Yes, frequently! I’m the person who loads your purchase into your minivan at an estate sale. It’s not what I went to school for, but…I have to wait for someone to die in order to make money, one way or another.
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You have to read the ‘Dictator Chic’ essay. Frenchified is much better.
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You’ll enjoy this article:
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I’m going to have to disagree, since I’m sitting on my off-bedroom screen porch with a cocktail at this very moment. The best bit is having the French doors wide open all summer so the breezes blow through and we can hear rain storms and wind in the trees. In the fall I come home from work, grab a mug of tea, wrap up in a blanket, and sit with my book and tea watching the sun set.
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This reminds me of a theory I have about minimalism. Not the obsessive documentary kind, but the millennial condo kind. Think largish, modern condos with just a few pieces of expensive furniture and no clutter. I believe that the purpose of it is to impress upon visitors that they can afford to waste space.
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With Millenials, it’s more likely that they just can’t afford a lot of furniture after spending 50%+ of their monthly income on the condo or apartment.
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It’s not just Millenials - there are a great many people who bought big and can’t afford so much as a pizza extra on the monthly bills.
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Same for the most part. My mom’s house was built in 1963 and is about 1800sf. It has a formal dining/living that really only got used because my step dad played his piano in there - he’s a professional musician - or the occasional dinner with more than 4 people. They don’t live in it anymore, they moved into a condo down by us and are renting the house out now.
Overall, the house uses space pretty well and is extremely well built, but the downstairs could have been configured to make slightly more sense.
My wife and I are childless and live in the city in a small house with no formal space. When we need to seat a bunch of people, we have the weather 90 percent of the time to seat them on our back patio at a 10 foot table I built.
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Like pay off your mortgage, pay off your car, and pay off your/your kid’s college loans. Plus a bit left over for a retirement fund.
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I did! Thank you!
“He knew that one of them, for example, was fond of painting a coat of melted-down licorice on the surface of reproductions, to make new wood look old and dirty.”
I was using potting soil…duly noted.
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I have been using a sort of reverse Parkinson’s Law to trim down my inventory. Realising that a lot of stuff was just not being used, so most of stuff in my flat gets used, as there is no room for greebles.
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McMansions are a pretty good visual representation of how the rest of the world sees US.
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I find that the correct accessories can make the largest of features seem homely.
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McMansions Hell makes fun of architecture and implied imaginary personas of potential owners of these houses. It doesn’t make fun of ACTUAL real people. I wouldn’t equate a person with the house.
Basic premise of the whole blog is that this whole thing is a runaway concept dictated primarily by real estate agents and obliging architects. The idea is that a lot of real people end up owning these sort of houses simply becos the system pushes them in this direction. They could be getting something much nicer and more enjoyable for their money.
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Pretentious an impractical architecture has been seen throughout the ages. When Florentine banker Luca Pitti started building his new residence he asked specially for windows on his new home to be bigger than stable doors on Medici’s town house.
Most of neoclassical mansion are built using as template a specific tomb of a specific ancient king.
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What would Roark say?
Urge to make others feel small and insecure…
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I imagine that the design process for a McMansion goes something like this:
The developer makes a list of supposedly desirable features that will help to push up the selling price.
Someone, who is not an architect, draws an asymmetrical, rambling floor plan that crams in all of those features.
Someone else, also not an architect, cobbles together a structure around that floor plan and pastes on a hodgepodge of details.
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It really depends on the climate. Not much use in places where the AC is running almost year 'round. That’s one of the things that she doesn’t harp on ENOUGH: features that might make sense in upstate NY, but are incredibly inefficient in TX, or vice versa.
It is interesting to compare these to the features of the actual Victorian Mansion that a friend of my Mom’s had in Boston. The Kitchen was HYUGE, I believe that it was where the servants ate back in the day. There was a butler’s pantry between the kitchen and the dining room where plates and serving dishes were stored… There was a separate stairway from the kitchen to some servants quarters on the second floor. The grates for the central heating had mantles around them in the public rooms. There was a carriage house that was serving as a garage, but it still had horse stalls off to the side. The third floor was finished to a much lower level, and I suspect that it was mostly servant’s quarters originally. I can’t even imagine how much that place cost to heat in a Boston Winter.
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