Tag Archives: McMansions

Prospective buyer of McMansion wants to know which builders can be trusted

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One of the questions that emerges out of my recent McMansion study (read about it here and here) is how people who buy McMansions feel about their purchase. In other words, who would openly go about seeking out a McMansion to purchase and live in? Lo and behold, here is an open thread at DC Urban Moms and Dads titled “Yes we are going to buy a suburban tract home/mcmansion . . . builder reputation?” 

As you might suspect, there is a certain degree of snark in some of the responses. Additionally, it quickly devolves into a debate over specific locations and the city vs. the suburbs.

Some McMansions critics might argue that it is impossible to find a quality-built McMansion.  I found one of the four major definitions of the term refers to the poor architectural design and/or quality of the home. The assumption is that McMansions are built quickly, are constructed with poor quality materials, are intended to impress rather than last, and often incorporate multiple styles of architecture creating mishmash rather than a unified whole.

Dallas Morning News covers my McMansion study

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This seems appropriate: after I examined all the mentions of the word “McMansion” in the Dallas Morning News from 2000 to 2009 (while also doing the same in the New York Times), the Dallas Morning News covers my findings:

In researching issues related to housing and suburban development, Miller “began to notice that the term McMansion was being used to describe wildly different things.”

To some, a McMansion is simply a big house. (But what constitutes “big”?) To others, it’s an excessively big house. (But what constitutes “excessive”?) To others, it’s a big, garish house. (But who’s to say that a certain design is “garish”?)…

The sociologist analyzed each appearance of the word, and concluded that its usage tended to imply “one of four general meanings: a large house, a relatively large house, a home with bad architecture or design, or a symbol for other issues, especially sprawl and consumerism.”

The use of “McMansion,” he concluded, “is often a judgment call, and almost always negative.”

Not a bad summary. It would be interesting to hear reactions of people in Dallas to my findings.

Atomic Ranch magazine defends American ranch home

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In a housing market full of architectural twists (McMansions? Stucco homes?), there are still people defending the humble ranch. One such outlet is Atomic Ranch.

Rambler-bashing was the norm when [Michelle Gringeri-Brown] and her husband, Jim Brown, launched Atomic Ranch magazine (www.atomic-ranch.com) in 2004. At that time, ranch-style houses were dismissed as the ugly ducklings of design, the home of last resort for first-time buyers.

The magazine quickly became a cheerleader for simple postwar homes, advocating for their preservation and helping owners find home-improvement resources.

Now ranch-style homes are finding new fans who appreciate their clean lines and open floor plans. And the Browns have published their second coffeetable book, “Atomic Ranch: Midcentury Interiors” (Gibbs Smith, $40), a detailed look at eight drool-worthy homes and how their owners have reinvented them for 21st-century living. We caught up with writer/editor Gringeri-Brown at home in Portland, Ore., to seek her dos and don’ts for remodeling and decorating “the regular old ranch house.”

Q What’s making ranch houses retro cool?

A It remains generational. People who are attracted to a more retro house, with its original elements, tend to be in their late 20s and early 30s, and it can indicate a whole lifestyle — going to scooter rallies, bowling, “Mad Men” parties. With TV promoting it as cool, it’s not just your Aunt Edna’s crummy rambler. And by and large, they’re still more affordable than bungalows.

Q A few years ago, you were concerned about ranches being torn down to make way for McMansions. Has the real estate meltdown had a silver lining for ranch-house preservation?

A With the economy tanking, and flippers having to take a step back, fewer ranch homes are getting the Home Depot treatment, when everything becomes vanilla. There’s more appreciation of what they can be, less disregard and thinking this is a housing stock that should be cleaned out and Dwell-ified.

A new rallying cry: fight the McMansions to defend the ranch houses?

I wonder if people who dislike McMansions also tend to dislike ranches. Here are some similarities: both can be produced on a mass scale. They are often not aesthetically pleasing, McMansions for being a weird mash-up of styles while ranches are very functional. They both are associated with sprawl. (A more speculative thought: perhaps both are not terribly green?) From the other side, ranches may be functional and more modern but are they modern enough in comparison to houses built in a modernist style?

This seems like a classic example of celebrating American pragmatism (in house form).

Two common uses of the word McMansion: to describe teardowns, tied to larger issues of consumption

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Earlier this week, I ran across two articles from two major newspapers that illustrate two of the definitions of McMansions.

1. The term McMansion can often refer to teardowns. In the Chicago Tribune, an interesting overview of teardowns in several North Shore communities in the Chicago suburbs uses the term this way:

Critics often pair “tear-down” with the pejorative term “McMansion,” coined more than 15 years ago to describe quickly built, super-sized structures that replace more modest homes. Some neighbors complain that once a home is torn down, there is seldom an effort to blend its replacement with the surroundings…

But now tear-downs seem to be rebounding. Last year, the village [of Winnetka] issued 28 demolition permits. Through March of this year, the village received 10 applications for permits, according to Ann Klaassen, a village planning assistant…

The factors behind the new upswing have changed from a decade ago, when developers and speculators were driven by easy profits. Tear-downs now seem to be the result of the foreclosures that left homes deteriorating.

Whatever the cause, Follett says tear-downs threaten the North Shore’s historic housing stock.

But builders call it a positive sign of an economy finally getting back on its feet, and argue that many buyers just prefer new homes over renovation jobs.

The key here is that teardown = McMansion plus the term McMansion is used as an effective piece of negative rhetoric. This is quite a different idea than a McMansion being built on a cul-de-sac in an exurb. These North Shore communities have a long history and an aging housing stock. The battle over teardowns is taking place in many communities across the United States and one tool at the disposal of preservationists and those who wish to avoid this architecturally incongruent new homes is to label them McMansions.

2. In contrast, an op-ed column in the New York Times about obesity and eating habits in the United States ties McMansions to other objects of excessive consumption:

I lived in Western Europe—in Rome—for two years. And I happen to be in Western Europe—in Lisbon—as I write. And in this part of this continent there’s a different attitude and set of signals about the appropriate amount of food a person should eat than there are in America.

In restaurants and at dinner parties here, portions are much, much smaller. And, seeing them, no one cries foul about insufficient value or inadequate hospitality. We Americans somehow imprinted our nation’s historical and famous “bigger-is-better” mentality onto the way we eat. Our Costco purchases and our supersized meals mirror our S.U.V.s and McMansions: they’re assertions of wealth and expressions of comfort through sheer size.

This matters. Because if, indeed, our evolutionary nature is to grab and gorge on food when it’s there, then we’re best served in the current era of abundance by cultural cues that try to condition us in the opposite direction.

This is a common argument: American culture promotes the idea “bigger is better” and this applies even to our food. But particularly interesting to me is the link between McMansions, Costco, supersized fast food meals, and SUVs. When this argument is made, these objects often are placed together, perhaps to show how pervasive this American mentality is: it covers where we live, what we eat, what we drive, and where we shop. In other words, McMansions are an easy to spot symbol of a larger American issue of excessive consumption.

Overall, I would argue that these are just two of the meanings of the word McMansion. These two articles do illustrate the idea that when people use the term McMansion they don’t necessarily mean the same thing.

The Thomas Kincaide housing development in Vallejo, California

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With the recent passing of Thomas Kincaide, one columnist takes a look at a development in Vallejo, California built with Kincaide’s name on it:

Named the Village, a Thomas Kinkade Community, it promised residents a “vision of simpler times” with “cottage style homes that are filled with warmth and personality.” Its slogan: “Calm, not chaos. Peace, not pressure.”…

The homes in the Village look a lot like other tract homes in Hiddenbrooke, but with Kinkadean touches such as steeply gabled roofs covered in faux-slate tile, gingerbread trim, front porches and stone facades.

Residents see their homes and neighborhood as unique and distinctive.

Teri Booth, an original owner, says she bought her home because “it didn’t look like every other McMansion.”

Homes here average 2,400 square feet. The four models were named after Kinkade’s daughters – Merritt, Chandler, Winsor and Everett. The styles might be described as pseudo Victorian, pseudo French provincial, pseudo New England cottage and pseudo arts and crafts.

The streetlights (electric) look like Kinkade’s gaslight logo and the walkways (stamped concrete) resemble cobblestones.

This reminds me of the Disney-built Celebration, Florida and Martha Stewart homes. Some homebuyers are looking for a distinctive house, a world of not “every other McMansion” but rather a Thomas Kincaide McMansion! (Interestingly, this article suggests that the Kincaide homes are a pastiche of styles, a common complaint about McMansions. These homebuyers also seem to like being tied to a famous person or company. Perhaps this is reassuring or perhaps it means that there might be a bigger market for the homes as they are distinctive. (Alas, as the article suggests, home prices in a Kincaide neighborhood can fall as well.) The Village also seems to promote nostalgia and traditional neighborhood life, as do many other developments and builders.

Why have just a painting when you can buy a Thomas Kincaide house?

Movie line: “Victims live in McMansions. You live in a bungalow.”

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A review of the new movie Detention includes an interesting  bit of dialogue spoken to a character who has just survived an encounter with a horror movie villain:

Victims live in McMansions. You live in a bungalow.

Since I don’t watch horror films or a lot of ultra-violent movies, I wasn’t aware that victims are often McMansion dwellers. If this is true: is this simply tied to the idea that the privileged/wealthy/popular/snobby types tend to live in such houses (meaning the setting is not the main point of the scene) or is it a larger commentary about consumption and poor-quality yet large tract housing?

As it encounters opposition to a NYC project, can Toll Brothers escape its McMansion past?

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Residents in the Carnegie Hill neighborhood in Manhattan are opposed to a possible development from Toll Brothers:

Following news that the builders, who have slowly been expanding their Manhattan presence, had closed on the purchase of a townhouse at 1110 Park Avenue and also had their eye on neighboring 1108 Park Avenue, Tolls’ new neighbors are trying to stop them.

Toll Brothers has kept mum about the whole thing (a rep told the Observer that the company is not commenting on the transaction), but rumors are circulating that the developer plans to build a 15-story tower where the two townhouses now stand, according to Curbed.

It comes as no surprise that nearby townhouse dwellers are not super happy about the possibility of a new tower rising in their midst. Even if the developer’s New York properties are a far cry from McMansion, they do share at least one characteristic—size.

Curbed reports that not only are residents writing letters to get the Landmarks Preservation Committee to extend the historic district from 86th to 96th Street (the buildings lie right outside the Carnegie Hill historic district), but residents of neighboring 1112 Park Avenue may have hired a lawyer in attempt to block any project that could block their view. (Never mind that theirs, and just about every other building on Park, is now quite large, the days of townhouses and mansions on the boulevard long since passed.)

I wonder how much of this opposition is driven by the fact that Toll Brothers is behind the project. If you look at a picture of the properties in question, it looks like the neighborhood has already moved beyond just having townhouses. During the building boom of the 1990s and early 2000s, Toll Brothers became well-known because of their “estate homes” (McMansions to critics). Even though the company has branched out into more urban projects (see this earlier post about another NYC project), can the company ever escape the image that they build oversized and architecturally incongruent structures? Just hearing the name Toll Brothers, many defenders of traditional neighborhoods as well as opponents to sprawl likely cringe and think about a corporate behemoth who throws their weight around. Both critics and media sources were very effective in making Toll Brothers the poster child for McMansions and ideas such as excessive American consumption. While the company seems to be trying to fly under the radar in this particular project, perhaps they will have to instead be aggressively friendly to the community and stress their good intentions.

Should the American Dream include a McMansion?

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Van Jones suggests the American Dream may have once included a McMansion but such hopes have been downgraded in these tough economic times:

We may not be able to save the American Dream from the point of view of, you know, everybody is going to have a McMansion and be rich, but we should be able to make a—have a country where you can work hard and get somewhere. The two big barriers right now are these. It used to be the case that the pathway from poverty into the middle class was go to college and buy a house. Today, those are the trapdoors from the middle class into poverty, because student debt is crushing a whole generation of young people who are trying to make a better life for themselves, and underwater mortgages—one-quarter of every mortgage in America underwater—is dragging people from the middle class into poverty. So the American Dream, so-called, has been turned upside down, inside out.

Isn’t Jones suggesting that the Dream once included a McMansion? If so, this fits with an idea I’ve shared before: McMansions may always have their critics but if the economy turned around and McMansions became more attainable again, they would receive less criticism and people would go back to buying them. At the peak of the housing market in the mid-2000s, you could find plenty of people who vocally shared their reasons for disliking McMansions. However, this criticism has been backed in recent years by a narrative that McMansions (along with SUVs and perhaps Starbucks lattes) either exemplify or brought down the crashed American economy and we should say away from these houses in the future.

 

Smaller luxury homes: “I’d rather have a 3,500-square-foot house and have it make sense.”

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Two home builders in Tennessee explain that they are building smaller luxury homes:

The luxury homes being built by Castle Homes are smaller than just a few years ago, Looney said.

“Not 8,000 square feet. Now the average is 4,500 square feet,” he said.

The custom home Colclasure is completing in Green Hills has about 3,700 square feet, and the open design almost eliminates hallways.

“The days of the McMansion with 6,000 square feet and you live in 2,000, the days of people wanting those houses, are long gone,” Colclasure said. “I’d rather have a 3,500-square-foot house and have it make sense.”

This is a decent reduction in size: moving from 8,000 to 4,500 square feet is a 44% drop while going from 6,000 to 3,500 square feet is a 42% drop. At the same time, these are still large homes. Most new houses do not have 4,500 square feet and even 3,500 square foot homes are 1,100 square feet above the 2010 average. Is this enough of a size reduction to not have these homes labeled as environmentally unfriendly or McMansions?

I really want Colclasure to explain what he means by this final statement: what does it mean for a large house to “make sense”? Does that mean that the large houses of ten years ago don’t “make sense” even if today’s builders built those same homes? Does this mean that luxury homes now come with more features rather than just size? Does it mean that builders have grabbed onto the idea that they can’t just sell impressive size?

Trading in a McMansion for a McCottage doesn’t stop criticism

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One firm argues that the trend toward tiny houses may simply be a shift from McMansions to “McCottages”:

Not to rain on the parade, but let’s have a reality check. Small, very small and microhomes – ranging from 800 or 900 square feet down to 100 or 150 – may be a new trend, a fad, or just the subject of some clever marketing by their builders.

“The McCottage is replacing the McMansion as a home status symbol as more homeowners look to save money and reduce their impact on the environment,” says HSH Associates, the mortgage data firm. While national figures are hard to come by, or don’t exist, HSH quotes builders who suggest microhomes will be the next big thing…

If you’re building a weekend or vacation place, smaller is cheaper and better for the environment. But the HSH story says many people are building microhomes alongside their main homes as an alternative to a more traditional addition…

Finally, consider that the microhome fascination may be a passing fad that will leave owners with white elephants when fashions change in a few years. While many people scoff at the McMansion today, pressure to display wealth and keep up with the Joneses often returns when economic conditions improve. Just think about how people go back to SUVs and trucks when gas prices fall.

This argument suggests there are several ways tiny houses and McMansions are alike. With the prefix “Mc” before mansions and cottages, there is a suggestion that these are simply mass produced. Whether the home is big or small, mass produced is bad. There could be two issues behind this. First, there could be issues with the architectural quality and integrity. In other words, you could order one of these tiny houses out of a catalog, order it, and tow it into your backyard as could thousands of other people. Your tiny house is not unique.

There is a second issue with the mass produced nature of these houses: there is the possibility they are simply a fad and not a lasting trend. A savvy consumer doesn’t want to fall prey to these trends and simply follow along because it is a “status symbol,” even if it is a greener or cooler status symbol than a McMansion. This suggests that a buyer/owner needs to have more legitimate reasons for acquiring a tiny house.

Overall, it appears people unhappy with McMansions and who could get behind tiny houses may just have to fight similar negative generalizations.