Tag Archives: Home Alone

Asking again: did Kevin McCallister live in a McMansion!?

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An overview of movies where Santa is the bad guy included this aside about Home Alone:

Photo by Irina Iriser on Pexels.com

The 1989 film (which is about a boy setting booby traps in his mansion on Christmas Eve to stop a killer Santa) earned a small measure of fame when its creators sued the makers of Home Alone (which is about a boy setting booby traps in his McMansion on Christmas Eve to stop some robbers) for the similarities between the two.

Is the Winnetka, Illinois home a McMansion or a mansion? Several pieces of evidence for the latter:

–Atlas Obscura calls it a mansion and says, “Built in the 1920s, the building is comprised of red brick and was built in the colonial Georgian style.” It is hard to call a home as old as this as a McMansion. Additionally, it is built in a classic style, not imitating a classic style.

–According to Zillow, the home has 5,398 square feet, 6 bedrooms, and 6 bathrooms. It is worth over $2 million. While the home size is in McMansion territory, that price is not.

-Did director John Hughes have a thing for suburban McMansions? This discussion in reddit.com/r/McMansionHell suggests no.

For more discuss, see my 2019 post.

Bonus information: according to Tripadvisor, seeing this home is the #1 thing to do in Winnetka.

Kevin McCallister of Home Alone does not live in a McMansion

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From a Buzzfeed list of tweets about Home Alone, here is one that considers the primary setting for the movie:

HomeAloneMcMansion

While the house may appear to be a McMansion because of its size and suburban settings, there are multiple pieces of evidence to counter this (compiled from multiple websites including fancypantshomes.com, themirror.co.uk, and census.gov:

1. The home was constructed in 1920. This construction predates McMansions by roughly six decades.

2. The home sold in 2012 for just over $1.5 million. This is beyond the price of most McMansions.

3. The home does not suffer from the architectural issues facing many McMansions (likely because it was built in 1920): it has a consistent brick facade, a symmetrical front, and not too many gables.

4. The home is not in a suburb with residents striving to look wealthy; this is a wealthy suburb with a median household income of $220,000 for its over 12,000 residents.

5. Because this is an older and smaller suburb, it is indeed possible to walk from the McCallister house to downtown which is less than half a mile away. It is possible to have big houses located in walkable neighborhoods (which is part of the appeal for some teardowns in older suburban neighborhoods).

Kevin McCallister lives in a big house, a house for wealthy people, but it is not a McMansion. The primary setting for Home Alone is a large and older single-family home far beyond the reach of most Americans and located within a walkable and wealthy suburb.