I grew up in Northern Virginia among these McMansions, and frankly I don't buy the elitism angle. These folks have a lot of money (top 5% at least, if not even top 1%) and are among the best educated in the country. And these aren't dwellings driven by the need for functionality. It's not like people here have big families they need to house (empty nesters can afford them more readily than people with families!). They're designed, instead, to be conspicuous consumption. If you can't ridicule them for lacking taste you're basically saying that taste doesn't exist and everything is always subjective.
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.
> 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).
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]
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.
Getting OT, but if you want a hilarious game simulation of dealing with poor kitchen design with multiple cooks (with a strong heaping of the brigade system), check out the game "Overcooked".
Boyfriend and I just beat Overcooked yesterday (three stars on every single level!), so lots of the kitchen design mistakes are still fresh in my mind (worst level imo was the kitchen with floating icebergs separating it into 3, mostly ice-covered partitions). Awesome game though :)
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.
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.
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.
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.
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."
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.
While there may not be One True Definition, and there's room to agree and disagree, there are attributes people probably could agree are tasteless and help qualify a house as a McMansion:
* No clear architectural style, or a haphazard/incoherent mix of styles
* Brick or stone facades in front, and cheap siding on the (less visible) sides
* Non-structural arches and columns
* Oddly placed/sized windows
* Multiple roof lines, chimneys and dormers
To the extent that a "Recently built house in a more or less modern style" incorporates these elements, it can be considered more or less a McMansion.
The point is, with the effort and money spent, the houses are not even necessarily nice to live in when the designer just adds a hodge podge of features. The critique may sound elitist but the actual defects are concrete once you notice them and not just 'accept and adapt' to them.
There is a fundamental difference between a 17th century house with wing added in the 19th century and garage added in the 20th century, and a 21st century house trying to mimic that look.
> A lot of time on that blog was spent mocking purely aesthetic features of the homes
A lot of time on HN is spent mocking "gamer aesthetic" on hardware the commenter would have otherwise actually liked to use. Garish LED-lighting, bulky-looks and oblique angles aren't my thing either, but HN loves to complain about McKeyboards, McHeadphones, McLaptops and McCases.
"Gamer aesthetic" and "McMansion aethetic" are valid phenomena and people have the right to critique those tastes without invoking classism, despite the sense of superiorioty occasionally found in the consumers of both.
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.
Benchmarks are at least attempting to be objective.
Also, there's a difference between mocking a company's product and mocking a house that is 1) an individual's home 2) their largest investment and 3) is likely, these days, to represent a significant financial liability.
I don't like McMansions much myself, but I can absolutely sympathize with people that want an affordable way to get more space for their family, etc. (Or people that have been sucked by the hedonic treadmill into a vortex of debt, high utility payments, etc.) They're probably suffering enough already.
> an affordable way to get more space for their family
Did you see the asking prices before the content was taken down? I don't remember any of the houses being affordable in any regard
> vortex of debt
It takes a special person to sympathize with someone living so far beyond their means that they take a $1 million (my average price estimate from the website) mortgage that they can't actually afford
> It takes a special person to sympathize with someone living so far beyond their means that they take a $1 million (my average price estimate from the website) mortgage that they can't actually afford
They'll suffer enough without help. The world is difficult enough without pushing people down because it's funny or a way to 'improve the quality of architecture' or whatever.
I can absolutely sympathize with people that want an affordable way to get more space for their family
But a McMansion will almost always cost you more than a more 'modest' house offering the same amount of space. Also that house will almost certainly be better constructed.
> But a McMansion will almost always cost you more than a more 'modest' house offering the same amount of space.
Lots of variables there. Construction is usually estimated in terms of price per square feet, and property values can represent a substantial fraction of the total price of the house. A 'modest', 'old' house in a good location can be vastly more expensive than a 'McMansion' built out in the suburbs or something. Also McMansions are usually built where land is cheaper, so more space.
For families with children, there is also the cost of education to consider. There are scenarios where avoiding the need to use a private school to educate your children can completely pay the cost of a home in the suburbs. (Even considering property taxes). The house can effectively burn to the ground when you're done educating your kids and you'd wind up net money ahead compared to where you might have been with a more modest house and private schooling.
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.
I'm living in NoVa in a zip code in the top 2% of wealth in the US. (Sadly, I'm not personally in the top 2%, I just rent an apartment here.) There are McMansions all around, and they are hideous. There's no sense of design or symmetry. And this is no aspirational neighborhood--if you're buying one of these houses, you are already at the top of society.
As much as I hate looking at these McMansions, they do give me one consolation: money can't buy taste. Maybe I'll never afford that monstrosity you call a house, but at least I've got the sense to not want it in the first place.
> As much as I hate looking at these McMansions, they do give me one consolation: money can't buy taste. Maybe I'll never afford that monstrosity you call a house, but at least I've got the sense to not want it in the first place.
My theory is that people who can afford such houses are usually very busy with their jobs or companies and don't have the time or mindspace to think about what kind of place they'd really like to live in, not to mention "details" like aesthetics. They're in perpetual hurry and thus they buy a house like the handle a project at their company.
Most of the McMansions around where I grew up in Northern Va. were fairly cookie cutter. Their lack of architectural unity seemed to be more of "We have X types of garages, Y types of base floorplans and Z types of entryways and so we'll just iterate on them for the whole neighborhood"
This combined with the rapidly rising real-estate costs meant the builders threw in some of the architectural versions of Hofmeister kinks[1] to make them look more luxurious which (IMO) only made them look worse.
I'm going to add this to my list of words for names of things that you never expected to have names. From aglet[1] to uvula[2], and now Hofmeister kink.
Maybe you'll appreciate Bangle Butt: the (usually chrome) strip across the trunk that modern cars have. It's named after the designer of the 2001 BMW 7 Series, Chris Bangle.
The design element was criticized so incessantly that Bangle eventually stepped down. But it turns out Bangle was just ahead of his time as most modern large sedans employ the eponymous chrome strip on their rear. The Accord, Camry, Mazda6, and Fusion all have the feature on their latest models.
While agree the Bangle Butt looks horrible, this does not refer to a chrome strip on the trunk of a car, it refers to the shape/proportions of the trunk and rear fenders/quarter panels on a specific set of BMW's:
http://www.bmwblog.com/2015/01/21/bangle-butt/
Subjective and arbitrary are not the same in this context. If it was arbitrary then you could randomize the outputs and see no correlation between experts and non-experts on determining what was tasteful and what wasn't. Thats not true of 'taste'. Taste is subjective in that it is highly influenced by society/culture/history but experts agree on what is tasteful and what isn't within those bounds.
Now preference is arbitrary and subjective. If you just like something even if its not tasteful that is fine, even for experts and I don't know that it is problematic in buying a house that isn't tasteful other than it is a signal that experts were skipped in certain design phases of the project.
If they're living on the other side of the country, I don't care. If they're knocking down perfectly fine, correctly-scaled houses in my neighborhood in order to build huge monstrosities that parasitize the aesthetic niceness of the neighborhood that is due in large part to correctly-sized and shaped houses then I get upset.
Example happening in my town: builder buys a normal-sized house on a large lot for $800K. Knocks the house down, subdivides the lot, and builds two bigger houses on each lot, and sells each for $950K. If anyone complains, they get written off as a NIMBY who is opposed to density.
Due to local regulations, you need more driveway curb cuts, so the tree-lined street starts to become less tree-lined. You now have two 3-story townhouse style homes right up next to mid-century ranches or bungalows or Cape Cods and it looks garish.
I live in a 150-unit apartment building that houses about 300 people, on the edge of the neighborhood. I have no financial stake in the outcome either way, I just don't want to see something beautiful destroyed. I would much rather they put up another 150-unit building than tear down 75-100 houses to achieve the same outcome.
Usually it seems that people who are moderately opposed to two houses on a lot would be rioting in the streets over a 150-unit building. But I agree, it's a better way to achieve the same outcome.
The term originated to describe opposition to the placement of unpleasant developments that wouldn't be objected to if placed elsewhere (think landfill or meat-packing plant).
It now roughly refers to anyone opposing greater density in urban environments. (This is different enough, already, that we should probably coin a new word for it.)
You're using it to mean -- what? -- opposition to any development on aesthetic grounds?
Opposing any level of density or capacity beyond single family houses with low lot coverage in your (urban/inner suburban) neighborhood is straight down the middle of any definition of NIMBYism I've seen in recent use. Particularly when you live somewhere that normal-sized houses go for $800k (!).
I'd also (tacitly) oppose large single family homes replacing small single family homes, but that's because I'd prefer to see even larger apartment/condo buildings. When each project is so politically expensive, it's important to get as many new units as possible out of each one. (Looks like defen is on board with this idea).
When two single family homes on a lot is encroaching on a community's threshold for permissible scale, usually a large apartment building would be out of the question. So I'll take what I can get.
At a 2:1 or better multiple (new units : demolished units), these conversions might be decent. You could increase a city's housing stock 2x that way, and it'd be a less drastic change than dozens-hundreds of skyscrapers needed for the same effect.
> They're designed, instead, to be conspicuous consumption
This is the key point in the thread. The legitimate criticism of McMansions isn't about their architecture per se, it's about the owners. I'd go so far as to say that the bad architecture is deliberate -- its senseless variation and useless ornaments call attention to the house. This is crass ostentation and nothing more. It says, "look at me, I can afford a big ugly house (and you can't)."
yeah. i especially agree with the fact that the people who buy these huge homes don't have big families. their families are the same size as the folks down the street in a house with 1/3 the square footage.
in Los Angeles, city government keeps on approving these extremely large homes without even requiring rooftop solar panels -- houses with not just one but TWO air conditioning condensers -- because ... uh ... wait, why?
because they save energy per capita? no.
because they will house more people than the single family homes they replaced? no.
because large homes are basically high capacity production assets which empower the city to be even more globally competitive (like a state-of-the-art rechargeable-battery factory, a digital movie production facility, a high-tech startup office, etc)? no.
AFAIK, we just have a distorted capital market. Federal government policies support home loans and the ownership society. there's also a local shortage of other viable ways for investors to make a quick $500,000 profit.
