She nails the superficiality of American taste in housing. Although the younger generation largely rejects this Baby Boomer-ism.
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I get that and I feel that way too yet at the same time people kind of need to know they’re making bad decisions that waste their money. It’s hard to tell people they’re doing something really dumb without insulting them, like really hard. I’m not even saying the author is trying, the tone is definitely snarky and judgemental… just even if she was it’d still be harsh because, well, the truth is painful sometimes.
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Occupancy expands to fill available space in ours. We’ve had a random teen sleeping on the couch for two months now. And somehow despite my firm resolve to never have more than three cats we’ve got four again.
You must be one of my children 
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HEY! Back when I had a house big enough to have a separate dining room and formal ‘living room’, I used them all the time! I don’t like eat-in kitchens. I don’t want to stare at my cooking mess, and I don’t want my guests, to, either. I used to throw big, casual dinner parties where the guests wandered all over the ground floor (about 900 sq. feet) carrying little plates of food. If I had a dining room now, I would start throwing dinner parties again.
“Considering that so often our guests are members of our own family adds another layer of darkness to the equation.”
My sister has Wedgewood china and Sterling silver flatware service for twelve and formal entertaining spaces in a big suburban split-level. It’s not quite a McMansion, but it’s bigger than my tiny S#!thole. She has no friends. The only people who have seen the inside of her house are immediate family members. Basically, those who can’t weasel out.
The last time I was there, I tried to stare at a stain on the rug until she noticed.
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I came to poke fun at the bad taste, and stayed for the psychological dissection. Her elevation pictorials and commentary are pleasing. Today’s architectural software allows us to design houses that we never could have dreamed of 30 years ago … except in nightmares. GotDANG there’s some ugly silly stupid-looking McM’s out there.
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From the linked article:
At the same time, many of us feel compelled to entertain. We all want to feel like power hosts, extremely likeable and sociable people who are the life of the party.
I’ve always felt like a weirdo because I DO NOT want anything to do with being the entertaining host, or the life of the party.
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No, you’re not weird, you’re normal. They’re weird.
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She’s addressed that more than once on her blog; she only uses houses that are staged for sale, on the assumption (which I think is fair) that the images reflect the realtor-bullshit aspect rather than the aspect where it’s someone’s home. Some people might take it personally if you criticise something they designed or bought, but… well… they shouldn’t. Criticism is the literal sine qua non of design, especially architecture, where the design has to serve the rest of the world, and future generations, as well as the whims of the person who commissions it. If you think the posts on McMansion Hell are unwarranted, you should try pinning up one of these houses in an architecture-school crit and see what happens.
I’m not totally convinced by her thesis on formal rooms, though. The size might be a power move, but the existence of these rooms is something else – as noted, it happens in homes of all sizes. I think it’s a performance of the distinction between “how our culture says a family lives” and “how our family actually lives”, for the benefit of people both inside and outside the family. If you believe Respectable People eat dinner every night at a dining table while wearing a tie, then it’s much easier to sell that role outside the home knowing that you do have a dining room. But pointedly not using the dining room is how you step out of that role in order to eat Pop-Tarts for dinner in your recliner.
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That stuff is about as irrelevant to most people under age 55 as the entertaining spaces in which they’re supposed to be used.
A couple of years ago my mother asked my sister if she thought I’d be upset with her for leaving all her wedding china and silver flatware (both sets of which haven’t seen the light of day in decades) to her in the will. When my sister told me about the conversation we both had a big laugh about it.
Been to a few candlelight suppers there, have you?
Apparently the new trend for wealthy people is to have two separate kitchens: an enclosed one for prep and clean-up and an open-plan one for show.
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Neither of us is over 55. She does seem to be ‘out of her time’ in a lot of ways, though.
I’m glad I’m not a getting any of Mom’s ‘good stuff’. I had to live with her beige decorating all through my childhood, I’ll be damned if she starts decorating my place after she dies!
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From what I remember my mother’s china and silver is lovely but I don’t have any room in my life for it in terms of space or use.
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Just because you have nice dishes doesn’t mean your party has to be…crap…i forgot her first name…Hyacinth?..like a ‘Mrs. Bucket’ candlelight supper.
I was just talking to my boss (she does estate sales - where the unused china and flatware gets pawed by Philistines) about how Megan Markle will be the death of the formal place setting with finger bowls and bone plates. They had been dead-dead-DEAD all through the 60’s and 70’s. But when Princess Di got married, the Martha Stewarts and other bossy self-appointed Old Guard took over the world, foisting fish spatulas and pickle forks on commoners. Now, with Megan Markle joining the Royal family - a modern woman with modern style - the overdone table setting is going back in the attic.
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It also depends who you perceive her audience to be. I take that her audience is - at least in part - other architects, rather than the owners. And her posts are both educational for newer architects (“don’t do this”) and a form of social norming (“A bad architect did this, and he should feel bad about it”). Both of those are just reasons, because it is possible to make a large, attractive, energy efficient, liveable, filled with useful spaces that isn’t an architectural abomination.
Anyone can design a house. An architect should be designing interesting, attractive, and useful houses.
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It was more the part about the only guests being people who couldn’t weasel out that reminded me of that show. One of the funniest parts was the agonised looks on the faces of the guests she roped in.
[Hyacinth was indeed her first name. Last name pronounced “Bouquet”, of course.]
It definitely goes in cycles but it’s been dying ever since Gen Xers started getting married in the late 1990s. With the GOP trying to return the country to the Gilded Age, though, 20 years from now it may make a comeback among the wealthy and those who aspire to their trappings.
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There are definitely mixed opinions in architecture circles, but a slider without an actual balcony is a
Juliette Balcony. I can see some cases in which this is an appropriate feature.
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…because Juliette killed herself?
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And lawns, “…the English lawn was a symbol of status of the aristocracy and gentry; it showed that the owner could afford to keep land that was not being used for a building, or for food production.”
One of my least favorite American status symbols of the 'burbs.
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As the photo in the article suggests, stepping out onto the juliette balcony of a McMansion is a highly risky move. “Romeo, Romeo, wherefore art thou Rome …ohhhh no!”
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Well, yeah. Helpful for Shakespearean actors practicing their scene too, with an acceptable level of risk.
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