6 ms·

Additionally, McMansions are often not very functional. As much as I would appreciate more space, I've been in enough McMansions to appreciate how important a w

Additionally, McMansions are often not very functional. As much as I would appreciate more space, I've been in enough McMansions to appreciate how important a well-built and well-designed house is. Completely ignoring scale doesn't just make McMansions aesthetically unpleasant, it them uncomfortable or completely unsuitable for most of the things we use a house for as well. If you spend any time in a McMansion, you will start to notice little things that just feel wrong. The fridge will be placed on the complete opposite side of the room from the island with the stove in it. Closets will be placed in the middle of a wall, creating a room where the bed cannot be placed against any walls. Rooms will be designed without any sense of a traffic pattern, and you'll find that it's impossible to place a couch in your den because it's basically a 30 foot wide hallway because of where the doors are. The dishwasher will block access to the sink when open. A lot of these things are probably unnoticeable to the owners because of their lifestyle. I know friends whose parents have literally never used a single pot or pan that they own. Around me McMansions seem to stay on the market forever compared to houses of a similar price. A ton were built where I grew up in the 2002-2007 time frame, and nobody wants to live in them. They neglect literally everything that makes a house a home for the sake of having as much space as possible. I would be surprised if the majority of them make it 50 years without being torn down.

ChuckMcM 9y ago
This is where I fall on the spectrum. I can understand someone wanting their house to evoke some notion of grandeur but really if it isn't functional the effort feels wasted to me. That said, I have always felt ridiculing other people's taste to be fairly mean. And while there are/were some solid points in the blog about design and things that 'look right' and things that 'look wrong' it could often come across fairly harshly. And even if you disclaim that with "I'm talking about the house, not you." since the owner likes the house enough to own it and not change it, it really is kind of about them too.
- toufka 9y ago
  All the more reason the blog is so useful. I'd hate to think with all the modern technology around us that the house I live in 'just doesn't feel right' because it was not built employing the past dozen millennia-worth of architectural knowledge at our social disposal. Just because I am not an architect doesn't mean I want to be swindled into an unknowingly unpleasant home. Just because I'm not an architect of CPUs doesn't mean I'd be willing to have a computer run poorly given my investment in a new computer - even if I like the processor's name and it has lots of gigahertzes. No one finds the tech reviewer 'mean' for saying the processor is slower at particular benchmarks according to our present technological measure. Why is this so different - if in fact what is being put to the measure is a human technology and not simply taste. And even then, many 'tasteful' architectural features only exist because of some function - and missing that function they are actually only taste.
  - emodendroket 9y ago
    A lot of time on that blog was spent mocking purely aesthetic features of the homes and I feel like if you like the aesthetic then there is not much else to consider.
    - mrep 9y ago
      I totally agree. That website came off to me as very pretentious in that everyone should adhere to her personal taste when I actually liked how some of the homes looked.
    - dnautics 9y ago
      But I don't think even people who acquire or live in those homes like the esthetic. Remember,mcmansions wind up the way they are because they're ticking off a list of 'things that algorithmically increase the home value'. That's what creates a sense of Inbalance and forces the house to contort into strange forms. Most denizens, I suspect, probably feel that something is not quite right but couldn't put their finger on it quickly enough to stop their purchase or possibly more cynically, don't care until they flip the house.
      - emodendroket 9y ago
        Maybe so. I dunno. I don't feel like I have a clear sense of what distinguishes a "McMansion" from "recently-built house in a more or less modern style."
        eropple 9y ago
        This is a pretty good architectural round-up: https://www.homestratosphere.com/home-architecture-styles/ https://www.homestratosphere.com/home-architecture-styles/ If you look at these, you'll notice something: they're by and large consistent within themselves and the author of that piece is often (and I say "often" because it's a pop piece) able to tell you what aspects the architects of that style are focusing on. Any given style of architecture might not be your thing, but I bet that you can see commonalities of design within a given design family. In particular it's worth looking at horizontal lines (stories of a house); it's sometimes fashionable for different stories of a house to differ stylistically, but do different parts of the house, including the roof, differ notably on that horizontal line? One of the deadest giveaways as to whether you can reasonably call it a "McMansion": look at the windows. Some of the houses on McMansion Hell have six different styles of window on the same story of the house. Sometimes they just look plastered on, like the house was built and somebody said "let's add a window there". It's not just bad taste, which has a lot of variance--it's also incoherence, and while there is some taste in evaluating whether various elements that a design adopts cohere together, there's a reasonable-person test there that doesn't really exist for like-it/don't-like-it. McMansions like the ones under discussion are incoherent because they're not designed for coherence, they're designed to tick off boxes in a "How To Increase The Value Of The Thing You're Flipping" checklist. (Few McMansions are built by the owners.) They're zits on a good neighborhood. Ever heard the adage, learn the rules in order to break them? An analogy that I like is with regard to painting: a cubist Picasso and realist Courbet are both technically masterful and appealing works, but if you mash them together the point becomes that they don't work together at all. And that can be fine--maybe the point of what you're doing is to highlight that discordance--but if you do it without understanding how and why they work, you're just creating a trainwreck.
- Hydraulix989 9y ago
  Are you affiliated with that site? Only reason I ask is because of the McM in your name?
  - PhasmaFelis 9y ago
    Check the profile. His last name is McManis.
    - DonHopkins 9y ago
      I remember him from Sun, where he was both a great engineer and a great architect. Looks like he's moved on from TCP/IP to HVAC. ;) http://www.sunengineering.net/PROJECTS/Residential/TheBackShoreHouse/tabid/287/Default.aspx http://www.sunengineering.net/PROJECTS/Residential/TheBackSh...
      - ChuckMcM 9y ago
        Ok, that is just hilarious! Of course that Chuck comes from the 'McManus' side of the family not the 'McManis' side.
        DonHopkins 9y ago
        When I saw "high efficiency media filters" I was sure it must be your work.
cr0sh 9y ago
> The fridge will be placed on the complete opposite side of the room from the island with the stove in it. This is actually proper kitchen design (the island being in the way would be a problem, though). It's called a "kitchen triangle" and the proper shape and size of it determines how efficient a kitchen is (the third vertex is the sink). A properly sized and shaped kitchen triangle can help turn cooking into a very efficient experience. One too large, or with an island in the way, or not correctly shaped (or not even a triangle) can make it a horrible place to cook in. I will grant, though, that in some cases the kitchen doesn't ever serve a practical purpose, but instead serves as an interior "conspicuous consumption" focal point. Easiest way to tell if this is the case is how well used the appliances are; if they look showroom shiny with nary a splatter, dent, scratch, etc on them - you are likely not looking at a working kitchen. Finally - all of this is moot if the person cooking is skilled enough. My wife has cooked highly commented meals for hundreds of people out of a kitchen smaller than some McMansion's walk-in pantry, using a stove that only had "on" and "off" (where "on" was set at 500 degrees F), and a work surface smaller than her cutting board (this was a "commercial" kitchen at one of here former employers who had a strange sense of what was the best things to spend money on - maintenance was not one of them).
- redm 9y ago
  Kitchens are undeniably more important today than in the past. Their increased and expanded uses have driven larger sizes. As you suggest, too larger of a triangle is inefficient. To deal with this, the concept of Kitchen Zones has been taking root as an alternative. A zone for preparation, cooking, cleanup, entertaining, etc. [1] [2] [1] https://www.houzz.com/ideabooks/16934736/list/kitchen-evolution-work-zones-replace-the-triangle https://www.houzz.com/ideabooks/16934736/list/kitchen-evolut... [2] http://lifehacker.com/optimize-your-kitchen-layout-with-work-zones-1692354456 http://lifehacker.com/optimize-your-kitchen-layout-with-work...
  - madhadron 9y ago
    I hadn't run across zones before. I've always set up cooking areas for the flows of material. Ingredients come from storage, are prepped, put into holding, cooked, plated, served, and the dishes and remains returned afterwards. The kitchen triangle serves a wide range of flows for a single cook, thus its popularity. When you have multiple cooks, it changes. If you have a lot of different things being cooked, you want the brigade system with individuals' prep, holding, and cooking areas distinct and the flow across their space minimized. That includes little things like having squeeze bottles of water at their station so they don't have to access a sink to add liquid to something and all the dishes they need to plate what they're working on. If you have labor intensive assembly of a few things, you want assembly line, and then it's more important to have lots of contiguous, double deep counter space so you can stage materials for each step and slide things along. For a brigade system, you usually have an aisle wide enough for someone to carry a hot pan past you while you're working without having to worry about bumping into you if you don't suddenly lurch backwards. Oh, and somewhere to step out of the zone where you have to be on alert for things like that. I've seen that both with one sided prep areas with eight feet or so to the other wall so you can physically back out of the line, or a four foot aisle and walking down the line to the storage freezers (which people aren't going into constantly once everything is prepped) to step away. In either case, finished materials need to be staged to be removed from the kitchen, and a parallel path needs to bring dishes back without getting in path of the cooks. But back to the primary topic, most of the kitchens I've seen in houses simply are not functional. When we were house hunting a few years ago I would say half the kitchens were laid out where, due to other constraints of the house, they could not be remodeled into something that wasn't a pain to work in. It's fine to have to cook in some place that's a pain once in a while, but in your own home? Yeesh.
SimonPStevens 9y ago
These problems are not unique to McMansions. I live in a normal size house and opening the dishwasher blocks access to the sink, the two cupboards under the sink and two cupboards above. The lounge is long and due to the door placement there is no sensible layout for the sofa that wouldn't have people sitting a long way from each other (in the end we used the furniture to effectively split the room into two smaller areas which were more sensibly shaped) My previous house had a cupboard too close to a central breakfast bar that meant you couldn't access the cupboard if someone was sitting at the breakfast bar. Bad room layout is everywhere.

ChuckMcM 9y ago

This is where I fall on the spectrum. I can understand someone wanting their house to evoke some notion of grandeur but really if it isn't functional the effort feels wasted to me. That said, I have always felt ridiculing other people's taste to be fairly mean. And while there are/were some solid points in the blog about design and things that 'look right' and things that 'look wrong' it could often come across fairly harshly. And even if you disclaim that with "I'm talking about the house, not you." since the owner likes the house enough to own it and not change it, it really is kind of about them too.

toufka 9y ago
All the more reason the blog is so useful. I'd hate to think with all the modern technology around us that the house I live in 'just doesn't feel right' because it was not built employing the past dozen millennia-worth of architectural knowledge at our social disposal. Just because I am not an architect doesn't mean I want to be swindled into an unknowingly unpleasant home. Just because I'm not an architect of CPUs doesn't mean I'd be willing to have a computer run poorly given my investment in a new computer - even if I like the processor's name and it has lots of gigahertzes. No one finds the tech reviewer 'mean' for saying the processor is slower at particular benchmarks according to our present technological measure. Why is this so different - if in fact what is being put to the measure is a human technology and not simply taste. And even then, many 'tasteful' architectural features only exist because of some function - and missing that function they are actually only taste.
- emodendroket 9y ago
  A lot of time on that blog was spent mocking purely aesthetic features of the homes and I feel like if you like the aesthetic then there is not much else to consider.
  - mrep 9y ago
    I totally agree. That website came off to me as very pretentious in that everyone should adhere to her personal taste when I actually liked how some of the homes looked.
  - dnautics 9y ago
    But I don't think even people who acquire or live in those homes like the esthetic. Remember,mcmansions wind up the way they are because they're ticking off a list of 'things that algorithmically increase the home value'. That's what creates a sense of Inbalance and forces the house to contort into strange forms. Most denizens, I suspect, probably feel that something is not quite right but couldn't put their finger on it quickly enough to stop their purchase or possibly more cynically, don't care until they flip the house.
    - emodendroket 9y ago
      Maybe so. I dunno. I don't feel like I have a clear sense of what distinguishes a "McMansion" from "recently-built house in a more or less modern style."
      - eropple 9y ago
        This is a pretty good architectural round-up: https://www.homestratosphere.com/home-architecture-styles/ https://www.homestratosphere.com/home-architecture-styles/ If you look at these, you'll notice something: they're by and large consistent within themselves and the author of that piece is often (and I say "often" because it's a pop piece) able to tell you what aspects the architects of that style are focusing on. Any given style of architecture might not be your thing, but I bet that you can see commonalities of design within a given design family. In particular it's worth looking at horizontal lines (stories of a house); it's sometimes fashionable for different stories of a house to differ stylistically, but do different parts of the house, including the roof, differ notably on that horizontal line? One of the deadest giveaways as to whether you can reasonably call it a "McMansion": look at the windows. Some of the houses on McMansion Hell have six different styles of window on the same story of the house. Sometimes they just look plastered on, like the house was built and somebody said "let's add a window there". It's not just bad taste, which has a lot of variance--it's also incoherence, and while there is some taste in evaluating whether various elements that a design adopts cohere together, there's a reasonable-person test there that doesn't really exist for like-it/don't-like-it. McMansions like the ones under discussion are incoherent because they're not designed for coherence, they're designed to tick off boxes in a "How To Increase The Value Of The Thing You're Flipping" checklist. (Few McMansions are built by the owners.) They're zits on a good neighborhood. Ever heard the adage, learn the rules in order to break them? An analogy that I like is with regard to painting: a cubist Picasso and realist Courbet are both technically masterful and appealing works, but if you mash them together the point becomes that they don't work together at all. And that can be fine--maybe the point of what you're doing is to highlight that discordance--but if you do it without understanding how and why they work, you're just creating a trainwreck.
Hydraulix989 9y ago
Are you affiliated with that site? Only reason I ask is because of the McM in your name?
- PhasmaFelis 9y ago
  Check the profile. His last name is McManis.
  - DonHopkins 9y ago
    I remember him from Sun, where he was both a great engineer and a great architect. Looks like he's moved on from TCP/IP to HVAC. ;) http://www.sunengineering.net/PROJECTS/Residential/TheBackShoreHouse/tabid/287/Default.aspx http://www.sunengineering.net/PROJECTS/Residential/TheBackSh...
    - ChuckMcM 9y ago
      Ok, that is just hilarious! Of course that Chuck comes from the 'McManus' side of the family not the 'McManis' side.
      - DonHopkins 9y ago
        When I saw "high efficiency media filters" I was sure it must be your work.

cr0sh 9y ago

> The fridge will be placed on the complete opposite side of the room from the island with the stove in it. This is actually proper kitchen design (the island being in the way would be a problem, though). It's called a "kitchen triangle" and the proper shape and size of it determines how efficient a kitchen is (the third vertex is the sink). A properly sized and shaped kitchen triangle can help turn cooking into a very efficient experience. One too large, or with an island in the way, or not correctly shaped (or not even a triangle) can make it a horrible place to cook in. I will grant, though, that in some cases the kitchen doesn't ever serve a practical purpose, but instead serves as an interior "conspicuous consumption" focal point. Easiest way to tell if this is the case is how well used the appliances are; if they look showroom shiny with nary a splatter, dent, scratch, etc on them - you are likely not looking at a working kitchen. Finally - all of this is moot if the person cooking is skilled enough. My wife has cooked highly commented meals for hundreds of people out of a kitchen smaller than some McMansion's walk-in pantry, using a stove that only had "on" and "off" (where "on" was set at 500 degrees F), and a work surface smaller than her cutting board (this was a "commercial" kitchen at one of here former employers who had a strange sense of what was the best things to spend money on - maintenance was not one of them).

redm 9y ago
Kitchens are undeniably more important today than in the past. Their increased and expanded uses have driven larger sizes. As you suggest, too larger of a triangle is inefficient. To deal with this, the concept of Kitchen Zones has been taking root as an alternative. A zone for preparation, cooking, cleanup, entertaining, etc. [1] [2] [1] https://www.houzz.com/ideabooks/16934736/list/kitchen-evolution-work-zones-replace-the-triangle https://www.houzz.com/ideabooks/16934736/list/kitchen-evolut... [2] http://lifehacker.com/optimize-your-kitchen-layout-with-work-zones-1692354456 http://lifehacker.com/optimize-your-kitchen-layout-with-work...
- madhadron 9y ago
  I hadn't run across zones before. I've always set up cooking areas for the flows of material. Ingredients come from storage, are prepped, put into holding, cooked, plated, served, and the dishes and remains returned afterwards. The kitchen triangle serves a wide range of flows for a single cook, thus its popularity. When you have multiple cooks, it changes. If you have a lot of different things being cooked, you want the brigade system with individuals' prep, holding, and cooking areas distinct and the flow across their space minimized. That includes little things like having squeeze bottles of water at their station so they don't have to access a sink to add liquid to something and all the dishes they need to plate what they're working on. If you have labor intensive assembly of a few things, you want assembly line, and then it's more important to have lots of contiguous, double deep counter space so you can stage materials for each step and slide things along. For a brigade system, you usually have an aisle wide enough for someone to carry a hot pan past you while you're working without having to worry about bumping into you if you don't suddenly lurch backwards. Oh, and somewhere to step out of the zone where you have to be on alert for things like that. I've seen that both with one sided prep areas with eight feet or so to the other wall so you can physically back out of the line, or a four foot aisle and walking down the line to the storage freezers (which people aren't going into constantly once everything is prepped) to step away. In either case, finished materials need to be staged to be removed from the kitchen, and a parallel path needs to bring dishes back without getting in path of the cooks. But back to the primary topic, most of the kitchens I've seen in houses simply are not functional. When we were house hunting a few years ago I would say half the kitchens were laid out where, due to other constraints of the house, they could not be remodeled into something that wasn't a pain to work in. It's fine to have to cook in some place that's a pain once in a while, but in your own home? Yeesh.

SimonPStevens 9y ago

These problems are not unique to McMansions. I live in a normal size house and opening the dishwasher blocks access to the sink, the two cupboards under the sink and two cupboards above. The lounge is long and due to the door placement there is no sensible layout for the sofa that wouldn't have people sitting a long way from each other (in the end we used the furniture to effectively split the room into two smaller areas which were more sensibly shaped) My previous house had a cupboard too close to a central breakfast bar that meant you couldn't access the cupboard if someone was sitting at the breakfast bar. Bad room layout is everywhere.