The grey is for your most important possession-- your car. The red is for the parasite who believes he is more than a driver.
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As someone who appraises real property (homes) for the local county government, this bring a big grin to my face!
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That movie is on Amazon Prime, if you’re curious.
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The Queen of Versailles was such a perfect encapsulation of how money can’t buy taste, class, or even happiness. Even the plan to recreate Versailles in the first place is an act of cluelessness—it was considered such an ostentatious display of wealth in its own time that it helped inspire the French Revolution.
And then there were the scenes showing how the family was just filling up their existing mansion with carload after carload of tacky cheap shit from Wal-Mart…
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I worked for a few years next to Park Ridge, IL (Home of the HRC), and watched entire sleepy neighborhoods of post-WWII bungalows on 1/4 acre lots get torn down and replaced with monstrosities that towered over the roads and trees, built as big as the setbacks would allow. I heard that when the recession hit, the McMansions were being abandoned by the droves, but a quick Zillow check looks like it’s back to boomtimes again.
Around here, we have what are affectionately known as Meadow Mansions - often built by wealthy out-of-staters who stick around for a few years before they get sick of the cold and move along.
@doctorow might consider swapping the two 101 links, since the “What Makes a McMansion Bad Architecture?” is referenced in the “Front Entries” intro?
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is a great term. Gad! The implications!
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This is what galls me about developers today. I think the combination of ugly, badly built, and ostentation is the worst combination.
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The heating bills for that… yeesh. I still remember the St. Louis weather and it is a big reason I don’t want to move back to that part of the USA.
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In the gilded age (1870s onward), when it was done well, it was
"baronial gothic revival"
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Maybe we’ll get a revival of neo-baroque. We can call it neo-neo-baroque.
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The thing I wonder about these giant houses is who the fuck cleans all of this? I mean 7 bathrooms? Christ on a pogo stick that sounds awful.
I live in a small condo and it’s a constant battle keeping it clean(ish) and I’m not even a neat freak. Do they include live in maids or something?
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I love how the guy describes parts of those horrid abominations as “masses”, as in, tumorous growths.
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I think its just a symptom really. The bigger problem, and what galls me, is that developers aren’t really building housing for most of the market. They’re building 2nd and 3rd homes and investment properties for the very top of the market. It used to be when we talked about a lack of affordable housing that was a euphemism for a lack of cheap housing for the impoverished. Now we really are talking about a lack of affordable housing. Even most of the middle class are increasingly shoved out of the market in favor of jankily built luxury housing with astronomical prices. I for one will likely never be able to afford to buy (or even rent) property in my home town. I currently live with family who bought their property when it was possible for a normal person to do so here. If I chose to rent anywhere nearby I’d be spending more per month than I would in NYC, a place with legendarily inflated and unaffordable rents.
And governments, especially local ones aren’t interested in helping. Our town council just nuked a plan for a ex-urban style development featuring reasonably priced rental apartments, commercial spaces for small business, and public pool and park, and a compliment of section 8 housing. Just straight killed it. Meanwhile just across the street from that planned development. The town is trying to create a “downtown” (or more accurately walking village as they’re called here) environment to better compete for tourist dollars. The center of this new development is a one block street with maybe 10 commercial spaces on it. The key feature they’re missing from this “downtown”? Housing. Won’t allow any to be built or added. Everyone has to drive to this nascent “downtown” and share the twelve god damn parking spaces with thousands of tourists.The towns and villages they’re trying to compete with are busier because their larger main drags are loaded with housing that’s within walking distance. They killed the major thing they need to make their entire redevelopment concept work in anyway. Its a fucking disaster. But I guarantee they would have gone for it if those were luxury condos for sale, a private pool, and another fucking golf course.
Though I shouldn’t be surprised. This is the same group that’s argued for years that changing the minimum lot size for residential homes from 1/4 acre to 5 acres would some how preserve farmland, maintain the “character” of our historic town and provide adequate housing for the middle class.
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I live in a small (not tiny) house in the suburbs (2 bedrooms – one is now my office; 1 bath; a “breakfast nook” which is a dining room that is way too small to actually dine in). It was built in the twenties as far as anyone can tell, and it’s filled with quirks and weirdness. It’s decorated in a style I describe as “Pugsley Addams grew up and became an anthropologist.” I can’t imagine it would survive this treatment without receiving some scorn (random shit on the mantle? A brass scale, a piece of alchemical equipment, a pair of African twin dolls, two candleholders and a kachina, so, yeah).
Ultimately though a house is about the personality that lives in it, so maybe he’s just decrying the lack of personality. That chair in the dining room does strike me as really stupid; no one would ever, ever use it. And his post about columns strikes me as right on.
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I guess if you can afford a house this big you can afford cleaners. Although I can imagine some people spend all their money on the house, and just let it get filthy.
A painter we know was working on a real mansion (~25,000 sq ft) in a wealthy section in the DC area. He said they had 27 electric panels to power the damn thing. 
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I was thinking the same thing! But it could just be an architectural term. Anyone know?
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In the first McMansions 101 post he defines it as a technical architectural term, so yeah.
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Exactly. A lot of those things are awful, but the moniker “McMansion” doesn’t seem to mean anything anymore except “a house bigger than I think someone should live in.” Are there modern mansions (pick you square footage) that meet the criteria of being a big, tasteful house?
I always took McMansion to be a house that was build over-large for the lot, so that you had nearly a row-house of 4,000’ things in some new development with a side yard scarcely big enough to get a wheelbarrow through and not merely, “a really big house designed to meet some common denominator of taste.” Instead, it’s just handy a word that – like “neo-conservative” – weakened itself in the retelling. If all “conservatives” are “neo-conservatives”, the word stops describing the thing it was meant to describe.
ETA: Ah, this guy works up a usable definition. The word, more generally, gets knocked about so much that it’s hard to know what it means.
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Maybe its time to get a group together, connected people who have the time you know…and unseat your local council?
REBELLION!
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Ah, thanks. The list of terms just never made it into my memory.
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