As some of you may know, I have been going to language school for the last few months in order to learn the world’s most widely spoken and useful language: Slovenian. At this point, my Slovenian is about as coherent as, well, a McMansion. In order to feel better about myself, I have sought out a McMansion that is worse than my cases and word-order. This house (in Naperville, IL, of course) does, in fact, make me feel better, but will probably make you feel worse:
This Cheescake Factory house, built in 2005, boasts 5 bedrooms, 8.5 bathrooms and can be yours for the entirely reasonable sum of $3.5 million dollars. Also for some reason all the photos look like they are retouched with 2012-era Instagram filters.
First of all, trying to visualize the floor plan of this house is like trying to rotate seven cubes individually in my mind’s eye. Second, if you stand right beneath the hole in the ceiling you can get the approximate sensation of being a cartoon character who has just instantaneously fallen in love.
Even if this was a relatively mundane McMansion it still would have made it into the rotation because of the creepy life-sized butler and maid. Would not want to run into them in the middle of the night.
The mural is giving 1986 Laura Ashley or perhaps maybe the background they use for Cabbage Patch Kids packaging but the floor? The floor is giving Runescape texture.
Have you ever seen so many real plants in your life? A veritable Eden.
The overwhelming desire to push one of the chairs into the haunted jacuzzi…but in reality they probably put those chairs there to keep from accidentally falling into the tub at night.
(elevator music starts playing)
This is one of the all time [adjective] rooms of McMansion Hell. I personally am in love with it, though I don’t think I understand it. Perhaps it is not meant to be understood…..,
Continuing with the baseball theme, the guy in the painting looks how I feel after it’s been raining in Ljubljana for two straight weeks. (Not ideal!!)
And finally:
We love a house that has four unused balconies and also a sporting grounds that is large enough to build a whole second McMansion on top of. Everyone should so value their health.
Thank you for tuning into another edition of McMansion Hell. Be sure to check out the Patreon for the two bonus posts (a McMansion and the Good House) which both also go out today!
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.
Read the bonus post on Patreon!
Howdy folks! In honor of Halloween, here are some of the scariest houses currently for sale in the ever-cursed suburbs of Washington, DC. It’s been awhile since I checked in on this particular hotspot, and once more, it did not disappoint.
I’ll just get this one out of the way. Long-time McMansion Hell-heads are well aware of this monster estate in Potomac, MD, once allegedly owned by a particular professional athlete who will not be named, because the house should suck on its own merit. The only nice thing I can say about this house is that the designers kept the materials and colors consistent, which adds some unity to what is, in reality, five turrets in a trench coat.
Some things, the economists tell us, are too big to fail. This is not one of them. Let’s move on.
Many McMansions exist to mock the concept of architectural consistency and historical continuity. This is one of them. About every single type of expanded second-story window elaboration exists here: bay window, covered balcony, juliet balcony. None of them work. The house can’t decide if its 19th century eclecticism or tony DC Georgian/Federal cocktail. The random cupola merely adds insult to injury.
I don’t know where realtors learned how to do photoshop, but whoever taught them should have their Adobe licenses revoked. There’s a certain type of McMansion I call a “hat house” - which is exactly what it sounds like. It’s a house with multiple bays or masses and each has its own special hat. This is one of the most egregious examples because all of the hats are different shapes and scales. Not even the most Disney Theme Park pink sky and fairy lighting can mitigate the controlling aesthetic influence of hät.
No compilation of Bad Facades would be complete without at least one Frankentudor™. Rich people in America really like to harken back to the days of feudalism, yet uglier, more drab, and using materials mostly derived from petrochemicals. The lighting is not helping this house, which is about as gloomy, hulking, and bloated as they come.
I have some fondness for houses that derive new, inventive forms of being ugly. The spread eagle McMansion is one of them, two oblique wings with no real core. A corner lot specimen. This one is especially weird, with the quadruple portholes, the windowless bays, the mall foyer, and the hipped roof that’s not quite clipped, complete with tacked on gables. Kind of neat, sad to say.
I know most of you won’t agree, but I actually believe this is the worst McMansion of the set. The absolute banality of it, the out-of-proportion everything, the compound-like demeanor, the nonsensical spacing of the mind-numbingly identical windows. The most infuriating part is that whoever designed this had some kind of order, continuity, proportion in mind and just failed utterly at it, like Sideshow Bob stepping on all those rakes. I hate it!!!!
When rich people try to make overly-inflated temples to their dumb piles of money, it’s deeply satisfying when they end up looking like this house, which is just a pile of roof and wall tacked on to the worst proportioned portico imaginable. Classic McMansion Hubris. Let us all laugh.
Now we’re getting into the more eldritch horror part of the list. Some houses make me wonder if I have the same set of eyeballs and conceptions of what “a house” looks like as other people. This one is playing dress up games with foam stickers. It looks like Steve’s shirt from Blues Clues. It abuses the prairie muntins, which is an insult to my chosen hometown of Chicago, Illinois. Bad house.
Not enough time is devoted on this blog to bad modernism, though it would be rather generous to call this house modern. It’s more like postmodernism trying to remember what modernism looked like and tripping down a flight of stairs collecting random masses and windows on the way down. Houses like this give modern architecture a bad name. It’s borderline libel. Also it looks like it was made out of cardboard.
This brings us to our final, and objectively worst house:
I don’t even know what to say about this freak of architecture. I don’t know how it came together or why. I don’t know what it wants or even pretends to do. It is a horrorshow. Gables protruding from random places, stealth roof fragments, windows too small for the walls they’re embedded in, a weird cathedral-like entrance, the mosquito-infested pond, the worst example of realtor sky I’ve ever seen, all of it is terrible. It’s haunted. Trick or Treat, but without the treat.
Anyway, that does it for this installment. If you’re curious about more McModern badness, this month’s Patreon bonus post will be to your liking!
Happy Halloween and Día de Los Muertos!
