Tag Archives: McMansions

Fight McMansions with Modernist homes

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You don’t need a tiny house to fight McMansions – Modernist homes can also fit the bill.

The reaction is much the same as the humdrum McMansions along Mr. Farrow’s Oakville street tick past the car window in a blur of beige.

Halfway down the long avenue, a first-time visitor to the Farrow Residence gasps at the sight of the sleek, low-slung Modernist abode.

Designed in 1962 and completed in September 1963, the Breuer-esque home hasn’t changed much since Mr. Farrow completed the last addition in 1973, when a summer porch and pool were added to the back. Before that, in 1970, when the couple’s two young boys were closing in on their teen years and needed more space, the original carport morphed into a bedroom wing, and a garage was tacked onto the other side. Not that you can tell: An architect rarely uses a heavy hand when rejigging his own vision and, in this case, it’s the same “old Dutch” bricks, same window configurations, same massing…

Peppered throughout the 3,000-square-foot home are Mr. Farrow’s intricate and amazing carved birds, a hobby that has kept the 1958 University of Toronto graduate “out of trouble” and “away from the television” (and perhaps out of wife Diane’s hair?) – when he wasn’t designing hundreds of hospitals, schools and churches.

There are numerous lines of attacks on McMansions but this one is a good example of solely criticizing the architecture. This Modernist home is not small (3,000 square feet) and not necessarily cheap (though the construction cost or the current value are not noted). Its key advantage over the McMansion is that is was carefully designed by an architect. Because of this, it is not like the “humdrum McMansions” and it has remained stylistically consistent even with additions and modifications over the years. Whether the architecture is enticing to many is not the issue – the article mentions one women who wondered why the home had no windows on the front – but rather than it is architecturally coherent.

That McMansions are dull and repetitive is a continuation of the long-running critique of suburbs that suggested similar houses (see the limited Levittown models) leads to boring people and neighborhoods. I haven’t seen any study that confirms this but rows of similar-looking houses can present quite a contrast to vibrant urban neighborhoods with a mix of buildings. Of course, you can also find repetitive urban neighborhoods like the new rows of apartments going up in Chinese cities or modernist housing projects built in the mid-1900s that didn’t turn out too well…

Drudge Report gets in on the politicization of tiny houses

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The Drudge Report yesterday featured this headline and photo regarding tiny houses:

DrudgeReportTinyHousesAug0514

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

While the headline links to a fairly bland story about the increased popularity of tiny houses in the Daily Mail, the tagline and the picture is intended to make another point: Americans are choosing tiny houses because the economy has pushed them into it. If the economy was doing better, assumed to be the case if there was a different president, they wouldn’t choose a tiny house. Perhaps this is what a future conservative president should run on: McMansions for all!

This isn’t the first time people have made political points with tiny houses. In the number of articles I’ve seen about such homes (and in the Daily Mail summary article), tiny house residents often make clear statements that they want to avoid consumerism and live greener lives. Generally, they seem to be favored by educated liberals. However, there is little reason that they couldn’t be supported by rural conservatives who want cheap and mobile housing on land or who want to build their own homes.

Given the relatively small number of tiny houses, perhaps the public discussion over tiny houses can’t help but be political as both sides try to use it to their advantage. If such homes were to become numerous and widespread across the population, the opposite might be true: neither party could risk alienating voters over their choice of a home.

The “McMansion Queen Bedroom Set”

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Thought McMansion owners couldn’t afford any furniture for their new large house? If they have the money, they may need this bedroom set from The Great Western Furniture Company:

McMansion Queen Bedroom Set

$795.00

Product Description

A version of our most popular bedroom (the Mansion) with less bulk and all the same beauty! Still solid wood and hand-crafted, this set comes at a great value and features the Queen headboard, footboard, side rails, slats and center support, dresser, mirror, and 1 night stand. The Chest is also available for an additional $265 if you have the room for it!http://www.greatwesternfurniturecompany.com/product/mcmansion-queen-bedroom-set/

Three quick thoughts:

1. This furniture set doesn’t look particularly special. But, attaching the name McMansion gives it certain meanings and many of these meanings are not good.

2. That this is a variant of the Mansion set makes sense but seems funny. Is there a smaller split-level set?

3. Is this the sort of furniture McMansion owners across America want?

“We must kill the McMansion!”

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Henry Grabar argues Americans should focus on getting rid of the embarrassing McMansion:

This surfeit of space is a potent symbol of the American way of life; it speaks to our priorities, our prosperity and our tendency to take more than we need. But the superlative size of our houses isn’t just a foam finger America can hold up to the world. It’s correlated with land use patterns and population density, which in turn determine the environmental impact and personal health of communities, and whether they can support a diverse range of businesses, facilities and transportation choices. It’s no coincidence that a modern American suburb like Weston, Florida, has just one-third the population density of Levittown…

But American homes dwarf those in nearly every other country on Earth. Our new houses are twice the size of those in Germany, and you could fit three new U.K. houses inside one of ours. (For what it’s worth, the houses in the U.K. are rather cramped.) Even in spacious Canada, our neighbors are building homes three-quarters the size of their U.S. equivalents. Only Australia, which has the lowest population density in the world after Mongolia and Namibia, can rival the U.S.A. for big houses.

As it turns out, though, the U.S. housing puzzle is more complex than many critics perceive. For the past few decades, single-family homes have dominated new construction. During most of the early-aughts housing boom, too, more than four of five new units were single-family homes. But that huge discrepancy has been vanquished by a surge in apartment construction. These days, the rate of new starts in multi-family buildings has been hovering, nationwide, near 40 percent — a level not seen in decades…

That raises a number of questions. Are these new residents trading the space of suburbia for the vibrancy of a city? Are they downsizing their living quarters to spend money on other things? Or can they simply not afford to rent a bigger apartment or purchase a house?

Provocative headlines involving McMansions are popular these days – “Kill the McMansions” is a pretty strong statement. Yet, the article doesn’t talk as much about the negative impacts of McMansions. The gist of the article goes more this direction: even as new American homes have grown larger in recent years, apartment construction is up, and it is unclear what direction housing will trend in the coming years. Answering this open question could go a long way in determining not just what the American landscape looks like in coming decades but, more importantly, what underlies American social life.

More on “showhome managers” living in Florida houses

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The story of a Tampa area family reveals more about “showhome managers” serving as “human props” to help sell homes:

Filling vacant houses with stuff, the firm said, “enhances the focal points, softens age and minimizes flaws.” But adding in fake homeowners adds something else entirely, Saavedra said, turning quasi-spiritual: “There’s an energy there. You can feel it. There’s something. There’s life.”…

Showhomes pays moving costs but the Muellers pay the firm about $1,200 in rent, plus all household bills. Showhomes decorators decide where things should go, and managers are responsible for faultless precision, enforced by rigorous, random inspections.

All surfaces must be regularly cleaned; weeds eradicated, car oil spots removed. Clothes in closets are to be organized by color, and contestable items — heavily religious books, personal photos — must be removed or neutralized. Every item has a rule, and everything must be exact: the rotation of pillows, the fold of towels, the positioning of toothbrushes. Even the stacks of novels casually left on the bookshelf are placed and angled with pinpoint detail.

Gatherings of more than 10 people require approval, and managers must always be prepared for surprises. Dareda has raced across town to get the home “show ready”: lights on, soft music playing, Febreze Fluffy Vanilla subtly spritzed. She said, “You just think … by golly, we’re going to just go do what it takes.” A training manual states, “Our motto is ‘A SHOWING IS NEVER REFUSED.’ ”

Serving as the unseen caretakers for a wealthier couple they’ll never meet doesn’t bug Dareda, she said, because “when I live in somebody else’s home it feels like I already know them.” She points to one of the sellers’ last vestiges, the drapes that puddle at the floor, which she calls an old-style display of wealth.

This helps fill in some details I asked for a while back though I still want to know how much added value such managers add. How much does this lived-in energy increase the value of the home?

It will be interesting to see if this catches on more widely. It requires households willing to live scripted, temporary lives in homes as well as homebuyers who want to see a sort of neutral, upscale decor.

McMansions as “weapons of mass construction”

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One writer resents having to put up with McMansions, labeled in the headline “weapons of mass construction,” for the sake of the economy:

I hate being all in this thing together. Or let’s just say, I hate being all in this thing together with the home-construction industry. Right now, a McMansion the size of the Louvre is going up directly across the street from my house. Nine other monstrosities are also being deployed in what was once a beautiful, empty meadow. The field has been filled with backhoes and earth movers and building materials on and off for at least two years.

The projects, once begun, take forever to finish. The crew starts work on a house, then gets dispatched to finish another project in a different town, and then comes back. So it takes months to get the micro-chateaux built. It’s like watching someone set fire to your neighborhood, then douse it, then come back and start the fire again six weeks later. You’d rather they just ruined things once and for all and got it over with. If you’re going to sack Rome, sack it. Drilling, digging, dust and leveled trees have been our reality since 2011. It makes it very, very hard to root for the home builders.

I am constantly reading that young people are not buying houses at the pace needed to get the economy percolating. Well, maybe someone should tell the developers to stop building lurid, vile houses that no one can afford. Or to stop building lurid, vile, prefab, ticky-tacky houses even if people can afford them.

When the economy cratered in 2008 and my 401(k) got massacred, I wasn’t as upset as I should have been because it meant that the McMansions scheduled to be erected across the street wouldn’t get built until the recession was over. Four happy years ensued, without bogus cathedral windows and four-car garages and faux-Belgian cobblestones and Philistines for neighbors. This situation put me in the uncomfortable position of having to root against my own country. As long as the housing industry was flat on its back, life was good.

I really wish that the economy were not so dependent upon the health of home builders. I would love to root for these guys. I really would. But they build trash. They tear down adorable bungalows and build McMansions in Princeton, N.J. In Chicago, in Boston, in Los Angeles and even in little old Easton, Pa., they are bulldozing whatever stands in their way and throwing up their eyesores. Throwing up being the operative term.

What does he really think? I wonder if this is closely tied to what he suggests is a personal experience with nearby houses. It is one thing to dislike McMansions on the whole and argue they are bad for society – like Thomas Frank suggested a few months ago – but then not live by them. In fact, a lot of social problems are like this: we know there are bad things happening in our county, state, country, and around the world but it is different when they are removed and abstract. There is some of that argument here: such homes are ugly, he doesn’t want to have to rely on the housing industry so much, etc.

It is another thing if a new McMansion under construction greets you every morning when you walk out your front door. Or if construction projects take a really long time. Are these concerns the result of teardowns where a historic neighborhood is threatened?

Fireworks limited by suburban sprawl

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Fireworks shows are now limited by newer guidelines and more sprawl:

“What’s happened is, the size shell that you can shoot in a particular location has decreased,” Taylor explains. Just as shell width correlates to height, so too does height correlate with regulation. Old regulations dictated that you needed 70 feet of area cleared for every inch of shell fired around a launch area. The new industry standard is 100 feet. So when you play that out, practically, a large 12-inch shell needs 1,200 feet (or nearly a quarter of a mile) cleared in every direction to be considered safe.

Taylor tells me that fireworks sites nationwide have been shrinking with both urbanization and suburban sprawl. And fellow fireworks company Pyrotecnico echoes the sentiment. “What we’re finding is that sites are shrinking,” explains Pyrotecnico Creative Director Rocco Vitale. “Growth is happening. More buildings are going up. And when that happens at a site, a show you could use six-inch shells two years ago becomes a place for four-inch shells.”

Neither company feels that the end product has suffered as a result: Since the extra expense per each inch of shell grows almost exponentially, the savings made from downsizing can be reinvested into the experience.

“Rather than one eight-inch shell, I could probably put 12 three-inch shells up for the same price,” Taylor says. “We like that for several reasons. Larger shells are more dangerous because they have more explosive power in them. But the truth is, people in this country especially like density in their fireworks show.”

So perhaps the best solution is to find large, empty pieces of land that people have to travel to in order to see more impressive fireworks. Or, if available, communities could use bodies of water which also add the bonus of the reflective surface. Yet, many communities shoot fireworks from parks which tend to be close to other things.

There is an odd juxtaposition with this story. The headline reads: “How McMansions Murdered Big Fireworks.” Then the final short paragraph: “So it wasn’t your imagination. Fireworks have gotten smaller over the years. But there’s a bright side: The public may be safer, and happier, for it.” The headline invokes evil McMansions and the desecration of sacred fireworks shows. The story suggests this is all because we want fireworks to be safer and people tend to like more dense fireworks anyway. That’s a McMansion clickbait headline if I’ve every seen one…

Why is a 5,600 square foot, $3.2 million home squeezed on a small lot a “mini-McMansion”?

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Jack Osbourne recently purchased a new home in Studio City that Variety calls a “mini-McMansion”:

In late May, rock ‘n’ roll scion and budding television and documentary producer Jack Osbourne sold his refurbished 1920s Spanish-style abode in L.A.’s celeb-saturated Los Feliz area for $3.2 million and, we first heard from gossip juggernaut TMZ, he and his missus, Lisa Stelly and their toddler daughter hightailed it to the San Fernanado Valley where they spent — oddly enough — $3.2 million for a bigger and brand-spanking-new house in and unassuming but affluent, north of Ventura Boulevard neighborhood in Studio City.

Young Mister Osbourne’s new, clapboard-sided residence in Studio City — online marketing materials rather generously describe as a “Cape Cod” — sits somewhat tightly on a .27-acre corner lot with five bedrooms and 6.5 bathrooms in 5,614 square feet. (It’s really too small to be a right-proper mccmansion so, oxymoron-ish though it may be, we’ll call an architecturally jumbled mini-mcmansion. How’s that sound?

In addition to the square footage, the price, and a small lot, the continued description of the home includes some more typical McMansion features like a two-story foyer, three-car garage facing the street, and an interesting front exterior (see the picture). So why isn’t this a McMansion?

My best guess is that this home is small by celebrity standards in Los Angeles. Compared to all new homes in the United States, Osbourne’s home is more than twice the size but he doesn’t live in an ordinary place: he lives in a place with mega-celebrities. In this city, 5,600 square feet simply can’t compete with flashier and bigger homes. See some of these celebrity homes here. Since real estate is local, Osbourne’s home is just mini-McMansion rather than opulent showplace.

Stereotypical NASCAR wives live in McMansions, consume a lot

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At least one NASCAR wife may not fit the mold of a McMansion owner:https://legallysociable.com/wp-admin/post.php?post=14555&action=edit

THE PERCEPTION some racing fans have of drivers’ wives is they live in McMansions, buy expensive clothes, drive luxury cars and travel to races in private planes. Krissie Newman insists this perception isn’t entirely true.

“Some [wives] are glamorous, but most of us are ordinary people,” she said during a recent interview…

Krissie, 36, seems comfortable with her life. No regrets about not practicing law?

“No, I’ve shifted my focus,” she said. “I’ve seen the benefits from what we’re doing. I think this is what I’m meant to do. You need to find balance in life; you need to know yourself.”

It might be interesting to look further at these perceptions. How many drivers live in McMansions and how does this differ from other athletes and celebrities? And why exactly is this tied to the wives and not also to the drivers who must have some say in whether they end up living in a McMansion and how their family spends money? It sounds like gender stereotypes are being linked to McMansions which are seen by critics as symbols of excessive consumption. It is harder to imagine a famous driver being criticized for having a big house as opposed to linking it to their wife. Additionally, NASCAR is often viewed as a more Southern sport and critics of McMansions could link that to suburban sprawl in the Sunbelt.

Hurricane Sandy made room for new McMansions in New Jersey communities?

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Hurricane Sandy left a lot of destruction – and opportunities to construct new McMansions to replace older homes.

Long and many of her neighbors claim ostentatious monstrosities are changing the landscape of their modest and historic community, McLogan reported.

They accuse some of taking advantage of what Sandy wrought by raising and rebuilding their homes without any regard for the families next door — casting their smaller homes in shadow and gloom.

About 3,000 of Freeport’s 7,800 homes were damaged or destroyed in Sandy. New York Rising and the Federal Emergency Management Agency say rebuilding requires elevating homes at least a half-story from the street.

Freeport Mayor Robert Kennedy is fielding calls from residents frustrated by the number of McMansions being built, but he said neighborhoods must be protected from the next big storm.

Hurricane Sandy didn’t just destroy homes; it may just lead to long-term transformations of dozens of neighborhoods and communities. This is an unusual situation compared to the typical teardown where a new owner buys a single home in a neighborhood, tears it down, and constructs a new large home with some different architectural features. When so many homes are destroyed so quickly, neighborhoods could change quite quickly, regardless of whether the new homes are McMansions, a negative term applied to these new big homes, or not.

In a typical case, a critical mass of teardown McMansions tends to lead to a group of residents appealing to local government to adopt some sort of regulations that limit the size and/or designs of new large teardowns. Yet, these processes take time and I assume there is a quick timeline for some of these homes to be rebuilt. How this plays out remains to be seen…