Tag Archives: single-family homes

Is a McMansion truly a better scary movie setting than a smaller, older house?

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In the last few days, I’ve seen a few stories about horror movies that take place in McMansions (see here and here). Are McMansions inherently scarier than smaller and older houses? I’ll offer a few arguments for each.

On the side of McMansions:

1. Bigger houses allow more room for weird things to happen and more space for bad creatures to pop out of. The victims have room to run away and utilize rooms they may not have entered in weeks (because the house is just that big!).

2. Perhaps residents of McMansions and all of their faux wealth (according to critics) are more deserving of bad things happening to them or are more naive and innocent. Either way, there is something about McMansion owners that makes them better targets for these films.

3. It is really about a commentary on the foolishness of buying and living in McMansions. Perhaps the horror is the inevitable result of American individualism and consumerism.

On the side of smaller and older homes:

1. They are more claustrophobic. There is nowhere else to go.

2. They are older so there is more potential for odd backstories (think of all of those old owners) or odd places (unused cellars, crawlspaces, attics, etc.).

3. The homeowners may be of a different demographic – they don’t have the wealth to live in McMansions or new homes – so there is potential for different kinds of story lines beyond wealthy and pampered teenagers or young couples who have “made it.”

I think McMansions are an easy target for horror movies and other cultural critics. Most Americans don’t live in them but they symbolize the kind of well-off life that contrasts with darker stories. Of course, dark things can happen in all kinds of houses…

Failed interactive graphic comparing American houses to homes around the world

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I was hoping for more when I saw this interactive graphic about homes around the world. Alas, this offers more style than substance. When you click on a country, you see a picture of one house, the average family income, the average household size, and an “odd” fact about the country. Indeed, I suspect this is more of a marketing ploy by the company sponsoring the graphic than anything else…

Here is what I would want to see if I could have my way:

1. Pictures of multiple “average” houses.

2. The average square footage of homes. Compared to other statistics available about countries around the world, it can be quite difficult to find good information on the average square footage of existing or new homes.

3. The average amenities of homes. Even if houses look different or are different sizes, this might be more interesting to a lot of people.

4. The average cost of homes or some measure of how much people in different countries pay for housing.

These four pieces of information would provide a lot better comparison to American homes.

Defending new large homes by arguing the new homes are certainly not McMansions

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Here is an example of how to defend the construction of large, new homes: argue that they are certainly not McMansions.

When the Anderson home on Ridge Road in Rumson was demolished to the dismay of many, Rumson Historic Commission President Jim Fitzmaurice defended new construction, saying the work of most of the area builders was not tantamount to that of a cheap, McMansion-type reputation, but high end and diverse.

“The term McMansion is often used as a term of derision to describe new large homes,” Fitzmaurice said in a blog on Patch. “I believe the term is inappropriately applied to most of the new construction in Rumson [and the surrounding area]. The term should be reserved for cheesy false front monstrosities, clad in vinyl siding on the sides and back. The homes being built by most of the high class builders in our area are nothing of the sort and will someday be the focus of another Historic Commission in the future.”

Fitzmaurice had said in an interview that he knew of some high quality new construction and revamping of smaller homes in the area as well.

When asked if the trend was one that, as it was followed, ended up pushing out diversity more and making the borough one that could only be afforded by purchasers of larger homes with bigger families, Lucarelli said that while that was not the intent, the need for larger homes and proximity to good schools is one that continues to be satiated by builders in the borough.

Don’t confuse those high-end new homes with McMansions! Fitzmaurice seems to be primarily working with one dimension of McMansions: poor/”cheesy” architectural quality evidenced by impressive fronts but siding on the side and back plus not looking “high-class.”

I’ve encountered a similar situation before where people (metaphorically) almost fell over themselves to declare they personally did not live in a McMansion but they knew nearby people who did. I’ve wondered about that situation: how guilty did these people feel that their home might be labeled a McMansion?

Fitzmaurice also suggests these new large homes may be preserved years from now by Historic Commissions. I’ve never seen anyone estimate this before but I am curious: what percentage of current large homes will survive 50+ years and/or be recognized as places worth preserving?

Looking for the future of housing at the Solar Decathlon in Madried

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Check out three designs from an international housing competition in Madrid: a “Heliomet SunBloc” house, the Bee House, and a house made out of recycled wood and mushroom spores:

London Metropolitan University’s “Heliomet SunBloc” European Solar Decathlon house combines novel construction methods with unusual materials. The house is designed so that it can be placed on the rooftops of existing buildings or other disused areas, answering a difficult question about future suburban growth. Allied with a PV-T (PhotoVoltaic-Thermal) array, the design would help supply electricity and hot water not only to its own structure, but to the host building as well.

The primary material consists of relatively low-cost and lightweight EPS foam that allows unique interior and exterior designs to be created. …

The Bee House … makes extensive use of living walls and green roofs planted with bee-friendly vegetation. This built-in beekeeping system, completed by a backyard hive, serves to pollinate the home’s surrounding garden areas, which keep the homestead stocked with homegrown veggies as well as honey. The Bee House includes a work area and boutique shop where honey and beeswax-based soaps and candles can be sold to the public, perfect for the urban farmer with an entrepreneurial bent…

To say that this house is aspirational is putting (it) lightly, as the structure can’t currently be built as designed — largely because it’s constructed around a wall system based on recycled wood that has been colonized by mushroom spores. The myco-treatment, so to speak, creates a fire- and mold-resistant, highly insulating building block ideal for green building. Oh, and it produces two edible mushroom crops in the process. (Call it the 100 Mile House meets the 100 Mile Diet.)

We are probably a long ways from seeing any of these three designs in practice. However, they do hint at some possible trends:

1. Greener houses. I think the question is how far builders and buyers are willing to go. Far enough to save a little money? Enough to significantly increase the price/value of the home?

2. Trying to utilize and connect to nature. Many single-family houses are sort of sealed off from nature even if they are in more suburban, idyllic settings. This could include everything from an uptick in gardens and compost piles, using green roofs, providing more rooms that don’t feel so sealed off from the outside, or just harnessing nature for energy purposes (solar plus geothermal and other options).

3. Looking for ways to build homes in denser settings. One assumption made by a number of thinkers is that future homes and suburbs will be more dense due to rising energy costs (particularly an increasing cost in driving due to higher gas prices and possibly higher gas taxes to keep up with better fuel efficiency) and young adults and retiring adults who want walkable communities as well as places that offer mixed-uses and more of a neighborhood feel.

Modernist homes doomed by being too small?

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Here is an interesting suggestion regarding modernist homes like those found in New Canaan, Connecticut: the homes were just too small to compete with McMansions.

Among the houses that Philip Johnson designed in New Canaan, Conn., the suburban enclave that became a laboratory for postwar Modernist design, the Robert C. Wiley house, completed in 1953, remains one of his most elegant. It is a strikingly simple composition of two rectangular boxes: one, a glass and wood pavilion with a single, 15-foot-tall living, dining and kitchen space, is cantilevered over the other, a stone and concrete base that contains, among other things, four small bedrooms, bathrooms and a sitting room. The 3,000-square-foot house typifies Modernism’s insistence on efficient use of space, but by the advent of the McMansion era, despite its architectural pedigree, it merely seemed quaintly, and unsalably, tiny.

The house had been on the market for some time when an enlightened buyer — Frank Gallipoli, the president of Freepoint Commodities, an energy trading firm — bought it in 1994. “I wasn’t looking for a Philip Johnson house,” he recalled, but given the price of land in New Canaan, the building, along with the six acres on which it sits, offered good value. “It had the utility of a house,” Gallipoli said, “but I was getting an art object.” And art is a subject close to Gallipoli’s heart: he owns an extensive collection that includes works by contemporary British artists like Damien Hirst, Tracey Emin, Gary Hume, Jenny Saville and Marc Quinn. Many of these pieces are too big to show in a domestic setting, so Gallipoli began to think about converting a barn on the property (it also served as a garage) into a private gallery. About 10 years ago, he asked Johnson himself to come up with a design, but the architect’s idea for a series of domed structures was never built. Ultimately, Gallipoli commissioned Roger Ferris, of the Connecticut firm Roger Ferris + Partners, to design the barn, along with a pool house, a new garage and a substantial restoration of the existing house. (Ferris also did some work on Gallipoli’s Manhattan house and designed a “surf shack” for him in the Hamptons, which includes a pink Corian aboveground lap pool.)

I know the point of piece is to discuss the intriguing rebuild of this home but I find the suggestion at the end of the first paragraph fascinating. The tone of the piece is that people should recognize the beauty of the home and it took an “enlightened” buyer with a true interest in art to see it for what it could be. But, alas, Americans got bogged down with buying humongous homes like McMansions and lost interest in homes with “architectural pedigree.”

I’ve suggested this before: if given a choice, I don’t think most Americans would select a modernist home. I’m not sure square footage is the only reason for this. Critics and architects may not like these choices but it also doesn’t necessarily mean Americans only go for the largest space, the best bang for the buck, the kitschiest house, or the most impressive space. Perhaps many Americans imply aren’t trained to know what critically praised architecture looks like or to appreciate it. Indeed, where is this training supposed to take place and when should it occur? (I don’t think it happens much in the curriculum from kindergarten through college.) Or perhaps it has to do with how Americans view social class and the suspicion Americans tend to have toward educated opinions and movements. Additionally, hiring an architect to design a home requires money that is likely out the reach of many Americans.

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.

Time magazine: “The Return of the McMansion”?

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Time echoes some other commentators: new data suggests we may be headed back toward bigger houses and McMansions.

When the real estate market imploded and ushered in the Great Recession, one of the biggest casualties was the size of our homes. For years, we’d been building increasingly large homes because, well, we could — and because we assumed all those two-story foyers and master suites could only go up in value. The recession put a screeching halt to this trend: After peaking at 2,521 square feet in 2007, the average size of a new home has dropped, a trend many industry observers thought would continue…

Census data shows that the average size of a new home built last year was 2,480 square feet, the first increase after three years of successive declines. Nearly 40% of new homes built last year had four or more bedrooms, a return to the all-time high reached in 2005 and 2006. And nearly 20% have three-car garages, an increase following two years of declines…

This reversal is unexpected. In a 2010 report, the National Association of Home Builders speculated that the trend of smaller homes might be due to a secular shift and that our preference for small houses would continue after the recession ended. “Part can also be attributed to trends in factors like the desire to keep energy costs down, amounts of equity in existing homes available to roll into a new one, tightening credit standards, less emphasis on the pure investment motive for buying a home, and an increased share of homes sold to first-time buyers,” the report says. “Not all of these trends are likely to reverse themselves immediately at the end of a recession.”

This illustrates the problems of making sweeping predictions on recent data: it is really difficult to predict long trends. Does the 2011 data now suggest we are going back the other direction toward bigger houses? What if the figures go down slightly again in 2012?

A second issue: moving back to bigger houses doesn’t necessarily mean that they are McMansions. The backlash against McMansions has been stiff in the last decade so these new big homes might be quite different. Perhaps they have emphases on customization (a concern of Sarah Susanka and the “Not So Big House”), more traditional looking neighborhoods (a concern of New Urbanists), and are greener and more sustainable homes.

What happens when there are 65 million vacant homes in China

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A review of a new book about China leads with this information about the recent “building binge” in China:

This spring in Beijing, I asked a businessman an obvious question about the risks to China of an economic crash-landing, to which I got a less obvious reply. It is impossible to travel around China without concluding that the place is in the grip of a building frenzy. In less than a decade, China has pumped around $4 trillion into property; tens of millions of houses and apartments as well as Ozymandian public buildings and factory estates – and what hits the eye is how much of it all stands empty. Across the country, uninhabited concrete blocks scab the land, not only in the megacities of the eastern seaboard but also in the sleepier southwest; from filthy mining towns in Henan, all the way to entire ghost towns in Inner Mongolia. With an estimated 65 million homes standing vacant, residential construction last year was still running at a rate of five times demand.

Dwarfing even the $2 trillion borrowed for the Railway Ministry’s high-speed networks since 2008, and the thousands of kilometres of 4–6 lane toll roads with barely a vehicle on them, China’s building binge is the most striking example of what Prime Minister Wen Jiabao famously, but impotently, denounced in 2007 as the country’s “unbalanced, unstable, uncoordinated and unsustainable” model of economic development. Now, with house prices and sales sagging in response to government restrictions aimed at deflating history’s biggest ever property bubble, and with local governments as deep in bad debt as the developers, I asked the businessman what was to prevent the bubble actually bursting, in a spectacular financial explosion?

His answer was that it wouldn’t happen. A lot of these empty apartments, he said, had been bought by Chinese families as investments, and they would patiently hang on to these speculative purchases because interest on savings was derisory. Secondly, although some developers would go to the wall, the bubble would simply not be allowed to burst for fear of public anger as well as economic chaos. China had massive reserves if need arose, he said, and would not hesitate to bundle nonperforming loans off into a state “bad bank”. Its plans to build 36 million “affordable” homes by 2015 would also help to offset faltering private sector demand. When in a hole, in other words, the Party keeps digging.

This isn’t the first piece I’ve read suggesting that we could be headed toward a pop of the property bubble in China…

“McMansions making a comeback”!

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Several sources picked up on the latest data from Trulia that suggested more Americans are interested in bigger homes. With a headline of “McMansions Are Making a Comeback,” here is what US News & World Report said:

After greed and excess torpedoed the housing market a few years ago, Americans understandably began favoring more modest homes instead of pricey palatial abodes.

But it seems old habits die hard.

Reverting back to a “bigger is better” mentality, interest in mega-mansions 3,200 square feet and larger has almost doubled from a year ago, according to new data from real estate website Trulia. About 11 percent of today’s house hunters say they want their own McMansions, up from just 6 percent last year…

About 16 percent of those surveyed said their ideal home was in the 2,600 to 3,200 square feet range, but according to listing data from Trulia, homes currently on the market skew much smaller, with only 10 percent of homes listed falling within that range. Nearly 60 percent of homes listed are 2,000 square feet or smaller, which means many house hunters’ hopes will be disappointed.

More from the Wall Street Journal as architects are also noting the trend:

Big homes are back in style.

That’s the headline from the American Institute of Architects’ first-quarter Home Design Trends Survey set to be released Thursday. Eight percent of the 500 architecture firms responding say square footage of homes increased in the first quarter, up from 5% a year ago. This change, the biggest year-over-year jump since the survey started in 2005, ends a multiyear march toward smaller homes driven by the housing implosion…

But today’s buyers are different from those seen during the buy-as-big-as-you-can boom. “People don’t want bigger homes just to have bigger homes,” says Steve Ruffner, present of the Southern California division for KB Home, one of the nation’s largest home builders. “Buyers show up with calculators. They actually calculate cost per square foot. They really understand what they’re getting for the money.”

Interestingly, 45% of architects reported more interest in single-story homes, up from 35% a year ago. The result is the largest percentage since 2005, according to the AIA. During the easy credit housing boom, builders quickly inflated home sizes to generate more profit. An easy way to do that was to tack on a second – or third – floor, making single-stories hard to come by in some communities. While more of today’s buyers seek more space, they don’t necessarily want to deal with stairs. Aging boomers are also more likely to seek a one-story address.

We will see how this plays out. Of course, the story is more complex than “Americans want bigger homes again” or “the housing recovery has begun.” And it will be fascinating to watch how these new, larger homes are marketed and perceived: if buying a McMansion is really a moral choice, can there really be a good defense for such a purchase?

Australians love the suburbs

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Few countries in the world embrace the suburbs in the same way as Americans. One close contender is Australia: an Australian professor describes their enthusiasm for the suburbs:

Historian Graeme Davison asked if Australia was the first suburban nation. He knew the scientific answer didn’t matter. We were, whatever the carbon date, among the most enthusiastic of peoples to embrace the suburban promise. Despite the mythic outback imagery that Australia has vigorously exported and exploited, the record shows we like suburbs more than any other way of living. We enjoy living together more than we care to admit – but not too closely. The suburb struck the perfect balance between collective security and individual possibility. The great quilt of this human accord hugs the continental coastline. Sea change and tree change means no change, really – more suburbia, only in new places.

This has some interesting parallels to the American case: Americans liked their frontier imagery (though the mass urbanization of the 1900s weakened this). Americans like community (see the oft-quoted passages from de Toqueville about voluntary participation) but have always held this in tension with individualism. Americans like the balance between being close to urban amenities and yet having some yard in a smaller community. I’ve wondered before how much the fact that both the US and Australia are British settler nations factors into this embrace of the suburbs.

A reminder: just a few years ago, Australia passed the United States in having the largest average new houses in the world. However, I suspect since the average American new home has once again gotten larger, the US is back at the top of this list.