Category Archives: McMansions

A plea to “stop demonising McMansions”

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An Australian architecture lecturer argues we should “stop demonising McMansions”:

For quite a few years now, anybody who writes about these oversized single family homes has consistently demonised them as not just individually ugly, ill-designed and unsustainable, but as the building blocks of isolated suburbs devoid of a sense of community…

What all this McMansion bashing has in common is a set of assumptions that are ill-founded.

The first is the convenient lie that McMansions are the opposite of architect-crafted paragons of good design. This is easiest dealt with by visiting somewhere like Homeworld Kellyville, the display village west of Sydney…

The second anomaly is that a surprising proportion of available project home models are of notably good design. They make the most of small sites, with great connections between informal living areas and well sheltered outdoor al fresco rooms…

The third inconvenient truth?…He pointed out in 2006 that, of the major dwelling types, free standing suburban houses are the lowest energy consumers per occupant and appear to consume less water per occupant than contemporary apartments. That is data.

In the end, King argues that not all McMansions are bad. Yet, it is common practice to paint all McMansions with a broad brush. At the least, the term McMansion is effectively used to bludgeon certain kinds of homes, particularly big showy homes associated with suburban sprawl.

When Mediterranean McMansions threaten the local architecture

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An article about local Tampa architecture notes McMansions might define the city’s structures:

When one thinks of Florida architecture, if one thinks of Florida architecture, Disney World might come to mind. Or the ubiquitous Mediterranean McMansion in a gated golf-course community. Or the art deco hotels of Miami Beach.

Tampa architecture? Not so much. But there is more to the Cigar City than the iconic University of Tampa, the Museum of Science and Industry and some glass bank towers.

Tampa architecture, says John Howey, FAIA, himself one of the city’s architectural grand guard, is like Cuban bread, the kind served at the city’s landmark Columbia restaurant…

To summarize his city’s architecture, Howey returned to the Spanish/Cuban food analogy.

“It is so like paella,” said Howey. “When you put it all together, it is very tasty. Taken separately, you would think they would clash.”

My take on reading this article is that Tampa doesn’t have much of a unifying architecture style outside of some modernist structures. Perhaps this is because it is a relatively recent big city; it’s biggest growth period was from 1950 to 1960 when the population increased from 124,861 to 274,970.

Two thoughts:

1. What would it take to give a city like Tampa its own style? Could it be done through constructing key buildings, like civic institutions, in a particular style? Would it require a number of architects banding together? Styles don’t just come out of nowhere.

2. New Urbanists often argue that their developments should be based on local styles. Would they adopt a more generic Southern style in Tampa or perhaps a beach house type of design?

Countering the suburban McMansion with the city “colossal condo”

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Suburban McMansions are known for their size but there is also a recent uptick in the size of condos in New York City:

At the peak of the Manhattan real-estate boom in 2007, the average new condo—from studios to penthouses—was 1,265 square feet. Now, new condos average 1,564 square feet, a 24% increase, said Kelly Kennedy Mack, president of Corcoran Sunshine Marketing Group.

The big condos, increasingly expensive and brimming with high-end details and amenities, are being built in converted garages and walk-ups, as well as part of new, ground-up construction across much of Manhattan…

“In New York, space is the ultimate status symbol,” she said.

Developers say that they are responding to the market—strong demand by the buyers in the upper end of the 1%. The new buyers, say brokers, include international clients looking for investment-grades properties, and local families, who after years of falling crime improving quality of life, want to stay in New York to raise families, or return there when their children head off to college.

Sounds like there is plenty of real estate money in New York City, whether it is for the latest offerings from Toll Brothers, big single-family homes, or large condos. Does this mean there is a bubble coming? Or, as the article goes on to note, what about housing options for the majority of New York residents?

It would be interesting to see how critics of McMansions would respond to these larger condos. Urban dwellings are often assumed to be greener and the average size of the new condo is still a couple of thousand square feet smaller than McMansions. Yet, they are quite expensive, aren’t exactly resource-free to construct, and tend to be within the reach of only a small segment of the population. In the end, are large urban condos and penthouses preferable to suburban McMansions?

To the Miami Herald: a 23,576 square foot home is not a McMansion

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The Miami Herald features a 23,576 square foot home for auction. However, they err by calling it a McMansion:

If you need a house that stretches across east and west wings, a massive McMansion — said to be the largest home for sale in Broward — will be auctioned off on Dec. 8.

The 23,576-square-foot, custom-built home on 10 acres features seven bedrooms, eight full baths and two half baths. It boasts inlaid Italian marble and cathedral-style ceilings, and comes with a guest house, four-car garage, and statues and objects of art from all over the world.

“The finish work on the inside is the most amazing, with 30-foot high ceilings, chandeliers. It’s just magnificent,” said Jim Gall, president of Auction Company of America, hired to auction off the home, which was listed a year ago for $10 million…

Gall said he plans to start the bidding on the house at $5 million.

Homeowner Ray Moses said he and his wife, Pam, spent five years building the mansion after buying the property, which was formerly used as a horse boarding facility. Broward County property records show they paid $2,225,000 for the acreage in 2003.

Here are four reasons it is not a McMansion (with the most important reason at the top):

1. This home is far beyond the size of a McMansion. This kind of square footage is way beyond a McMansion.

2. Because of its size, luxury, and land, it is also out of the price range of a typical, particularly in Florida. The price might make sense if it was a big house in New York City.

3. This is not a big house on a postage-stamp lot; there are ten acres of land.

4. The home is custom-built, not part of a suburban neighborhood where the houses all look at the same.

By size alone, this home is not a McMansion but the other factors matter as well.

Interestingly, the report on the auction starts with the term McMansion and later uses mansion. Does this suggest the terms are interchangeable? Again, I would argue they are distinct categories.

Toronto mayor Rob Ford’s problems include living in a “American-style suburban McMansion”?

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The mayor of Toronto is getting all kinds of attention – and at least one person thinks one of his problems is “American-style suburban McMansion”:

Also from the Gawkerverse: this Ken Layne piece about Rob Ford’s essential un-Canadianness, which wrongly asserts that “when he sits around his American-style suburban McMansion, he literally sits around his American-style suburban McMansion.” Rob Ford’s house is suburban, but it’s actually a pretty modest place.

Americans are known for their big houses. It shouldn’t be a surprise that this is something Canadians pick up on since most Canadians live quite close to the U.S.-Canada border. Indeed, there are plenty of stories regarding McMansions in the Chicago metropolitan region and Chicago and Toronto are often compared to each other. But, which part of the insinuation is worse:

1. That a Canadian acts like an American?

2. That owning a McMansion is a bad thing anyway (whether one lives in Canada, the United States, Australia, and other places with McMansions)?

3. That sprawl/suburbs are bad?

This also reminds me of the documentary Radiant City that involves Canadian suburbanites outside of Calgary but utilizes a number of American opponents to McMansions and seems to be most interested in tackling American-style sprawl. A side note: it is a film that includes a mock musical about mowing lawns.

The crazy house you get when put together the McMansions of Google 3D warehouse

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One group combined the various McMansion designs they found on Google 3D warehouse – and the result is not pretty:

Two-year-old Canadian design office The Practice of Everyday Design searched Google 3D Warehouse (an open-source library of model files) for the most popular suburban home typologies. After culling the top examples, they fused them all together and 3D-printed the mess. They call it “Nasty McMansion,” and you can buy one! We suggest hanging it on a string and dangling it from the ceiling in your office, as a warning.

Think of it as a kind of Ringstrasse for suburban mansions. Write TOPED:

“The McNasty Mansion offers a new and more exciting typology of homes, formed off the same principals of the McMansion: more rooms than one can fill, enough mixed styles to ensure complete architectural confusion, and enough faux finishes and cheap materials to keep cost down but dimensions huge.

I’m not sure how exactly they put this image together but it looks like it was done in such a way to maximize the bizarreness. For example, that front door on the left that tilts down toward the ground would be quite difficult for the average McMansion owner to access. Wouldn’t you get a similar result even if you combined more pleasing designs? And how exactly does their 3D design incorporate “faux finishes and cheap materials” versus the real things? But, if the goal was to create a “McNasty” design that creates a startling visual, the goal was met.

Just curious: what is the general level of architectural design on Google 3D warehouse?

Don’t confuse community-building “little free libraries” for bird McMansions

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Don’t make the mistake of confusing a “little free library” with an oversized birdhouse in your neighbor’s front lawn:

Zooming by in your car, you might mistake them for bird McMansions…

Based on a map on the Little Free Library website and chatter among local “stewards” — people who erect the boxes and maintain them — we’d say the Kansas City area has at least 20 little libraries so far, typically about the size of a recycling bin.

The idea germinated in a small Wisconsin town in 2009, when Todd Bol built a diminutive one-room schoolhouse out of an old garage door as a tribute to his late mom, a teacher. He stocked it with books and put it on a post outside…

“This is just a way to build community, and people can put in books that they love or just want to get rid of,” says Theiss, who’s an actual librarian. She works at Rockhurst University.

Several things are interesting here:

1. People with these libraries still believe in the power of books. How many people in the U.S. would agree?

2. From this article, it sounds like many of these small libraries are in fairly well-off suburban-type neighborhoods. The irony is that such neighborhoods are supposed to have community but need these small book outposts to bring community.

3. While these small libraries may have benefits, does this suggest people don’t want to spend the time to travel to the library? Perhaps this is more about convenience than community?

I’ll be curious to see if this is just a fad or something longer lasting.

New York City seeing a rise in super-rich mansions (not McMansions)

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Curbed highlights a Gizmodo story about “McMansions” in New York City – and both get it wrong as these new homes are far beyond McMansions:

But developers may be reaching a breaking point in Manhattan, where warehouses are being bought to build $100 million single-family homes.

A handful of real estate stories this week question whether NYC is reaching peak development. First off, we have a mind-boggling report about the rise of single-family “palaces” in Manhattan. According to the New York Times, the super-rich are buying up warehouses, parking garages, and other commercial buildings to turn them into gigantic McMansion-style homes (including what will soon become the largest single-family home in the city). According to one broker, the new “benchmark” price is going to be $100 million, as opposed to the almost austere $50 million buyers expected to pay a few years ago.

It’s one thing to get rid of warehouses and garages—but another set of trend pieces alert us of a more problematic trend: The disappearance of gas stations in the city. As developers strive to find new plots of land that can be rebuilt from the ground up, they’re buying up gas stations left and right. We’ve covered at least one of these developments before, but according to the NYT and the Village Voice, it’s becoming a problem for cab drivers who can’t always find a station in time.

Note: the New York Times article cited above which starts with the story of a new 40,000 square foot home does not use the term McMansion. Calling them McMansions is just wrong; these are unusually large and expensive homes that go far beyond the typical, mass-produced, large suburban home.

More on these new homes from the New York Times:

“The town-house buyer doesn’t want a multi-unit condominium that is mass-produced,” said Wendy Maitland, a senior managing director of sales at Town Residential, who just closed a deal on a town house at 45 East 74th Street for $26 million. “This is an entirely private home, built for the lifestyle of someone who has multiple staff, a private driver. These people do not need a doorman, and they aren’t sharing amenities.”

Such buyers don’t exactly need a discount, but the value of private homes compared with condominiums is a draw anyway. “There is a gap in the marketplace — mansions are an area that is undervalued,” said Louis Buckworth, a broker at the Corcoran Group. He recently represented the British real estate magnate Christian Candy in buying a $35 million 30-foot-wide mansion for his family on the Upper East Side. (“Mansion” is typically defined as a town house at least 25 feet wide.) Mr. Candy’s new home, at 17,000 square feet, cost less than $2,100 a square foot. Meanwhile, “an 11,000-square-foot apartment at One57,” said Mr. Buckworth, referring to the glass tower in Midtown that Extell Development is building, “sold for $10,000 a square foot, making what we paid a joke.”

McMansion owners may want similar things – privacy, more space – but these homes are a step above.

Interestingly, even with their size and price, they tend to compare favorably to expensive homes in other global cities:

And for many buyers — especially foreigners who see real estate as more affordable in New York than in cities like London or Hong Kong — the numbers are eye-catching. Mr. Candy, for example, just sold a $250 million apartment in London and a $400 million home in Monaco, Mr. Buckworth said. “So as a foreigner, you say to yourself: ‘I can spend £20 million for an average-size flat in London, or get a mansion in prime Manhattan.’ And you can see why these numbers aren’t going to be particularly scary.”

So instead of pitching the story on Curbed and Gizmodo as the excesses of the American wealthy in New York City, this could be told as a story of relative value for big homes in a major global city. Same data, different contexts and narratives. Just bringing up the word McMansion implies selfish owners out to live in ostentatious homes.

Homebuyers don’t want “the same old McMansion”

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Here some evidence that “the same old McMansion” is outdated and needs some new features:

New home buyers are coming back, but they don’t want the same old McMansion. They want a house they can use.

That means a “great room” where everyone can gather – and a spalike bathroom to escape from the crowd.

But usefulness also extends to lots of storage space for big-box buys. It means “drop-off zones” for recharging smartphones and pet-friendly “puppy showers.” It means a home office actually designed for work and media centers made for play. It means big closets and little nooks…

According to experts, today’s home buyers are much more budget conscious, a natural consequence of the recession. They demand more value per square foot. They’re not interested in rooms they will rarely use such as a formal dining room. Most of all, home buyers want a house that “works” for them.

“McMansions put a huge percentage (of square footage) into hallways and formal spaces that are used infrequently,” Lake said. “It adds up to a lot of square footage. We’re building homes with 1,000 less square feet but every room feels bigger because the house isn’t so cut up.”

As the article notes toward the end, these are not necessarily smaller homes. In fact, my interpretation here is that these are McMansions with different features. What counts for luxury today versus twenty years ago has changed: buyers want to see how to use their space rather than simply have large spaces, they want luxurious bathrooms, and they want exciting kitchens and great rooms. I’m guessing builders don’t mind these changes too much – they can work against the McMansion image (customize the luxury items!) and still sell expensive homes at high prices.

The question in the long run is whether these interior design changes are enough to stop these homes from acquiring the McMansion label.

One way to avoid teardown McMansions nearby: just buy all the properties yourself

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Mark Zuckerberg has a way to avoid annoying teardown McMansions next door:

Facebook chief and founder Mark Zuckerberg bought four homes adjacent to his own tony Palo Alto house to prevent a developer from building a McMansion capitalizing on being next to the creator of Facebook.

Zuckerberg paid more than $30 million for the four properties next door and behind his home, and is now leasing them back to the owners, according to the San Jose Mercury News.

The 29-year-old billionaire reportedly bought the houses to prevent a developer from building a McMansion and marketing it as “being next door to Mark Zuckerberg,” according to an unnamed source.

According to public records, the home behind Zuckerberg’s was sold last December to a legal entity affiliated with Iconiq Capital, a San Francisco company that handles Zuckerberg’s finances. Last month, two more properties behind his home and one next door were also bought by associated entities of Iconiq. One of the properties sold for $14 million.

The irony of this is that defeating teardown McMansions requires having more money than the possible property owners. Have less money and residents can often have a fight on their hands.

Another issue: who would pay more money for a home just because it is next to Mark Zuckerberg? Rather than offering opportunities to spy on Zuckerberg, I wonder if this is more of a halo effect for the neighborhood: it’s such a good neighborhood that one of the world’s best-known people live here.