com/post/150597521816/mcmansions-101-revisited-aesthetics-aside-why http://www.mcmansionhell.com/post/150597521816/mcmansions-10...
  - theothermkn 10y ago
    It's not about "showing off." It's about whether the structures are inviting or alienating. It's about whether they contribute to the aesthetic of the neighborhood. It's about whether their exteriors sacrifice form for a cheap veneer of ostentation. The elements of McMansions are borrowed, ineptly, from better classes of buildings and then mangled and jumbled together. They make a vague visual promise of quality, and their intent is to be sold. Buildings should, instead, function inside and out to support the life and activities of their residents and those residents neighbors and visitors. The visual function of architecture is not decoration; Architecture uses a visual language that conveys the uses of structures to the community at large, as well as the residents (in a home) or patrons (in a business or public space), so that society can function. And, to say that these homes are not bought to be looked at nor shown off is incredibly naive. The point of them is aesthetics, and that's part and parcel of why they're such travesties. It's why they are degenerate. They're the kind of thing that can only pass to someone who is uprooted from their own culture and history, cannot even rely on even a folk understanding as a guide to what works or does not work architecturally. These are degenerate homes, sold to the degenerate mass of déclassé and rootless consumers.
  - wott 10y ago
    If those are not made for showing off, I don't know what they are made for.
  - nommm-nommm 10y ago
    McMansions are actually made for showing off to other people as well as living in. The whole point of a McMansion is a pseudo-status symbol. If you actually read her blog she actually does critiques the interiors as well.
rabboRubble 10y ago
She does talk about quality of materials in other posts in addition to the failure to use / design / construct with those cheaper materials. She's a hysterical writer. Highly recommend poking around her site for a bit. She's changed the way I look at real estate.
- deleted 10y ago
  [deleted]

harryh 10y ago

dupe of a dupe: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=12754592 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=12754592 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pRtVMLwh6mY https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pRtVMLwh6mY

deleted 10y ago
[deleted]

hogrammer 10y ago

Meh. People have the right in the United States to buy property and build houses on it. One man's "ugly" is someone else's dream home. I also suspect there's some envy here.

partisan 10y ago
Does the author feel better after writing generating all of this negativity? I don't feel better reading it. I live in the opposite of a McMansion, but if I had a choice, I would prefer to live in a large house where I can have some space that is my own. I wouldn't give two shits about what someone thinks about the appearance of the house. There are those who view success as a large house, nice car, a nice lawn, with kids running around in the back yard. There are people who view success as living in the city, childless, dining out, paying ever increasing rent as your badge of honor. The old American Dream concluded with you seeing the fruits of your labor in your possessions and the successes of your progeny. It was full of traps and the ways to fail were many, but there was some sort of blueprint to having something at the end of it all. The new American Dream is really just like a dream. You wake up and you have nothing to show for it and you barely remember it. You ate good food, drank good drinks, hung out with friends, went to that awesome show. All these great experiences. But you paid for them, in high rent, untold thousands on cabs home, expensive meals, artisanal trinkets, the right clothes, concert tickets. And the next day, they are memories. And then at some point, you are old, you age out of the lifestyle, and then out of your job and suddenly you have nothing left. Which of these American Dreams is better?
- nommm-nommm 10y ago
  This is an extremely bizarre comment. Research suggests that spending money on experiences brings lasting happiness and spending money on material objects does not. Not wanting to own a huge house doesn't mean being childless or childfree. Most Americans have children sometime in their lives and even many who can't have children would like to have had them. Consumerism is still alive and well in America. Does one really age out of enjoying eating, drinking, and companionship? Does hitting a certain age mean you suddenly want to sit around the house alone eating bland food and staring at your accumulation of stuff? Enjoying going out and doing things at the expense of a long commute, two SUVs, and huge house doesn't mean you spend 100% of your money and have no budget. I enjoy all those things (too much) and still save half our income and we max out our 401(k)s and IRAs. If I had a smaller income I'd adjust my spending, I certainly did when I was a student and also when I was very poor. If I wanted to buy a McMansion once I age out of companionship and having fun I certainly can afford to do so at that time. Personally, material possessions bring me a lot of anxiety and I'd like to own as little as possible to reduce my anxiety level. I don't want to "[see] the fruits of [my] labor in [my] possessions."

dietrichepp 10y ago

This article is best juxtaposed with articles about image synthesis: * Wave Function Collapse image generator https://github.com/mxgmn/WaveFunctionCollapse https://github.com/mxgmn/WaveFunctionCollapse * Image Synthesis from Yahoo's open_nsfw: https://open_nsfw.gitlab.io https://open_nsfw.gitlab.io * Generative Adversarial Text to Image Synthesis: https://arxiv.org/abs/1605.05396 https://arxiv.org/abs/1605.05396 Put another way, when I look at the McMansions at 10 on the scale, it looks to me like the kind of output you get when you just feed a bunch of pictures of houses into a neural network without feeding in any of the cultural or aesthetic context. Things like the large garages and roofs look like the efforts of constraint solvers working with inputs that are out of bounds. In a sense, that is exactly what happened.

internaut 10y ago
I agree, I think that is literally the case. The part of the human brain that deals with 'unified logic' or whatever you want to call it, is visibly absent because it is not there. It was never employed to make those decisions, I think we should be asking broader questions about why not because I believe it to be a societal issue and not a recreational one. This aside it is worth noting that in days of old they had 'style handbooks' (because they built idiot things in the old days too) to guide them in keeping overall symmetry. I don't think that solves for everything but it would have prevented the worst atrocities. Just like an anti-patterns or patterns book really.
- jimmux 10y ago
  So these houses are the architectural equivalent of The Homer. http://simpsons.wikia.com/wiki/The_Homer http://simpsons.wikia.com/wiki/The_Homer
disconcision 10y ago
this is a really good comment. i was going to refer to the 10s as literal 'dream houses', in that they remind me of the places i'd wander through in my dreams, especially when i was younger: nonsensical, sometimes phantasmagorical amalgams of the homes of friends, hotels, historical buildings, and any number of other places i was dragged as a kid.

carsongross 10y ago

I was recently struck by this house, offered by Sears in 1921: https://oklahomahousesbymail.files.wordpress.com/2012/10/sears-saratoga-1921.jpg https://oklahomahousesbymail.files.wordpress.com/2012/10/sea... What's crazy is the price: $47,085.20 in todays dollars. This is with all finishing materials (including stained glass) & delivered (no cement or bricks). It's an amazing house, and any old schlub could order it from good ol' Sears. Something very bad happened in architecture around world war 2.

Turing_Machine 10y ago
The "something bad" that happened was that VA home loans became available, and many returning servicemen took advantage of them. However, the maximum amount was small ($2,000 at first). Whether this was actually "bad" or not depends on whether you think it was better to keep returning veterans in crowded, archaic housing, or whether it was better to let them have a modern house (with modern wiring, plumbing, etc.) that doesn't conform to your personal taste in the year 2016. Note also that your 1921 Sears house doesn't include electrical wiring, plumbing, or heating.
- carsongross 10y ago
  Well, given the post WW2 built environment... Yeah, I'm gonna call it something bad. But this is the problem, I suppose. It's obvious that the fractal complexity, materials, beauty and craftsmanship of older buildings is vastly superior to what even rich folks can afford today, but we have to sit around and argue about taste and air conditioning, rather than figure out what the hell happened.
  - Turing_Machine 10y ago
    Off-the-rack clothing doesn't match the materials, beauty, and craftsmanship of a bespoke Savile Row English cut suit, either, but neither does it cost $3-5,000 a pop. I personally like having more than one set of clothes to wear. I also like air conditioning when I'm in a hot climate and central heat in a cold one. Electricity and running water are also nice.

bertiewhykovich 10y ago

I'm not sold on this. Some of the criticisms levied seem valid, and there's /some/ sensibility to the scale -- but the whole thing smacks of a post-hoc attempt to define why McMansions are in poor taste in non-socioeconomic terms. It's sufficient to just say "McMansions are tremendously wasteful symptoms of American decadence" -- but that might be psychologically hard if you've spent years in architecture school learning how to design status symbols for the upper classes.

danharaj 10y ago
Architecture has rules of composition like any other craft. McMansions shit all over them. There's nothing post-hoc about calling them shit. A McMansion only look sensible and aesthetically pleasing if you try to imagine one as a well designed house covered in tumors. The fact that they are an example of American decadence stems from the fact that they are cargo culting opulence.
- Turing_Machine 10y ago
  "McMansions shit all over them." How is it any of your business? The people who buy them like them. Their tastes are not yours, and they're the ones paying the bills.
  - 542458 10y ago
    There's an entire post on how, aesthetics aside, mcmansion-style houses are rife with problems. The tl;dr of it is that they're a very bad investment, massively energy and co2 inefficient, maintenance intensive (due to large size and low-quality materials) and often have badly cut corners. There's also a final point about the size being isolating, but that's a bit more subjective IMHO. http://www.mcmansionhell.com/post/150597521816/mcmansions-101-revisited-aesthetics-aside-why http://www.mcmansionhell.com/post/150597521816/mcmansions-10...
  - danharaj 10y ago
    It's my business in the sense that I can have an opinion about how ugly their house is and I do. There's nothing more to it. It's not like I think McMansions should be illegal because they are ugly, although I don't see what's fundamentally unjust about a community not wanting eyesores in their neighborhoods if enough McMansion haters congregated in one place. There are other reasons why they suck that a sibling comment mentioned. I don't believe just because aesthetics involve personal preferences that we can't discuss them and come to common conclusions regarding the good and the bad. Aesthetics are very important to me as a programmer, for example, and I am an unhappy programmer if I cannot write pretty code for whatever reason. I certainly wouldn't want to be a programmer if I couldn't write pretty code as often as I do. Crunch time hurts me twice: the extra work, but also the resource constraints that mean I have to satisfy beauty in code. If I didn't care about what is beautiful and what is not, I would feel like a very flat person. If that makes me an asshole then, well, I mean I wouldn't disagree.

ars 10y ago

Interestingly the higher the number the more I like the house. The low number ones are boring and plain. The high number ones are interesting to live in.

bkyan 10y ago
Me, too!
pavel_lishin 10y ago
I hear there's an ancient Chinese curse about living in interesting-something-or-other. I don't think it was houses, but I bet they'd have adjusted it if they'd seen these.
- joncrocks 10y ago
  https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/May_you_live_in_interesting_times https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/May_you_live_in_interesting_ti...
tracker1 10y ago
From the exterior, the modernist in the #1 block was my favorite, and the Suburban Craftsman in the #2 block my second... most of the rest I find less appealing. I also tend to like more Colonial and Victorian era looks as well. That's just me though, that said it doesn't have to be a particular style to be good looking... it's about balance, scale and style. It's too easy to go over the top in very bad ways. I've also seen some nicer garage integrations, usually with the garage entry to the side, which allows for a better balance... If the house is too small, then a separate garage or different integration can work.
UweSchmidt 10y ago
Can you generalize what exactly it is you like? How many small pointy roofs and different kinds of windows do you like? Is there an upper limit on how disney it can look, if we expanded the McMansion scale to 20 in photoshop? Can you appreciate a reduced style in other things, say, the original Google.com or the first iPod?

bkjelden 10y ago

Any valid critiques the author may have are completely lost in the contempt and pretentiousness of her writing style. Additionally, I am incredibly skeptical of her ability to judge the quality of a house's construction based on a single exterior photo.

erikpukinskis 10y ago
Funny, I thought the author is mostly correct, and also chucked quite a few times at the silly writing. To each her own.
- ghaff 10y ago
  I basically agree with her while cringing at a lot of the academic jargon around design language. I do believe that consistency of style in architecture is a thing while recognizing that homes are in service of how people use their interiors.
Turing_Machine 10y ago
Presumably the people who actually buy the "McMansions" don't think they look all that bad. Otherwise they'd buy something else, right?
- flukus 10y ago
  Or they buy what they can afford.
  - Turing_Machine 10y ago
    That too, in which case sneering at them is plain ol' snobbery. No one is making McMansion haters buy one or live in one. Me, I can't imagine why anyone would willingly live in San Francisco or New York City, but people obviously do. I just don't feel the need to write snobby articles criticizing them for their lifestyle choices.
    - 10y ago

tomcam 10y ago

It's really bad when people idiotically think they should be able to put the house they want on their own property. What a bunch of tools.

stephen_g 10y ago
Where does the author advocate banning terrible houses? She's just explaining the features and design ideas that make this kind of architecture so distasteful - not telling anyone what to do...
- zip1234 10y ago
  She doesn't even get into the main thing (in my opinion) that makes them so distasteful--car dependency for everything. Having lived in that situation vs a situation where I was in a smaller house, but walking distance to town, I much preferred the walking distance house. Being in a subdivision a half mile into a windy 25 mph road is not such a fun experience.
  - initram 10y ago
    She very often talks about how attached garages make houses much uglier, and ruin the aesthetics in a lot of cases. Check out the rest of her articles!
    - Turing_Machine 10y ago
      I like having a place to keep cars, tools, and sporting equipment. I suspect the people who buy these houses do as well.
      - siidooloo 10y ago
        The issue isn't that they have garages. The garages are randomly placed. They look glommed on.
      - nommm-nommm 10y ago

flukus 10y ago

So tiny houses and large mansions are the same on this scale? What does the author think mansion means?

stephen_g 10y ago
The scale is supposed to be a scale of the quality of the design. Neither tiny houses or well-designed mansions qualify as 'McMansions'.
- flukus 10y ago
  The quality is only the "Mc" part of "McMansion" though. and Mansion implies large house. Edit: > Neither tiny houses or well-designed mansions qualify as 'McMansions'. Yet they're on the McMansion scale.
  - dpark 10y ago
    Yes, at the bottom of it.
  - eyelidlessness 10y ago
    It establishes a baseline as a frame of reference.

siidooloo 10y ago

I think some commenters are missing the point. The issue isn't that the houses are big. Mansion vs McMansion is like the difference between a gadget made out of aluminum and a gadget made out of plastic covered in silver paint.

bbarn 10y ago

The hate for attached garages.. Doesn't the author realize how incredibly useful, and unsightly, they are at the same time? I have a rented garage a half block away in the city, and a basement full of all my random projects, that I would only dream of being able to stick in a garage next to my house.

ghaff 10y ago
Yep. My cars move out of the garage in the summer and I have all sorts of sports equipment and in-progress projects there. The cars need to go back in (for plowing reasons) in the winter and stuff gets packed away or winched up. But garages are pretty much essential for a lot of people.
- stass 10y ago
  It does not have to be attached though.
  - ghaff 10y ago
    Useful though in the winter.
  - brightsize 10y ago
    Or visible from the street.
    - lostlogin 10y ago
      While I don't like garages that dominate the front of a house, paving a route around you section is wasteful and potentially dangerous in terms of small kids playing etc. I'd far prefer almost anything to acres of concrete.
    - ghaff 10y ago
      The street is where you're typically driving in from though. So, barring a garage at a lower level at the side of the house or something along those lines, moving a garage around to the back (non-streetside) of the house probably involves building more driveway and otherwise dedicating more space to cars.

pkamb 10y ago

I'd like to see a similar blog for the terrible "modern" homes currently being built. Count the exterior materials! Cinder blocks, fake artisanal barnwood, neon-green door, neon-orange corrugated metal, exposed concrete, yellow windows, reclaimed shipping container...

internaut 10y ago
In particular anybody who reclaims a shipping container has not done the math. It's an idea that sounds good or affordable but it takes a lot of money and expertise to make that work properly even if the container was free. It would make considerably more sense to acquire a large cardboard box.
- TheSpiceIsLife 10y ago
  Never mind making it work properly, just slap them together as per http://www.examiner.com.au/story/380795/one-mans-container-is-another-mans-home/ http://www.examiner.com.au/story/380795/one-mans-container-i...
  - internaut 10y ago
    If you are not concerned with the difficulty of running plumbing/electric, you still have thermal bridging through steel at 400 times the conductivity of wood. The people who use steel framing often thermally isolate thin strips of metal, not the entire wall. The insulation job the guy says he hasn't done yet, he's going to find out he'll need to insert a cavity air gap. If he chooses to stick it with a gap as external sheathing to save space he'll still need to contend with condensation on this very conductive surface. If he goes for passive house level air tightness and internal smart vapour barrier he could be fine but somehow I think he's just winging it which means water vapour will condense inside his house and not be able to dry out. Hello mildew and everything he owns will rot. You can build with shipping containers, but you've got to really know what you're doing. tldr; A guy spent 50k+ to put his house inside a heatsink. This looks environmentally friendly but with the probable dehumidifier requirements it is probably much worse than regular building.

Animats 10y ago

There's a long history of this problem. Bletchley Park Manor House[1] meets most of the criteria listed for a 9th or 10th level McMansion. Three or more window styles. Turrets. Bad columns. Faux balcony. Patchwork masonry. Roofline soup. Oversized pediments. Oversized transoms. House is out of scale. They avoided the two-story entrance. It's not big enough for one. (I visited before it became a big-time museum, and had a guide who was more into the architecture than the cryptanalysis.) [1] https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/8/82/Bletchley_Park_-_Draco2008.jpg https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/8/82/Bletchle...

arkitaip 10y ago
It looks like something you would find at an amusement park.
- wott 10y ago
  I remember reading that the building of the Disneyland in Europe was more costly than the one in the USA because they had to use real materials and kind-of-real construction processes, for customers are used to real historical stuff everywhere and would be shocked by bad quality replicas; whereas plastic and crude fake construction was okay for Americans, they would not bat an eyelid.
Maarten88 10y ago
An even older example: Palacio da Pena, Sintra, Portugal http://www.neverendingvoyage.com/the-fairytale-palaces-of-sintra-a-photo-essay/ http://www.neverendingvoyage.com/the-fairytale-palaces-of-si...
- mattkrause 10y ago
  But...that's old. It's almost inevitable that old buildings evolve in strange ways. According to the wikipedia article, it was a monastery, cathedral, and palace. Parts were hit by lightning and rebuilt; I'm sure others also needed repairs from other disasters, wear-and-tear, and changing usage. The fact that an old building ends up like that doesn't mean that new buildings should start looking like that. Imagine if someone said "this legacy code is an absolute mess, so this new project can be a spaghetti-coded disaster too!".

omegote 10y ago

As an european who has never visited the US, I'm totally unfamiliar with this kind of buildings, other than seeing them in TV Shows like Family Matters or Full House. Also, almost every single american woodworking YouTube channel is recorded in a garage of one this kind of houses. I find them huge, yet their popularity makes me think they're pretty common, maybe even affordable?

swah 10y ago
I wonder how are the houses in some places in Germany, for example? They also love their cars and have real winters...
- pluma 10y ago
  The average German lives in an apartment or multi-family house. On the country side there are still a lot of fully detached houses but they're either mostly "old" (i.e. built or fully renovated after the war) or built to a different standard (Germans generally consider drywall a cheap substitute). But of course that is also changing. Also, building your own house is not as affordable as it seems to be in the US. Germans have a stronger aversion to taking out loans and banks often want a significant down payment. From what I've seen few home owners actually park their cars in garages though. Recently carports (basically sunroofs) have become pretty popular but most people seem to park their cars in the driveway as far as I can tell. We just clean them more often, I guess.
  - MK999 10y ago
    what kind of multi-family house? Side by Side duplex? Up down duplex? Quadplex? Something else?
    - taejo 10y ago
      I don't know what the averages are, but I'd say in towns the most typical are terraced houses with four or five floors - sometimes that's one apartment on each floor, sometimes two.

zuminator 10y ago

Fun, but I'd find this information more useful if juxtaposed with an analysis of the livability and practicality of the various McMansion species. After all, a person spends a lot more time inhabiting the home as opposed to looking at it, so ultimately the inside is a lot more important than the outside. As a few people already noted, attached garages may be generally ugly but they're useful. Can one say the same about multistorey windows and entryways, lots of dormers, large columns, random multiple window styles, etc.? Do these things add aesthetic or practical value to the house for the people actually residing in them? Or are they mere eyecandy for tasteless consumers but in the end add nothing to the enjoyment of daily living.

usrusr 10y ago
Individual house dissection do go into detail about how the outside is reflected on the inside, to bad effects. See this one for example: http://www.mcmansionhell.com/post/149128564511/mclean-virginia http://www.mcmansionhell.com/post/149128564511/mclean-virgin... It's even more chaotic on the inside than on the outside. The Homer Simpson car without wheels.
Jean-Philipe 10y ago
She actually spends at least half of her compliments on the inside of those houses. Reading the blog before commenting might be a good idea.

fuqted 10y ago

Thanks for sharing this blog. She is funny, and this is putting words to feelings I've had. That said, what she constitutes as negative, 'McMansion' traits largely seem to be based on how she feels about the house as a whole. http://www.mcmansionhell.com/post/149284377161/mansionvsmcmansion?is_related_post=1 http://www.mcmansionhell.com/post/149284377161/mansionvsmcma... >Mansion vs McMansion Immediately you'll notice the 'mansion' has a faux balcony, useless pillars and void throwup; all traits she claims to despise. Scroll down to the example of a New Traditional house (which is a beautiful house) and it's clearly a house that, in her terms, has no concept of mass; it's all roof! I get what she's saying, but still. She should at least be consistent with the individual traits she dislikes.

Rumudiez 10y ago
Design and architecture aren't matters of opinion – "disliking roofs" isn't a thing and is not her point. Combinations of various features lead to different dynamics, which can be beneficial or harmful to the overall appearance or impression given by the object. So when she says the house is "all roof," it's not that she dislikes roofs in general; it's that the roof dwarfs the rest of the house, making it look small and insignificant. Imagine wearing too large of a suit, or putting your TV in front a movie theater screen.
- dlubarov 10y ago
  The thing with roofs is that if you get substantial snowfall in winter, practicality demands a steep roof pitch, otherwise melted snow will drip through the shingles. A high roof pitch necessary makes the roof more prominent. From a reverse image search, the two "more roof than house" photos (both in the 8 section) seem to be from Sandy Spring, Maryland and Gaithersburg, Maryland. In general, the author seems to think that builders should place more value on architectural merit rather than practicality, maintainability and cost. Obviously most homebuyers don't share her priorities.
  - Rumudiez 10y ago
    Living just miles away from one of the places with the heaviest annual snowfall in the world (Cascade mountain range in WA), I don't know if what I'd call a steep pitched roof is what you'd call a steep pitched roof. There are other considerations to what makes a roof appear large. I'm not an architect, but as a designer I can at least point out that meaningful horizontal rhythm and the creation of positive and negative space through effective use of roof lines, dormers, and chimneys can all help make any practical roof space feel more utilized and be less eye-catching. A good designer or architect can uphold "good taste" while accommodating real world constraints; it's one of the defining differences between those fields and fine art, and a requirement of anyone performing critique.

kzahel 10y ago

There is a great podcast released a few days ago by 99% invisible interviewing the creator of the site: http://99percentinvisible.org/episode/mcmansion-hell-devil-details http://99percentinvisible.org/episode/mcmansion-hell-devil-d...

pjc50 10y ago

As a Brit, I'm struck by the size of almost all of those houses; so much money deployed in the service of so little taste. Of course, we're not safe from it either in the UK, but usually on a smaller scale of cheap apartments and faux-Tudor suburbs.

te_chris 10y ago
I was thinking the same as someone living in London. What do people do with all this space?
- sotojuan 10y ago
  The US is a big, big place. Between the coasts there's plenty of cheap space that to this day remains unused. People have become used to being able to buy larger and larger houses for decades. It's just American culture. I can't answer what people "do" with all the space... but friends of mine lived in houses like these and it's not like there was an unused room or ignore backyard. Everything was used.
- alistairSH 10y ago
  Not much, in my experience. Or, it might be more accurate to say the space is used for the detritus of middle-class living. I own a moderate 4 bedroom home, 3 of which are "vacant". 1 was my son's, but he's an adult and moved out. 1 is the guest room and used sporadically. The other is overflow for the now-too-small master closet. The dining room is used a few times each year for holidays and parties; we could easily do without. The 2-car garage is filled with too many bicycles, kayaks, utility trailer, large toolbox, etc. We're actively purging with the goal of moving to a more "urban" area sometime before retirement. I put urban in quite because we might find a nice small town instead of a major city, but the goal is a small rowhome or flat in a walkable area. With about 70% less stuff.
- bagacrap 10y ago
  Have lots of kids and hobbies. An entertainment room, a room for the kids, 5bd/5br, a massive garage for bikes, water skis, snow skis, jet skis... These things take up space. When I was buying a house I was advised that I'd never regret having too much space. That wound up being false but I did find that I had no problem filling up said space with junk. (Largely explaining the overwhelming success of Amazon.)

Dowwie 10y ago

This is architectural trollery unleashed on the innocent masses, the kind of information that just makes homeowners feel bad about their property but does little to change things. The mcmansionshell crusade is analogous to developers publically complaining (trolling) about perfectly functional, stable source code that isn't as idiomatic as it could be. Unlike real property, source code is a hell of a lot easier and more likely to be improved when the criticism is compelling. Homeowners, on the other hand, won't upgrade. They literally have to just "live with it".

minikites 10y ago
So then why even have aesthetic guidelines about architecture? Why don't we all just live and work in cuboid structures with perfectly square windows spaced at uniform intervals?
Jean-Philipe 10y ago
I think you missed where she points out non-aestetical flaws of those McMansions, like cheap materials, water damage, covered-up measuring mistakes, wasted space.
- Dowwie 10y ago
  yes I did

ssharp 10y ago

A lot of this McMansion stuff has trickled down into smaller homes, in the 2000-3000 square foot range. I think the term is neo-eclectic. Multiple roof lines, no two windows looking the same, lacking symmetry, front-facing three car garages, three or four different types of materials on the outside (siding, shake shingle, brick, etc.). These houses also suffer the same fate as many McMansions, where the house takes up a massive amount of the lot and you get houses stacked on top of each other with very small backyards[1]. Almost all of the new houses I see being built are using this style. I'm looking into building a house and in my area and it's impossible to find a builder advertising their plans online who don't use this style. So if you want to deviate from this style of house, you have to start working with an architect to draw something up or try and find your own house plans. I'm not saying this is a terrible burden, just that it's hard to get something more traditional "off the shelf", so to speak, and many people building a house don't want to go through that much of a process. I'm looking to build my house a rural lot in the 5-10 acre range, so fitting into neighborhood aesthetics isn't that crucial to me, but many places people build, it's going to look ridiculous to place a traditional cape cod amongst all the neo-eclectic stuff. [1] Small backyards and closely built houses work well in city neighborhoods but seem to be in conflict with why many people move to the suburbs -- to have more space. I'm not sure the desire to live in such compact lots. Certainly the developers like the small lots because they can squeeze more houses onto the acres their developing on. However, I'm probably an exception because people build these types houses on these types of lots in troves.

Broken_Hippo 10y ago
> I'm not sure the desire to live in such compact lots. I do understand the small lots to an extent - adults don't actually use their yards very often especially in climates with cold weather half the year. Yards are a lot of work if you live in a place where you have to care for it. Inside space = usable space for many folks. I'm truly no different in this respect. I'm a low yard-use person and despise things such as grass mowing. I might go outside with a laptop or a book occasionally, if the space is private. Which to me, is truly the most horrible thing about these neighborhoods. Some of them merely have walking space between the houses, and it cuts down on privacy. To me, that is the main reason to have a yard - a buffer zone between me and my neighbors. I'd be quite happy with the rural lot you describe, but I don't think the folks moving to the suburbs view it as such.

mschaef 10y ago

Every time this site come up on yc, I I always have the same impression... I like what the guy is trying to do to improve architecture, but it just seems so mean spirited in execution.

oe 10y ago
*girl (http://99percentinvisible.org/episode/mcmansion-hell-devil-details/ http://99percentinvisible.org/episode/mcmansion-hell-devil-d...) It's mean but well deserved.

rayiner 10y ago

I love this article as social commentary. I grew up in McMansion hell--the DC suburbs. My parents live in a McMansion. The architectural critiques capture not only what I hate about these houses, but about the attitudes of many people here. They have a general air of being better than the rest of the country by virtue of education and an upper middle class income. They're intensely image conscious but don't have exposure to real wealth, so they buy and build houses with features like fake windows. They're bad with money: Median household income in Great Fall VA is about $200k, while the median house price is about $1 million. The owners of most of these McMansions are extremely leveraged.

CPLX 10y ago
As I was reading the first half of this comment I was thinking, I'm going to ask him if he means Great Falls, or Potomac, and then you said Great Falls. I think your armchair analysis is spot on. Am from Montgomery County myself for reference.
ssharp 10y ago
Did you grow up in the McMansion? Were the schools mostly kids that came from these upper-middle class families? I'm curious because I flip back and forth between wanting a good school district for my kids and wanting to expose them to a little more socioeconomic diversity. Just curious your thoughts on growing up in that type of area, particularly around education and socializing with other kids.
- tom_b 10y ago
  If it is an option for you geographically, look around at college town school districts where maybe there is some remaining socioeconomic diversity (e.g, the whole school district isn't made up of employees of the university). My kids are in a school where more than half the kids are non-white and around half the kids have low socioeconomic status (SES) based on free/reduced-price lunch numbers despite our district being high-SES compared to other districts in our state. We have a good base of racial diversity although that diversity is mostly Hispanic (dual-language school). A teacher at our elementary school once said that socializing across SES normally happens only if parents make a point of providing opportunities for that to happen with the kids. Kids have lots of birthday parties at local parks - I've attended several of these gatherings where the kind-hearted bilingual parents switched over to English so that I could be a part of the conversation - while my kids are bilingual, I am a typical American and only speak English. As both a parent of participants and as a coach in youth sports, I'll say the rec leagues sometimes provide good opportunities for that mixing of different SES kids. It often falls apart though - we have youth sports leagues where the participation and lost opportunity costs due to heavy practice/travel time seem to screen out low-SES kids. It's kind of funny, but my family basically lives in small-town America but has wound up in a better school district in our state that also has some racial and SES diversity in the population. It's working as both a good school district and opportunity for kids of different SES and race to grow up together. Longer term, problems with affordable housing are probably going to blow some of these opportunities away.

martythemaniak 10y ago

Perhaps this is a good thread to ask: Does anyone have book recommendations about how and why houses are built? For example, this blog talks about siding (EIFS, vinyl, stucco), but I'd like to learn how these are made, relative costs, how they respond to different climates, how they're actually constructed etc. I'd like to learn about all different aspects of houses, for example, why are foundations just poured concrete, vs using stone? What are the advantages of brick vs stone, etc.

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pjc50 10y ago
http://diy.stackexchange.com/ http://diy.stackexchange.com/ might be a good place for those questions. Stone is expensive, hard to transport, and difficult to shape. Concrete is stone you can pour, although you need to keep water away from the embedded steel reinforcement. UK houses tend to be brick and US wood due to relative costs in those countries.
- bkjelden 10y ago
  /r/homeimprovement on reddit can have some bright spots too. As a general note, house construction varies a lot throughout the US due to the climate variances. E.g. someone moving to the bay area from the midwest is going to find the insulation in houses there comical. Here in Colorado we have almost no vinyl siding (because of the increased UV exposure, I presume), and mold is less of a concern than elsewhere. Full basements are the norm in the midwest, but rare in Texas and nearly impossible in Florida.

owenversteeg 10y ago

The author rightfully hates on pre-lawsuit EIFS, but I know it's improved quite a bit. Does anyone know how good EIFS is these days? As far as a quick Google tells me, post-lawsuit EIFS is a magical building material from the gods that can quite literally withstand hurricanes and missiles [0] but I imagine reality is a bit more nuanced than that. [0] http://www.architectmagazine.com/technology/products/revisiting-eifs-the-once-maligned-cladding-system-that-may-help-architects-meet-new-energy-codes_o http://www.architectmagazine.com/technology/products/revisit...

jessaustin 10y ago

Incidentally, I find TFA to exemplify a "McWebsite". The interesting primary content is totally dominated by the massive "More You Might Like" footer with four more entire McMansion articles sandwiched in together, including all original images and graphics. Meanwhile Chrome is pegging at 500k for this one page. Lose the four-car garage please!

jessaustin 10y ago

I'm not surprised to see the higher end of the scale feature lots of oversized eave returns. I am surprised TFA doesn't mention this everyday horror of ostentatious suburban living. A classical eave return is only appropriate when of classical dimensions.