Behold the ultimate McMansion

Great googlymoogely! Needs moar arches. :flushed:

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And when you throw that much shade, they’ll have to clean mildew off the atrium…

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Oh, that I’d pay to witness!

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I’d be worried that house is going to jump off a cliff.

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First time I saw the interior pics I thought “there is someone who actively wants their domestic cleaning crew to go insane.”
Particularly the white snakeskin tiling in the bathroom. So many crevices

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The house i grew up in had a lot of terrazzo throughout most of the floor of the house. As a homeowner now i can appreciate how easy such a floor would be to clean. Tiling with a lot of grout would be the kind of thing that i would loathe to clean :smiling_face_with_tear:

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If you’re interested, be aware it’s a phrase that researchers and startup founders tend to use… generously… in cases where I probably wouldn’t. The basic idea is that some materials (stuff like TiO2, which is used in paints and food and sunscreen, it doesn’t need to be anything exotic or toxic) break down organic matter in the presence of UV (or sometimes blue) light. This can kill bacteria and viruses, remove stains and oils, deodorize, etc. They’re sometimes combined with superhydrophobic coatings (sorry for more jargon!) which, basically, make surfaces that stuff doesn’t want to stick to, so they are easy to wipe clean. There’s a lot of reasons you don’t often see them used in practice (yet?), but the potential use cases are really cool and high-value.

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Hold a mirror up to it so it can see itself, and it’ll be over that cliff in a nanosecond.

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Is this “Enshittification” in meatspace?

No-this is people mocking the choices of others because a)those others are rich; b)those choices don’t conform to some idea of “good” architecture. It’s an odd kind of gatekeeping, accepting that there is a right way and a wrong way to design your house and that having the money to build that house is something you should be ashamed of, or is bad in its own right.

Having enough money to commission a custom home is nothing to be ashamed of in and of itself (depending on how you got the money).

However at a time when so many people can’t afford a home at all it is completely natural to get a little bit of public criticism for spending so much money to build a house that seems to be a pure vanity project thrown together without any coherent rhyme or reason to its design.

It’s like hosting a private banquet during a famine and spending thousands of dollars on quail stuffed with deep-fried, chocolate-coated lobster tails.

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Zackly.

Also, just because someone has enough money to buy the Moon, it doesn’t give them the right to shove their aesthetic ideal into others’ eyeballs. Nor does having a ton of money equal having superb taste.

I make fun of and make puking noises at all sorts of ugly buildings. e.g., “How can anyone get better in such a hideous hospital?”

Ugly buildings are often so bad they crush unlookers’ souls. I can’t see anything positive about that.

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My childhood home was not quite a mcmansion. It featured a rigorously symmetric façade. and all the rooms on the first floor had weird cutouts so that the interior floorplan could have windows in the right locations.

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Liking or disliking any building is fine. Mocking people online for something you think is ugly is less fine. As for “shoving it people’s faces” would you be ok with someone else deciding if your house is good looking enough? That’s how you end up with HOAs, a scourge on the populace. If I say I hate certain types of music I can get yelled at by strangers for my personal taste. The same thing happens around foods. If I had the money to build a house just as I liked it I would do just that, other people’s opinions be damned.
As for spending the money on a house while others go unhoused-the owner of any of these buildings may be donating to help that very cause. Their not building a given house won’t get anyone else into one. Solving societal problems by personal donations is hardly the way to go. (Se also, condemnation of philanthropy by the 1% as “just a tax dodge”, “reducing the perceived need for societal changes”, etc.)
Has anyone here given away all of their wealth and lived on the streets in solidarity? Or even downsized to a smaller home so they can donate more resources to the needy? How is this different from people complaining about what folks using SNAP benefits get at the grocery store?

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Rich people will still be just fine, even if strangers online are mocking them for their questionable choices and/or taste level.

That’s not the same as being impoverished and getting persecuted for just trying to survive.

:rage:

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100%. Punching down vs punching up. McMansion ridicule is punching up.

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I mean, for me this is definitely a hazard of my profession and I definitely DO think there are right and wrong ways.
Having spent most of the past two decades professionally fixing existing homes or teaching others how to do it, it kills me that poor design keeps getting built. (ETA- to clarify, by “fixing” them I mean improving energy efficiency, air quality, and general durability improvements.)
In this particular case, I don’t blame the occupants, I blame the designers. That home is almost certainly acoustically and thermally uncomfortable to live in. To see a home that I KNOW requires a lot of upkeep, and to know that even with tons of inputs (electricity, fossil fuels) large parts of it will be uncomfortable much of the year, yeah, I’m going to mock it a little. The designers or architects phoned it in, imo.

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Because those attitudes and narratives help shape public policy that deprives needy people of food they need to survive. It’s not just punching down (as mentioned above), it also has a real impact on public policy.

Making fun of some rich guy’s ugly-ass house is not going to deprive rich people of anything, ever.

I would be surprised if this house was conceived by someone who actually studied architecture. It has the smell of “moneyed person who insists they know what they want and told their architect to include a bunch of discordant elements from different photos they’ve seen on other buildings.”

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This.

All of this.

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It bothers me a lot that these people obviously had a lot of money but appear to have given no thought to the electric footprint of the house. It’s in Alabama, that is a lot of air conditioning needed.

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