Check out how one Salt Lake City McMansion was converted into condos:

In 2005, construction started on the monster house at 678 North H Street in the Avenues. Over the next year, and against the wishes of many neighbors, the home grew and grew. In 2006 construction stopped, and the partially-finished home went on the market. For the next four years the exterior shell of the 16,000 sf structure was the blight of H Street.

Eventually, however, Allen Millo did a conversion on the building. This picture shows what the building looked like as fairly bland McMansion during construction.

Looks pretty good now. Of course, McMansions aren’t the first big houses to be converted into multi-unit housing:

In most cases, those units have been carved from historic homes, are rented to students, and are hated by longer-term residents.

But the H Street project offers a more pleasing take on that classic approach, proving that multi-unit conversions can be beautiful and even appealing to upscale buyers. In other words, it shows how this can be awesome rather than awful.

This isn’t the first appeal I’ve seen for converting McMansions into multi-unit housing. I do wonder about a couple of things that could stall this momentum for this:

1. How likely are neighbors to approve of this kind of conversion? McMansions tend to be built in neighborhoods with other McMansions where wealthier property owners are worried about property values and having a certain kind of neighborhood. This might be more doable if the McMansion was originally constructed in an older neighborhood, possibly as a teardown, but these situations tend to lead to their own problems.

2. Does a conversion like this this make the construction of a McMansion morally good? McMansions are often criticized for not being good examples of architecture or design, taking up too many resources, and contributing to sprawl. This example from Salt Lake City started with a 16,000 square foot home which means that each of the condos are still of a decent size, probably well-appointed, and probably not cheap. The structure is still built on a more suburban-like lot. At the same time, this conversion leads to denser housing and more efficient use of resources.