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!
Greetings, Friends, from my current state of residence, Maryland. Today’s estate is in the…extremely special…place known as Harford County. Perhaps the best thing to come out of Harford County is my partner, who said, in no uncertain terms, “roast that place to the ground.”
Oh, I will - I will.
This extremely dank 2010 McMansion boasts 4 beds and 5 baths, clocking in at a reasonable <7500 square feet. It can be yours for about $1.2 million USD, aka a total rip off because, come on, look at it.
LAWYER FOYER: EXECUTIVE EDITION
BUT WAIT. JUST WAIT. BEHOLD: DAISY CHAINED CHANDELIERS!!!!!!!
Sometimes I get emails that say “these houses are all obviously staged” as if rich people don’t actually have the worst taste ever despite the overwhelming evidence to the contrary. Yes, sometimes these houses are staged. Sometimes they’re staged…badly. Behold.
Dining Room
According to my partner, who, conveniently A) is sitting next to me and B) teaches high-level college math, one needs at least Calculus III in order to calculate the internal volume of this room. I highly doubt that level of thinking went into building this in the first place, because, well, look at it.
Kitchen
rest in peace, gentle giant.
Also, knowing Japan, The Adventures of Mr. Fridge is probably a thing that exists in this world.
Living Room
Guess they wasted all that ceiling height on their absurd chandelier folly. I guess it’s time to make living rooms great rooms again? no.
Master Bedroom
hey, at least there’s some biodiversity left now that Trump decided to pull out of the Paris Agreement. (weeps deeply while taking shots of gin)
Master Bathroom
Um, are you trying to tell me you don’t have a bathing plate????
Bedroom 2
I’m pretty sure that if a McMansion were capable of writing poetry, this is the highest level of abstraction and/or depth it would be able to achieve.
Also shoutout to the Realtors™ who email me saying they have to resist saying McMansion Hell tropes irl.
Bedroom 3
the light is proportional to the likelihood of this house ever getting sold.
Sitting Room 2
Like, why aren’t stagers just google searching apartment therapy dot com ? Succulents probably make a house 10,000x more likely to sell.
The Bar
lol is spike tv still a thing? i’m a millennial who blogs for a living, as if i could afford cable tv lol.
Sitting Room 3
Current Mood: that table.
Alas, alas, our tour has come to an end, but don’t worry…
the rear exterior is.
.
.
, extremely good.
Rear Exterior
Allow me a moment of juvenilia. I am not above such things.
Well, that does it for Maryland! Stay tuned for a good ol’ rousing theory smackdown featuring Edmund “Pain and Danger” Burke vs p much everyone else on Monday, and next Thursday’s Massachusetts McMansion!
Happy Weekend!
If you like this post, and want to see more like it, consider supporting me on Patreon!Also JUST A HEADS UP - I’ve started posting a GOOD HOUSE built since 1980 from the area where I picked this week’s McMansion as Wednesday bonus content on Patreon! Not into small donations and sick bonus content? Check out the McMansion Hell Store- 100% goes to charity.
(INSERT HOLIDAY GREETING CORRESPONDING TO YOUR RELIGIOUS BELIEFS HERE) FRIENDS!
There will be a two-house special for the holiday season: this post and a post tomorrow - both in Howard County, Maryland (or as we in Baltimore call it: where all the rich people hide in fear after watching one episode of The Wire.)
Without further ado:
This gorgeous home, built in 1992 and boasting 5 bedrooms and 7 bathrooms can be all yours for a low payment of just $1.5 million USD!
The Entry
Ok fun story - a bench in the foyer was the time-out chair when I was little, so that joke is 99% Freudian projection.
Sitting Room 1
I’ve been really into wholesome memes lately and the positivity is very helpful during these uncertain times, so I wanted to be positive for once too and I hope you have a wonderful day <3
Dining Room
Forget undocumented migrants - this dining room is the REAL BORDER ISSUE. Someone call Fox News!!! ((political joke))
The Kitchen
Seriously clean yo grout before you sell yo house.
The Nook
Green is a very soothing color but for some reason seeing it on walls in a dining situation makes me feel a little queasy.
The ~GREAT ROOM~
Whatever cement stuff they use to glue stone to walls I need for sealing the year 2016 away foreverrr
Master Bedroom
The great white sea: a carpet oasis just as much a symbol of futility as Melville’s white whale.
Master Bath
That shower is the middle child of bathroom fixtures.
Reject Room
Reject child went on to get a degree in accounting from a good in-state public school and grew up to be the only one in the family who didn’t get a divorce.
Bedroom Two (Favorite Child Bedroom)
Favorite child bedroom, unlike the other bedrooms, got a full makeover in 2005. Favorite child got a degree in Communications from a private school that took 6 years to complete and favorite child now works in HR and is on her third husband. Favorite grandchild rides horses competitively and is enrolled in 5 AP classes because she “needs to get into a good school like Johns Hopkins so she can rope in a doctor” according to Mom.
Bedroom Three
The bedroom of the two youngest children, who got stuck in one room because unlike sad reject child and favorite child, they weren’t going through puberty yet. Because they were given no special preference but weren’t rejected by momma bear (unlike sad reject child who looks too much like momma bear’s ex-husband), they grew up in the hyper-competitive zone known as parental neutrality.
The Den
Before mom and dad got divorced, dad spent much of his time on that couch.
And finally,
Rear Elevation
Apparently that extra few square feet of bricks was just too much for the family’s budget.
That brings us to the end of Part One of the Two-Part special! Stay tuned tomorrow for more!
Copyright Disclaimer: All photographs in this post are from real estate aggregate Zillow.com and are used in this post for the purposes of education, satire, and parody, consistent with 17 USC §107.
