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!
Howdy folks! Today I’ve decided to return to a long-neglected place of terrible vibes, Oakland County, Michigan. The house on special is, one could say, fit for a king but like maybe one of those kings that sells used cars on tv in the wee hours of the night. Anyway:
This house, built during the ripe housing bubble era of 2002, will only cost the good sir a marginal $3.2 million. For such a pittance, one receives 4 bedrooms, 4.5 bathrooms, and around 5,000 square feet. Princely!
Now, you might be thinking that this house will be decked out in the cheesiest middle ages decor imaginable – yes, Kate, surely you shall be showing us a cromulent McCastle specimen. Alas, nay, it is worse than that.
Here is my theory: the people who live in this house do not understand what houses are nor how one behaves in them. It’s like Mark Zuckerberg trying to be human. Nothing, and I mean nothing in this house matches, coordinates, flows, or makes sense. It’s subtle, yes, but when you start to notice it, it becomes infuriating.
yeah, you know what would look good in this mostly neutral room? a painting with a clown palette. good for the digestion.
Tbh I wish they stuck with the hokey castle thing instead of making a house that looks like a bank lobby.
There’s a weird Dracula subtext going on here and it makes me uncomfortable.
I am trying to understand the thought process here. First: tray ceiling. ok. normal mcmansion stuff. Now we need the two narrowest windows WITH a big fanlight on top. OK SO instead of doing a tray ceiling in the middle of the room, what if we did like, a double soffit with recessed lights. Ok. BUT THEN WHAT ABOUT THE WINDOW?? Well we could move the window down two feet or replace it with a more normal window shape, you know one that makes a modicum of sense. However, for some reason that is unacceptable. Hence, moldus interruptus. And yet (and yet) we still want that tray ceiling look because this is 2002. So i guess?? nail on some moldings??? but they’re brown because they have to match the doors instead of the white baseboards??????
???????????????
As a bonus, this room is the easiest for dressing up for Halloween.
You’ve got to give them credit where credit is due here. They had to find some kind of use for the McMansion foyer interzone despite the fact that it is a “room” with no walls that is clearly an oversized traffic area. It’s like putting lounge chairs in the middle of an airport hallway.
Finally, the back side of this house which is marginally better than the castle stuff.
Anyway, thanks for joining me on this confounding journey. Bonus posts will be up tomorrow, and there’s still time to catch me livestreaming terrible home design shows from the 90s on Thursday:
Hello Friends! It’s really late at night. Do you know why it’s late at night? Because in addition to being your lovely trash tour guide and historian, I am also a graduate student. In graduate student land, it’s that mythical time known as midterms. This worked alright last semester because there were no tests, only projects. Now there are tests. Difficult tests.
Either way, here comes what I like to call a very stereotypical McMansion, except worse. It’s so stereotypical that you’ve probably seen one rather like it yourself.
Except this one has surprises. This lovely house was built in 2005, and features 6 bedrooms, each with their own bathroom! It can be yours for around $800,000 smackaroons. Let’s begin.
Lawyer Foyer
Because the Pringles Can of Shame covers the staircase, the Lawyer Foyer is truncated by a huge footbridge which renders the window useless from the first level. Oh well.
SIT ZONE
Acoustics Rating: full of garbage echoes. Yeah, garbage echoes can be your band if you want it to be. Also, I’m sorry but this room really tickled my angry bone. This is just the most egregiously wasteful enclosed volume I’ve seen since last week’s edition.
SECOND SIT ZONE
Jesus, that’s like radioactive tangerine. Also HGTV Magazine needs less pop of color and more, like normal tones. Also, Mom, if you’re reading this you know EXACTLY WHICH ISSUE I’M TALKING ABOUT. Like, seriously, it’s the worse one. You don’t need stupid paint colors to be unique. Just say no.
Dining Nook
long form jokes, people, long form jokes.
KITCHEN
Man, this totally looks like my old Girl Scout troop leader’s kitchen. She was a bitterly divorced psychiatrist who got the big house but lost half the furniture. All of my jokes come from real experiences. I have stories.
Culinary Consumption Zone
Okay, are any of you guys from the south? Do you about CookOut? STRIP TRAY Y’ALL. It’s probably the one thing I miss from the south, except for the wildflowers of North Carolina which are particularly unique.
Master Bedroom
Maybe I can be a little dark, okay?
Master Bathroom
That’s not a tub. That’s a hot tub. Put a cover on it and stop wasting water. I swear, Dune has made looking at garden tubs so infuriating now. Like, do you know how many Fremen that amount of water could have sustained???
Whatever, Bedroom
I actually did give up ballet in the 3rd Grade but my mom was okay with it because, realistically, I was terrible. Ok I think it’s time to move on to the next room -
Wait.
Wait.
Wait.
Wait.
In addition to innumerable likely code violations, I’m also angry at the fact that these people bulldozed so many friggin lovely, good, happy trees, just to be able to stare longingly at an expanse of ugly. patchy turf grass. Get out. Just get out. You literal wastes of space.
The Rec Room
Mondrian isn’t even spinning in his grave, he’s just projectile vomiting preemptively.
Finally, we reach the most incredible part of this masterpiece:
NO RAILINGS. Do these people never imbibe alcohol? Gosh, golly, if this weren’t a private residence (and architects are probably howling at this) the first in a line of many inspectors would shut this down. Hell, the fire inspector would probably just torch it himself.
Well, that’s it for Delaware, a state so small I literally only had to type “Delaware” into the real estate aggregate to get results. Join us Sunday for a tad bit more of Britain and next Wednesday for FLORIDAAAAAAAA.
Also a bit about scheduling for the next few posts:
Sunday, March 12th: Scotland McMansions Wednesday, March 15th: I will attempt to write a post this day. Around the time I started this blog, I began saving up for a trip to Europe. Well, on the 15th, I’m going on that trip. (Iceland/Amsterdam/Paris) and will return to a normal schedule Sunday, March 26th. In order to keep up with the 50 States, I am going to attempt to post on Friday the 23rd. Thanks for your understanding!
