Occasionally, the term McMansion is applied anachronistically to older homes. See this example of a 1929 home in Oregon:

On Sunday, the Wayne Morse Historical Park Corp. invited the public to come out to the ranch and enjoy its annual open house, throwing open the doors of the home that Morse and his wife built shortly after moving to Oregon from Wisconsin in 1929 so he could take a job at the University of Oregon School of Law…

Designed by UO architecture professor Wallace Hayden, the colonial revival house, listed on the National Register of Historic Places since 1999, is modest beyond imagination for a man known as the Tiger of the Senate.

The living room is scaled to fit a family, not to hold a state reception. There is no “McMansion” whiff here; instead, the house looks as if it was comfortable for Morse, his wife, Mildred, and their three daughters.

I think I know what the journalist is getting at: the home is not pretentious or does not betray who lived there. Indeed, the long-term owner of the house was a 24-year member of the US Senate who was elected as a Republican, Independent, and Democrat and also “set a record for performing the longest one-person filibuster in the history of the Senate” at 22 hours and 26 minutes (later broken by Strom Thurmond). At the same time, the home, can’t really be considered a McMansion because of when it was built. The term McMansion didn’t arise until the late 1980s and retroactive applications of the term don’t account for the context in which it arose of sprawl, larger homes, and new ways of displaying wealth. Additionally, this article suggests the home is a colonial revival home, a style that may indeed be found in McMansions of today but it also a coherent style that doesn’t fit with the mish-mash style of some McMansions. Finally, the house is on the National Register of Historic Places, an honor that I suspect will not be applied to many McMansions.

Also, I amused by this idea: “whiff of McMansion.” Perhaps it could apply to a garish perfume or wine?