Many times, McMansions are defined by their exterior: a many-gabled roof or a mish-mash of architectural styles or a cookie-cutter home or a large home that seems to overwhelm its relatively small lot or doesn’t fit into an older neighborhood. But a Sarasota blogger suggests that one could have a small home with a “McMansion interior”:

They have a new development out at Lakewood Ranch called Central Park, and even though it’s very generic and a little closely packed for my taste, they have finally done what I have been hoping somebody would do for years—build a small, inexpensive house that suggests a McMansion inside, but on a tiny scale. By that I mean it has things like a particularly nice master suite and fancy master bath, high ceilings—many coffered and trayed, lots of windows, imaginative layouts, big, well-integrated kitchens, cute little dens and lanais, entrance foyers—all for well under $200,000.

This definition suggests that McMansions can be more about the luxurious interior appointments than the garish or ostentatious outside.While the exterior qualities tend to draw negative attention, would this interior flourishes get the same criticism? I would guess no for several reasons. The interior is not as obvious to outsiders and so it is harder to call it ostentatious. Also, there seems to be a higher level of tolerance for interior appointments: the Subzero refrigerator or Viking stove or 60″ LED TV seem more acceptable as consumer items that are still useful.

Additionally, this story hints at what is likely already a trend: smaller homes with luxury upgrades. A homebuyer no longer needs large amounts of money to buy the square footage typically associated with luxury. Although your home might be just over 1,300 square feet (the size of the model reference above), you too can feel like you live in a mansion.