Tag Archives: McMansions

What I suspected: new homes might be slightly smaller but buyers want more amenities

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Here is a little evidence from the Hartford Courant of something I suspected might happen: people might buy smaller homes but this doesn’t necessarily mean they will be cheaper or have fewer amenities.

While “downsizing” may be the housing buzzword of recent years, not everybody’s doing it. And even those who are buying smaller homes are spending big on upgrades like granite countertops and hardwood floors, area builders say…

The houses may be slightly smaller than the 6,000-square-foot-plus “McMansions” of the past, but “people still want size,” according to Greg Kamedulski, president of the New England division of national builder Toll Brothers, which is building Weatherstone…

“It doesn’t necessarily have to be huge, the house,” said George Santos, sales and marketing director at Plainville-based By Carrier Inc. “A lot of people want new construction because they want to be able to customize the home the way they want it to be.”

“There has definitely been a shift in … the popularity of those very large houses in exchange for those relatively smaller homes but with the same amenities,” said Bill Ferrigno, president of Sunlight Construction, which recently completed Knoll Lane in Avon. Houses on Knoll Lane range from 2,700 to 3,700 square feet…

“People are very concerned with interior appointments — trims, a more sophisticated decorating package, numerous wall colors,” he said. “All these things cost more money, of course.”

So people know that having a home of a certain size is either unnecessary or is frowned upon (it may even be morally wrong) but having the nice interior features is still desirable. Perhaps this is because these interior appointments are not immediately apparent from the outside? Perhaps people now value their own experience of their home and what they want versus what they think people want to see on the outside?

How do McMansions affect kids?

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I recently ran into an article about kids helping to clean a 16-acre preserve in New Canaan, Connecticut that one local leader described as a much better alternative to having multiple McMansions erected. This got me thinking: how exactly do McMansions influence children? I suspect there are multiple factors at play: the neighborhood(s) in which the child grows up; the socioeconomic status of the family; the comments about McMansions made by family, friends, and others; how they see McMansions portrayed in the media.

Some questions that could be pursued. Are children who grow up in McMansion neighborhoods more alienated or isolated from society? Critics of McMansions argue they are frequently located in auto-dependent, wealth neighborhoods. Are children who grow up in McMansions more prone to excessive consumption? Critics argue McMansions are symbols of overspending and an American tendency to buy large. Are children familiar with McMansions more or less likely to appreciate high culture? Critics argue McMansions are typically lacking in design and quality.

If I had to guess, I would suggest McMansions have little or no effect on outcomes independent of factors like social class and educational attainment. But that doesn’t mean that it wouldn’t be fun to pursue some of these questions…

McMansions come to Levittown

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Levittowns are well known for its mass-produced homes but plenty of change has come to these homes and communities in recent decades. There are now even McMansions:

Take a ride down any Levittown street, and you will see the changes. I suppose, after 60 years, some change is to be expected. Apparently, even a complete tear down and re-build. That’s what happened over in Levittown’s Kenwood section.

This super-sized,’McMansion’, juxtaposed next to an asbestos-sided Jubilee, is the talk of Kentucky Lane. To my knowledge, there was no camera crew or shouts of ‘move that bus!” for this renovation. This prominent 3-story home is a sore thumb on a quiet street of  neatly lined Levitt built 2-story specials. It’s a monster of a house, complete with 5- bedrooms and 4-bathrooms. And? It is for sale. The asking price? Over 600-grand.

In.

Levittown.

Who will buy this house?

I posed this question to local realtor, Jen Mandell-Sommerer, of RE/MAX Advantage. She shared, “It’s not going to help the sales in Kenwood, nor do I think it is going to really hurt the sales in Levittown. The home just does not fit the area. I feel if a buyer has $650,000 they are not going to look in the Levittown area, especially in Bristol Township for that price range. Our houses are selling just in the $200,000 range.”

The listing for the house, which is down to $495,000, is here. Looks like a possibility for a McMansion: 3265 square feet, some odd architecture in the front, and a teardown that dwarfs original (yet altered) Levittown homes. The red sports car in the front driveway (both uncovered and covered) is an interesting touch, there is an interesting walk-through shower, and an extra-wide (leather?) chair next to a jacuzzi tub.

A good definition of a McMansion: Scott Skiles’ suburban Milwaukee home

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Since I occasionally criticize the improper use of the term McMansion (see this recent post arguing that the 90,000 square foot home at the center of the film Versailles is way beyond McMansion territory), I might as well also point out when the term is used well. Take, for example, this description of Milwaukee Buck’s coach Scott Skiles’ home:

Scott Skiles was always a smallish NBA player but he has a very large house. His Mequon domicile boasts 4,728 square feet (nearly four times bigger than the average single family home in the city of Milwaukee) and five bathrooms. Plenty of places to shower off that sweat after a grueling practice…

Meanwhile he is still living in Mequon-styled splendor in a home that could hardly be less urban. To measure this, we do a walkability score (from walkscore.com) that calculates distance to the closest school, coffee house, grocery store, etc. as the crow flies and from the site’s “street smart” score, which does this calculation based on the walking distance on local streets. We also look at the distance to Milwaukee’s City Hall; suffice to say, for Skiles it’s no slam dunk.

The Rundown

  • Style: Single-family – Tudor/Provincial architecture
  • Location: Stonefields neighborhood – Mequon, WI
  • Walk Score: 12 out of 100
  • Street Smart Walk Score: 3 out of 100
  • Transit Score: Not Available
  • Size: 4,732 sq ft
  • Year Built: 1997
  • Assessed Value: $1,236,700 (2011)
  • List Price: $1,475,000
  • Currently listed: Yes, with Realty Executives – Integrity [Listing]
  • 4 bedrooms
  • 3-car garage
  • 5 total full baths
  • 13 total rooms

According to the typical usage of the term McMansion, here is how Skiles’ home meets the criteria:

1. It is a large house of over 4,700 square feet. Interestingly, it has more bathrooms than bedrooms. I would guess there is some really large family/great room space in this house. I’m not sure what Scott Skiles’ height, small by NBA standards but fairly tall for the population at large, has to do with it…

2. The walkability score is quite low, suggesting that it is in a relatively isolated suburban neighborhood. In other words, it is not really possible to walk in or out of the house to locations outside the neighborhood. The implication could be that this is another fairly anonymous suburb where neighbors don’t know each other and people hunker down in front of their TVs.

3. There are some pictures of the home in this story. The house does have a number of gables and the driveway is quite large and dominates this particular exterior photo.

4. The house is pretty expensive and built during some of the McMansion boom years (1997).

According to the four criteria I identified that are typically used for defining McMansions, this particular usage meets at least two out of the four: it is a big (and expensive) house associated with suburban sprawl. It may even qualify as a poorly designed home though it is difficult to know for sure with these six pictures. It does not appear to qualify as a relatively larger home

I suspect that many athletes and head coaches live in homes that would qualify as McMansions…

The world of McDonalds, McQuarks, and McMansions

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Wired has a few recent pieces that are related to McMansions. First, an “Alt Text” piece parodies other “theoretical particles” that might follow the recent Higgs-Boson news:

McQuark

This subatomic particle is found in all McDonald’s food, and is the reason that all the menu offerings — including the burgers, shakes and dipping sauces — taste “McDonaldy,” as if they were all just carved out of a big lump of McSubstance. Currently, the McQuark is the universe’s only trademarked subatomic particle, although Motorola, maker of the Photon smartphone, is attempting to gain traction against Apple’s battery of lawsuits by patenting actual photons.

Wired‘s Matt Simon follows up and defines McMansions:

The most widely used of these pejoratives is McMansions. These are the quickly produced cookie-cutter homes that some say lack taste.

It would be interesting to hear more from McDonald’s about how they feel about the expanding usage of such terms, particularly McMansion. According to Wikipedia, McDonalds was not too happy about the term “McJobs”:

The term “McJob” was added to Merriam-Webster’s Collegiate Dictionary in 2003, over the objections of McDonald’s. In an open letter to Merriam-Webster, Cantalupo denounced the definition as a “slap in the face” to all restaurant employees, and stated that “a more appropriate definition of a ‘McJob’ might be ‘teaches responsibility.'” Merriam-Webster responded that “[they stood] by the accuracy and appropriateness of [their] definition.”

On 20 March 2007, the BBC reported that the UK arm of McDonald’s planned a public petition to have the OED’s definition of “McJob” changed. Lorraine Homer from McDonald’s stated that the company feels the definition is “out of date and inaccurate”. McDonald’s UK CEO, Peter Beresford, described the term as “demeaning to the hard work and dedication displayed by the 67,000 McDonald’s employees throughout the UK”. The company would prefer the definition to be rewritten to “reflect a job that is stimulating, rewarding … and offers skills that last a lifetime.”…

According to Jim Cantalupo, former CEO of McDonald’s, the perception of fast-food work being boring and mindless is inaccurate, and over 1,000 of the men and women who now own McDonald’s franchises began behind the counter.Because McDonald’s has over 400,000 employees and high turnover, Cantalupo’s contention has been criticized as being invalid, working to highlight the exception rather than the rule.

In 2006, McDonald’s undertook an advertising campaign in the United Kingdom to challenge the perceptions of the McJob. The campaign, developed by Barkers Advertising and supported by research conducted by Adrian Furnham, professor of psychology at University College London, highlighted the benefits of working for the organization, stating that they were “Not bad for a McJob”. So confident were McDonald’s of their claims that they ran the campaign on the giant screens of London’s Piccadilly Circus.

Instead of trying to change or block the definition, why doesn’t McDonald’s try to introduce its version of a “Mc-” term that it can then work to define? Of course, such things can be quickly turned around on the Internet but McDonald’s has plenty of resources and reach. I’m sure they could develop a positive version and there are still plenty of people going to their restaurants…

Size of new Canadian homes has dropped 400 square feet since peak

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While American new home size picked up in 2011, new homes in Canada have dropped in size over recent years:

Gone are the days of the McMansion, with the homeowner’s dream of a plus-sized home replaced by pint-sized living.

According to the Canadian Home Building Association, the average house size has dropped in the past decade from a mid 2000 peak of 2,300 square feet, down to 1,900 square feet, a decrease that is expected to continue.

Catalysts for the change in residential housing are varied – a choice of location over space or a move away from home-oriented leisure activities serving as but two examples – but for the most part, it comes down to the simple factor of the economics of sustainable living…

McMansions simply aren’t environmentally or monetarily sustainable.

It would be interesting to look more into why Canadian home sizes have dropped so much while American home sizes dropped a little but then picked up again. Is there a stronger cultural stigma attached to larger homes? Is there simply not enough demand in the market for the larger homes or are builders leading the way here?

I would also note that 1,900 square feet is still a decent sized home.

 

“The Queen of Versailles” is not about a McMansion

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More reviews are coming out of the new documentary The Queen of Versailles (and critics are liking it according to RottenTomatoes.com) but I would still argue with some of the depictions of the 90,000 square foot house at the center of the film. Here is an example: the Jewish Daily Forward has a headline titled “The Biggest McMansion of Them All.” I’ve argued this before: a 90,000 square foot home is far, far beyond McMansion territory. This is the land of the ultra-rich. Take this information from the same Jewish Daily Forward story:

David Siegel, 76, is the billionaire founder of Westgate Resorts, which he claims is “the largest privately owned time-share company in the world.” Jackie, 31 years his junior, is David’s surgically enhanced wife, and mother to seven of his 13 children. They live in a 26,000-square-foot home in Orlando, Fla., with a household staff of 19. They believe the house is too small…

All went well until the credit crunch of 2008. The Siegels’ problems weren’t caused by the house — though it did become a burden. Rather, David’s company ran into trouble as lending dried up. Typically, Westgate customers borrowed money from the company to pay for their vacation time-shares. The company, in turn, borrowed from the banks at lower interest rates. When the banks stopped lending, the bottom fell out.

Added to that difficulty was the burden of the PH Towers Westgate, a new 52-story high-rise luxury resort in Las Vegas, which drained Siegel’s corporate resources as well as $400 million of his own money. Finally, in November of 2011, Siegel was forced to sell…

Originally, the project was going to be a look at how the wealthy live and, of course, at the Siegel’s house-in-progress. It was very much in line with Greenfield’s previous work as a documentarian and photographer.

I’m looking forward to seeing this film at some point but it is difficult to draw conclusions about McMansions and American excess from one ultra-wealthy couple. Thus far, it sounds like reviewers and others see this film as a metaphor for the American economic crisis of the last five years or so and I’m not sure you can stretch it that far. As a view into the life of the elite, it may be fascinating but it would be difficult to describe this as a “typical” experience that explains the logic behind all McMansions and excessive consumption.

Some McMansions are already multi-generational homes

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While some have suggested McMansions can be renovated for multi-family housing, one Australian observer suggests this has already happened to some degree:

“We’re seeing a new efficiency or a new austerity where people are thinking a lot more about costs such as rising energy bills,” he says.

“And it’s the return to the multi-generational household where you’ve got the parents, their adult children living at home, sometimes with their own little ones.”

McCrindle says as a result there is a question mark hanging over already established large properties.

“What’s going to happen to the McMansion? Are they going to be in demand, or are they going to drop in value?” he says.

“I think that problem is already being sorted out because those McMansions are becoming multi-generational. Some downstairs rooms are being turned into granny flats, kitchenettes are being added and whole bedrooms are being turned into study rooms or home offices. For the future, it will be about building housing stock that is flexible and will adapt to our needs.”

Perhaps the children of the “accordion family” can use this as a rallying cry: “Our living at home helps mitigate the aesthetic, environmental, and financial disasters are parents made by purchasing a McMansion.”

It would be interesting to talk to McMansion owners and see if one of the reasons they purchased the home was for the possibility that adult family members might be able to live there. If so, perhaps the McMansion purchase isn’t completely misguided as critics would suggest?

Shoddy McMansions provide good settings for books, movies

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A book review in the Christian Science Monitor suggests that McMansions lend themselves to good mysteries:

Forget crumbling castles or isolated mansions. The recession has created something truly rare: a whole new kind of haunted house. The summer’s best two mysteries are both set in shoddy subdivisions of McMansions – relics of wrecked hopes built just before the housing bubble popped in 2007. Both feature seemingly golden couples, one Irish and one American, who lose the ability to cope when the world suddenly throws out the guidebook to the good life. And both offer shrewdly written, darkly compelling stories that rank among the year’s best.

So there is at least one good thing about McMansions: they make for good dystopian settings!

I will note that this is not limited to fiction books. A number of movies and television shows also use McMansions as a backdrop. Think of The Sopranos or the Real Housewives series. As with books, there is some commentary here as well: McMansions are lived in by certain kinds of people.

When your extra-large McMansion bathroom requires an extra-large vanity

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Several architectural traits of McMansions tend to draw attention: two-story foyers, Palladian windows, multiple extra rooms for hobbies and crafts and whatever else, and gaudy front exteriors. Yet, the bathrooms don’t get as much attention. Here is a blog post that suggests McMansion bathrooms present special challenges:

72″ seems to be the largest standard size for bathroom vanities. But what do you do when that is just not big enough? You know who you are, if you can fit a 5 piece bedroom set into your master bathroom then you are probably living in a McMansion. And if that McMansion was built in the 80’s or 90’s it is probably time to renovate.

So how do you find bath vanities larger than 72″ with a classic, high end feel to complement you expansive space? Here are some of my top picks.

I haven’t personally searched for vanities of this size but, if shows on HGTV are any indication, there does seem to be an upsizing of the bathrooms, particularly for the master suite. I’ve been intrigued by this: why expand the size of the bathroom instead of using the square footage elsewhere? Of course, if your house is already large (say over 3,000 square feet), perhaps you wouldn’t really need square footage elsewhere…

Thinking more broadly, it would be interesting to examine the features of homes, such as furniture, decorations, and appliances, to see how much their size has grown with the expansion of American homes in the last five decades.