I don’t know why, but every city, no matter how big, has some insanely stacked dictator-looking McMansion somewhere outside the city limits. If you sort your Zillow results as Price: High - Low, this house will pop up first. It costs something like $5,000,000. It is 10,000 square feet. There are usually frescos and tawdry gildedness of some variety. The realtor’s text brags of marble and uses the word “Manor.”
Today, our house, squarely in this category, is found in the suburbs of Milwaukee, WI, not really a place known for unhinged 21st century robber barons. In fact, I find Wisconsin to be one of the least McMansion-dense states in the country. Even the guy who invented Culvers or the Milwaukee Bucks probably has a much less insane house than the one I’m about to show you:
Built in 1999 (owing to what kind of economic event outside of perhaps the dot-com bubble, I’m not sure), this house is indeed around $5 million and 10,000 square feet. I am not sure how much of the square footage includes the garage. Anyway, if you told me this house was from Wisconsin, I would not have believed you. Illinois, maybe, the DC area, maybe, California, maybe, Texas, most likely. But no. It is in Milwaukee and it is the one house in the surrounding area that looks like this and costs this much.
In typical local-magnate fashion, the house opens up with white and gilding. This is how you know the people who live there are really rich and have Made It. All the McMansion signifiers are present: chopsticks machine, lawyer foyer, puzzling and dull art, always in imitation of something architecturally undefined but possibly French.
In an attempt to not be too off-putting (indeed, having a ceiling full of religious symbolism seems a bit overzealous even if its purpose is to scream “I HAVE MEDICI-LEVEL AMOUNTS OF MONEY”), the house is furnished, well, normally. It cannot decide whether it wants to sell (it will never sell) or if it wants to lean into being an eccentric millionaire’s house. This is very cowardly.
Perhaps the decorative thought process comes from a desire to elevate the ordinary into the realm of the sublime. Sure, let’s go with that and not the fact that obscenely rich people are uniquely obsessed with French Rococo aesthetics because they long for a time when democracy wasn’t real.
On the other hand, I guess you don’t really need a functional kitchen if you never have to work a day in your life!
One thing that strikes me about extremely rich people is sometimes they don’t know how ordinary people live and function and in this case, design a bathroom. Hence, they are one clogged toilet away from carpet replacement. Imagine living life on the edge like that.
“I wish to lie awake and stare wistfully into copies of my visage.” - things totally normal people would say.
Everyone needs to have one chinoiserie room in their house - it’s part of being a global citizen. Also I appreciate the effort of turning six acres in Wisconsin into Versailles 2. That’s a worthy endeavor because $6 million dollars goes half as far in California. You might be able to buy a shrub for that much.
Finally, we reach the rear of the house, which is, well, phallic:
Obviously this is paying homage to the vernacular forms of the grain silo. Or something.
Happy New Year.
Fans of this website will perhaps remember a certain house from the “worst of suburban Illinois” post. I’m here to alert you to the fact that the interior of said house may in fact be the pinnacle of what has been dubbed by my colleague Cocaine Decor as “Cocaine Decor.” This 1990 house has lived rent free in my brain for a while, and now it will live rent free in all of yours. It sits at $1.1 million USD and precisely 10,000 square feet, each of which exists in ignorance of the Light of God.
Remember her? I wish I didn’t. Anyway.
The Lawyer Foyer
I would actually venture that this is the most reasonable and bland room in this house, but it sets the tone for what is to come: baffling art, even more baffling curtains, and the most baffling carpet choices to ever be offered in a catalog. Also from this angle it’s really funny.
The Sitting Room
Ok does anyone else here from the aught’s internet remember vintage Art.com and its kind of weird kitschy art prints? I used to spend hours on that website amassing pictures of lemons and limes because children are weird.
Living Room
I quilt and I KNOW how much fabric costs. Also I really want to do some kind of research project on late 90s-early 2000s “modernism” which is basically like “what if we took modernism and made it really chunky.” If you were working as an industrial designer during that time and can help me figure out what in the world was happening, please hit me up in the Twitter DMs @mcmansionhell.
Kitchen
hmm getting some Eyes Wide Shut vibes from all this… kinda sus…
Main Bedroom
Viral Tweet Voice: Tiger King was 10,000 years ago. Remember sourdough starters??? Hobbies taken up with manic urgency??? Washing groceries??? How young we were. How foolish.
????
Give me some powder and 15 minutes in here and I’ll come up with McMansion Hell 2 (or lose thousands of dollars on NFTs - it’s a toss up.)
bedroom
You know those metallic sharpies they sell two-packs of at Target? They took those to a fabric shop and said: here’s our palette, go nuts.
pool
shout out to my mom, I love her.
Okay, that’s about enough of that. Here’s the back of the house complete with a tripartite architectural analysis (it’s very complicated):
I hope you enjoyed this installment of McMansion Hell, stay tuned for more cursed houses from the Mecca of cursed houses, because I, uh, found a lot of them yesterday.
P.S. go bulls
For reasons architecturally unbeknownst to me, the McMansions of Chicago’s suburbs are actually insane. Perhaps it makes sense that Chicago, America’s mecca of great and distinguished architecture would also give birth to what can be appropriately called the netherworld version of that.
For six years, I have run this blog, and for six years I have been absolutely amazed by the formal leaps and bounds exhibited by the McMansions of Chicago’s suburbs. This area is undisputedly the fertile crescent of unhinged custom homebuilding and while I’ve heard other claims made for the gaudy, compact McMansions of Long Island, the paunchy shingled stylings of Greenwich, Connecticut, the Disney-Mediterranean hodgepodges of Florida, the oil-drenched nub mountains of North Texas, you name it – nothing comes remotely close to that which has been built in the suburbs of Cook, Lake, and DuPage Counties. (In the case of the houses featured in this post, nine of ten are located in Barrington, IL, which just might be the census designated place known as McMansion Hell.)
Usually vernacular architecture has some kind of origin point, a builder or a style or a developer one can point to and say, aha, that’s where that comes from. One could argue that the postmodern classicism of a Robert AM Stern or the tory Colonial Revival selections found in the Toll Brothers catalog provided this service for much of the McMansion canon.
However, the McMansions in the Chicago Suburbs are so wildly customized and unique, it is as though each of the ten listed here were in competition with one another to build the most outrageous collage of wealth signifiers imaginable, to the point where their architecture becomes almost un-house-like. The responsibility for their form, owing to the absence of architects, lies solely with the owners and the custom builders who did their unquestioned bidding, who plucked each turret and mismatched window from the catalog after being told, give me that. These homes are the end logic of the “custom home” of the pre-2008 era where nouveau riche (and sometimes old money) fantasies were dropped on whatever massive virgin lot one could afford to hook up plumbing to.
There are two Barrington subtypes I’ve been able to identify that, while not unique to the area, seem to be the only kinds of formal logic uniting many examples. The first I’ll call the Long House, which is just what it sounds like: a once rational house that’s been stretched to comical length-wise proportions:
Theoretically the above house makes sense to the eye. The turrets divide it into a kind of five part vertical rhythm. But the more you stare, the less sense it makes. Why is there a window between the third and fourth turret but no other? Why are there two whole other wings jutting out from the house in two other directions? Were the house not one color, the eye would get lost immediately, and the scale is such that the realtor had to zoom all the way out with a drone just to capture the whole thing in one frame. Besides, what style even is this imitating? French Country? Great Recession-core? (The same could be asked of all of these houses which, owing to their bloated-ness defy and elude even the most half-assed stylistic or historical cosplay.)
In case you were wondering, the turret exists so as to roof a curved secondary mass. A horrible question to ask ourselves is: when a turret is not used, how does one attach the curved mass to the roof? The answer is whatever is going on in the above example. I’m sorry you all have to see this.
The Long House is perhaps best demonstrated in the above particular model, which appears as though it’s not actually real but rather a mid-range SketchUp render. This house actually reminds me of many examples I’ve seen in Bergen County, New Jersey. The first three masses form a logical tripartite facade. The two that are tacked on after that undermine the rest and render it almost comical. Also they’re slightly different from one another. Of course.
The other of the two subtypes is what I call the Tank House. (One also finds turrets on a tank.) The Tank House is, well, shaped kind of like a tank: hulking, with a central protruding mass around which everything else is oriented, often at a strange oblique angle:
Building a house at an oblique angle is kind of an interesting architectural decision especially on a corner lot, but none of these are corner lots - they are large swaths of what was probably farmland unhindered by size constraints. A carport is rather like the firing arm of our tank house, protruding outward and demonstrating a kind of military might:
Often in the Tank House, additional masses are just kind of piled on to the sides because it’s actually kind of inconvenient to design a really big house on a 45 degree angle:
This results in these houses taking on a kind of kaleidoscope effect where they tesselate, spread and converge as the eye tries to assimilate them into something with symmetry, even though the design consistency falls apart at the edges.
And then there’s whatever this is:
Yeah. Sometimes postmodernism wasn’t all fun colors and ironic greek order references. Unfortunately.
However, the Tank House doesn’t always have to involve an oblique angle. What’s unique - other than the oversized central portico - is actually the piling on of the massing into mismatched wings:
Like I said above, architecture, especially “traditional” architecture longs for symmetry, and these houses simply do not have it. They always manage to screw up, shoving some house over there, some roof to that side, as though they’ve started with a central idea and were unable to commit, rather like this post in which I’m wandering around really, really trying to understand why these houses are so damn bizarre.
In the last two examples, you’ll see a central hall punctuated by grand entrance of some kind. But in both cases the symmetry is broken by adding another mass to the right simply because the garage calls for it. It shows a remarkable lack of architectural faculty and imagination to let a garage derail the entire formal logic of the house. It’s lazy. However, the garage is a status symbol in and of itself – perhaps the disruption, the madness, is the point. (In architecture, as in all things, one must remember not to ascribe to malice that which can be easily explained by incompetence.)
This brings us to the last of our examples, which I consider to be among the greatest McMansions to ever exist:
This house took sprawl as its very inspiration, its DNA, its parti. It exists simply to say how much of it there is. It lays on a barren sea of turf grass, is constructed entirely from fossil-fuel based materials, is illuminated by a spurious sky added in post. Everything about it is the pinnacle of artifice, the absence of substance. Even color eludes it - it has traded color for “tone,” for a monochromatic neutrality that even better conveys just how huge and stupid it is. I hate this house, but I also love it, because it pushes the boundary of the medium like all memorable works of architecture do. That’s the thing – despite six years of running this website, every time I think I’ve seen it all, I come back to Barrington, Illinois and find something even my headiest subprime fever dreams couldn’t possibly cook up.
