Tag Archives: McMansions

Wait, they are “practically giving away” “suburban mega-McMansions”?

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Curbed Chicago returns to a listing for a 19,438 square foot suburban home and notes the reduced price:

Demand for suburban McMansions is so low that some owners are practically giving them away. Take for instance this totally redonkulous 19,438 square foot home set on a 10 acre parcel of prime Barrington Hills real estate. It’s gone on and off the market since 2010, when it was originally listed for $10.5 million. Today, it can be had for $4.75 million. Its ask is now less than half of what it was when it first listed four years ago. This McMansion joins many others in the Barrington area to take huge price chops. While the value of most homes in the city have begun to rise again since the 2008 foreclosure crisis, large suburban McMansions continue to feel the hurt. The good news is, if you’ve always wanted to live the 1990s MTV Cribs lifestyle, it can now be had for about half the price.

Large home with lots of features. Yet…

1. The price may have been cut by half but it is still $4.75 million. In fact, this price reduction may not indicate that the owner is ready to give this away but rather that it was overpriced to begin with. I think the piece is trying to imply that the demand for “mega-McMansions” is low so the price was cut but we would need some more evidence before jumping to that conclusion.

2. What exactly is a “mega-McMansion”? The square footage puts this home way out of reach of the normal suburban McMansion owner as does the price. The home may not be pleasing to everyone – I’m thinking the pool room looks most desirable – but it is a scale above McMansions. Again, tying a home like this to the term McMansion is intended to add another layer of criticism that “mansion” just doesn’t add.

New novel “The Megabuilders of Queenston Park” addresses McMansions

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The problems McMansions can pose are addressed in a new novel where builders spread teardowns in suburban Princeton, New Jersey:

Author, translator, Greek poetry scholar and Princeton University Professor Emeritus Edmund Keeley tackles this issue in his newest novel, “The Megabuilders of Queenston Park,” published by the Lambertville-based independent Wild River Books. Joyce Carol Oates has called it a deftly written “contemporary comedy of manners.”

Set in present-day suburban Princeton, with its architecturally distinct buildings, the book’s “megabuilders” roam neighborhoods in search of modest homes to tear down. When a smooth-talking real estate developer tries to convince Cassie Mandeville to sell her beloved home and property, she and her husband Nick decide to take action. Nearing retirement, Cassie and Nick find themselves thrust into a battle with a father-and-son construction company that plans to erect an overgrown, high-end eyesore next door and convince the Mandevilles to sell their home as a teardown. As the couple tries to save their neighborhood, they run headlong into an insensitive and possibly corrupt local government as they navigate the maze of community zoning.

“The Megabuilders of Queenston Park” brings to life unsettling environmental questions that plague many families and communities, large and small. What is the true value of real estate? How do we measure the stability and familial loyalty our homes nurture and shelter? How do we protect our neighborhoods from large-scale development, construction, pollution and sewage run-off?…

Says the developer to the fictional Mandevilles: “I understand how you and a few others around here feel, but I’m afraid you’re all living in dream land. I promise you, if it isn’t Solar Estates working to revitalize the neighborhood, it will be somebody else moving in for their own kind of upgrading. The lots in your neighborhood are just too valuable and — forgive me — the houses are too old and small. Someday soon they will have to come down, and I’m afraid that includes yours.”

Novels have been a common way to express critiques of the suburbs since the early 1900s. Teardowns are common in numerous older suburbs with a higher quality of life as people want to move into homes with all the amenities but still live in quaint neighborhoods with plenty of character. I wonder just how many novels provide positive perspectives on McMansions and teardowns?

I hope the book isn’t as didactic as this summary makes it sound…

McMansions show disconnect between “worker[s] and automated tool[s]”

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A new book suggests McMansions are the result of automated home design:

The author of the new Building a Timeless House in an Instant Age is well-qualified to criticize. He’s a nationally recognized authority on historic design, and architecturally correct moldings and millwork. From 1991-93, he attended North Bennett Street School in Boston, the nation’s oldest trade school – one that’s evolved into jewelry making, bookbinding and museum-quality historic preservation…

“If you look at the Pyramids, you understand the Egyptians by what they were building,” he says. “McMansions are not really what we want to say about ourselves.”

They are the products of a mechanized disconnect between worker and automated tool, even between architect and computer. “Most architects draw by hand and then enter the drawing into AutoCAD, and there’s a separation between the hand and the head,” he says. “It’s the same thing with craftsmen looking at their computer while a router cuts the wood.”

What’s lost is the classical sense of scale and proportion – and a cultural heritage.

“There’s a separation that’s taking place that’s not good for us – we’re falsely assuming that were improving as we go to AutoCAD,” he says. “The beauty is in the human quality of the hand-cut piece, but a machine puts an impersonal imprint on that.”

It sounds like this is less about McMansions and more of a critique of automation and mass production. McMansions may be the symptom of mass produced homes but they weren’t the first. Similar complaints were leveled against the Levittowns and early mass suburbs which were viewed as too uniform. Those early mass homes were partly the result of changing technology: earlier American homes were built with beams, requiring heavier pieces of wood, and constructed mostly by small-scale builders or the homeowners themselves. The balloon-frame home opened things up to mass production since it relies on uniform pieces of wood.

At the same time, balloon-frame homes don’t necessarily have to be built to look like or to be the size of McMansions…

Renovating a McMansion: “Help! I want Country Understated Natural and it screams Mcmansion”

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One McMansion owner is looking for help in redesigning their home:

I did not build the house and I want it to be lodgy, understated country? It is Tony Soprano in its bones…If I changed the siding to the cedar color– would it be too monotone? I would like to use that grey cedar for the door. What can I do about the square panel details which have the red rosettes? I thought a trellis/lattice design there could work there but…not really. The hardware should be copper for the door handles and the light fixtures-any suggestions for the exact kind/type or go with vintage or gas lantern look-but which one and how large? Any suggestions overall, any advice…APPRECIATED!

The subsequent suggestions range from from changing the exterior color to a different kind of siding and roof to changing windows.

But, this brings up an interesting question: how much can and should homeowners remodel McMansions? Critics would argue that the homes shouldn’t have been built or purchased in the first place but plenty exist. The same critics may go on to note that renovation projects might be difficult and expensive with McMansions because of inferior build quality or a lack of design. However, it is likely that many McMansions would undergo significant changes over the decades. This is what happens to single-family homes – just look at some of the original Levittown homes and how they have been altered. There may be a huge potential market for firms to offer McMansion renovation services, to come in and spruce up the dated portions and/or overhaul the more garish features (two-story entryways, large great rooms, many gabled roof, etc.).

Can a former McMansion be converted into a non-McMansion with a reasonable amount of money and time?

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?