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:
Good morning, friends! First of all, thank you all for the kind birthday wishes and for your generous gifts and donations!! You all are the best! Second, I’m putting the finishing touches on the worst McMansions in Virginia, which has been no easy task! But first, it’s time to kick off a new tradition for this blog, a gingerbread McMansion contest!
Your task is to create the most nubtastic, gawdawful gingerbread McMansion in all of McMansion Hell!! If you succeed, you will be rewarded with cool merch and even some money (as much cash as I’m able to put up):
Prizes!
First Prize: $200, a T-shirt, and 3 pins from the McMansion Hell store.
Second Prize: $100 and a T-shirt and 3 pins from the McMansion Hell store
Third Prize: a T-shirt and 3 pins from the McMansion Hell store.
Honorable Mentions: stickers from the McMansion Hell store and an award certificate
All winners will be featured on the blog and will be mailed an award certificate.
Rules and Regulations:
• Gingerbread structures must be constructed mainly of gingerbread and icing.
• Styrofoam and other support materials are not permitted.
• Entries must be original, don’t just assemble a pre-made kit. (to clarify: you can use materials from kits but don’t just put a kit together and call it a McMansion)
• All components of the display, except for the base, must be made of edible materials.
• Edible materials include candy, nuts, cereal, cookies, crackers, pasta, and other food items that do not include wrappers or sticks. Wrappers should be removed from candy and other decorations.
• Entries must be created this year
Entries will be judged on:
• overall appearance (30 points)
• originality/creativity (30 points)
• workmanship/technique (30 points)
• difficulty (10 points)
Registration starts December 2nd, 2018 and ends January 2nd, 2019. Winners will be announced January 5th, 2019.
Submissions (including photo upload) will be handled via this Google Form:
Hello friends! I want to say that choosing one house out of all of the houses in Arizona was perhaps one of the hardest decisions I’ve ever made in my McMansion career. Despite being the home of Frank Lloyd Wright’s masterpiece Taliesin West, Arizona (or as I call it “Beigeturretstan”) is mostly what we in the industry like to call “hella tacky.”
But, after a few days of searching, I think I have found “the one”.
This house, built in 1996 and boasting around 4,000 square feet can be all yours for just under a million dollars!
Let’s take a closer look:
Also, yes, yes I know the shutters are interior blinds. That should be the least of your concerns.
The Sitting Room
Sadly, there is no lawyer foyer here, this (like most houses in the area) being a one story house. However, there is still a useless sitting room, which I have provided below:
When furniture is perfectly taut, you know it has seen no butt contact. Also, I’m just going to assume the plant is fake.
Dining Room
“Honey, can you pick up some spray paint? I think I have a project!” (Husband’s face falls when he realizes his wife has circumvented the child block he put on Pinterest.com)
Kitchen
This was a really difficult photo to draw on top of. I’m most perplexed by the pink vent grills - what a strange detail.
Powder Room
That’s not paint, it’s silver sharpie.
Living Room
I love being able to spot hotel fire sale furniture. It’s like - come on, that obviously came from an old Best Western located in the nice part of town near the office park.
Master Bedroom
Apparently behind the wall tetris is a bar. A bedroom bar. Now that I can get behind.
Master Bathroom
I don’t know about you, but I don’t want any statues staring at me during my morning ablutions. I am self-conscious enough, thank you.
Vague Sitting Area #1
Seriously, how much do you have to hate light to have Venetian blinds for your fanlight window?? Also, it’s rooms like this that make census room calculations difficult. It’s not a bedroom, or a living room. It’s just…a room.
Vague Sitting Room #2
This room is how I’ve felt this week.
Bathroom 2
The only thing that could make this room more 90s is a celestial shower curtain.
Bedroom 2
Can you even open those fanlight blinds??? Also, if whoever owns this house dreams about green gardens and the ocean so much maybe they should move away from the desert! Oh wait! This house is for sale!
And finally, our favorite part (sadly there were not too many pictures from this beaut)
Rear Exterior
“Water everywhere in this room - on a planet where water was the most precious juice of life. Water being wasted so conspicuously that it shook her to inner stillness…
“She recalled the report that many Arrakeen houses were sealed by airlock doors and windows to conserve and reclaim interior moisture…
“But this room embodied a statement far more significant than the lack of waterseals on outer doors. She estimated that this pleasure room used water enough to support a thousand persons on Arrakis -possibly more.”
- Frank Herbert, Dune (p. 71)
If you follow me on Twitter, you probably know that I think about Dune a lot. If you haven’t read it, what are you doing go read it right now omg
Well, that’s it for our wonderful Arizona home! (I am extremely distraught about the lack of photography, but the RED EXTERIOR WAS WORTH IT AM I RIGHT????) Stay tuned for Sunday’s post on Canadian McMansions, and Thursday continues our 50 states with Arkansas!
Copyright Disclaimer: All photographs in this post are from real estate aggregate Redfin.com and are used in this post for the purposes of education, satire, and parody, consistent with 17 USC §107.
My apologies for the late post - my faithful laptop of 5 years died on Saturday, and I have been in IT Hell (someone make that a blog pls) getting my files off of my hard drive, in the meantime learning a valuable lesson about keeping things in the cloud. Anyway, I hope you like words, because that’s what this article mostly is.
I receive emails all the time about McMansions built in countries outside the USA. I’m here this week to briefly examine where and why McMansions are commonly constructed (and why the US has the vast majority of the world’s gross houses.) For the next five Sunday posts, I will be doing a special on the houses of each of these countries:
Canada
Australia
Isolated, yet entertaining cases to be covered in the coming weeks:
Ireland (specifically during the housing bubble, less-so now)
China
Eastern European ex-Soviet countries
Now, as those of you who are also obsessed with @uglybelgianhouses may know, ugly houses transcend geography. However, not all ugly houses are McMansions. I taxonomize McMansions to be houses built after 1980, having 3,000+ square feet, constructed with low-quality materials/craftsmanship, and use a mishmash of architectural symbols to invoke connotations of wealth or taste, executed via poorly thought-out exterior and interior design.
Why, then, do certain countries build McMansions, and others do not?
Available Land
In order to build large houses in low-density neighborhoods, you have to have space into which you can sprawl. That being said - having lots of land does not directly correlate with having more large houses, however it is one of many factorsfavoring the formation of low-density, often greenfield (unoccupied lands used for agriculture, landscape design, or left alone indefinitely) developments where large houses are commonly found.
If we look at average house sizes around the world, the US, Australia, and Canada continue to have the largest homes.
However Russia, the largest country in the world by square-footage, has some of the smallest house sizes. This is due to a number of factors including the amount of habitable vs inhabitable land, a predilection towards living in dense cities, and the relatively small amount of new housing stock built each year.
Private Transportation Infrastructure (CARS!)
The countries with the largest houses are highly linked to car use and infrastructure for private transportation. Enjoy some data:
*** Walking or biking frequency, for 2012. Represents percent of population that walk or ride their bike to their destination either “all of the time” or “often.” Public transit usage, for 2012. Represents percentage who responded that they use public transit “at least once a week” or “every day or most days,” for 2012. (Other options in survey included “at least once a month,” “a few times per year,” “once a year or less,” or “never.”)
As we can see from this graph, the US, Australia, and Canada are more dependent on the car than most other highly developed nations. The amount of existing road infrastructure, gasoline consumption, etc. are a result of car commuting, a byproduct of urban expansion aka sprawl. Because this infrastructure is both convenient and already in place, until we run out of space or come to our senses, we are going to continue sprawling.
Restrictive/Inflexible Zoning Laws
Countries like the US (less so: Canada, Australia, and the UK) have more restrictive zoning laws than places like France, which allow for more flexible development. Zoning is the segregation of land into sections to be used for certain types of uses, such as residential, industrial or commercial.
Example of a zoning map (Santa Clara County, CA) via Richard Masoner (CC-BY-SA 2.0) (Blue is industrial, green is green space, red is commercial, orange = ?)
Zoning and building codes in the US have tended to benefit larger properties rather than smaller properties, greenfield and tear-down development rather than infill development (development using existing building stock or empty space within existing infrastructure) which is partially why US homes continue to spiral upward in size despite the effects of the Great Recession.
Mortgage Speculation, Products, and Incentivization
Many people ask why the US in particular has more McMansions than other countries. Part of the reason is because the US offers many more government incentives to buy a home.
For the last few decades over-investment in housing – the most unproductive form of accumulation of capital – has been heavily subsidized in 100 different ways in the U.S. government: tax benefits, tax-deductibility of interest on mortgages, use of the FHA, massive role of Fannie and Freddie, role of the Federal Home Loan Bank system, and a host of other legislative and regulatory measures.
The result was that the U.S. invested too much – especially in the last eight years – in building its stock of wasteful larger and larger homes and housing capital and of larger and larger private motor vehicles (whose effect on the productivity of labor is zero) and has not invested enough in the accumulation of productive physical capital (equipment, machinery, etc.) that leads to an increase in the productivity of labor and increases long run economic growth. This financial crisis is a crisis of accumulation of too much debt – by the household sector, the government and the country – to finance the accumulation of the most useless and unproductive form of capital, housing and large private trucks (calling them cars is a misnomer) that provide only housing services to consumers and have no effect whatsoever on the productivity of labor.
In Australia, lending standards were not eased to the same extent as elsewhere. For example, the riskier types
of mortgages, such as non-conforming and negative amortization loans, that became common
in the United States, were not features of Australian banks’ lending. In addition, Australian mortgages are “full recourse” following a court repossession action, and
households generally understand that they cannot just hand the keys to the lender to
extinguish the debt. The legal environment in Australia places a stronger obligation on lenders to make responsible
lending decisions than is the case in the United States.
Now, riskier mortgages do not necessarily mean that more people will build oversized houses, however riskier mortgages make larger houses easier to buy. This is the number one reason why US houses are so much bigger than other countries - because they are more attainable.
Cultural Traits
It’s not just economics that play into why people in certain countries buy larger homes - it’s culture. The US in particular (Canada and Australia perhaps by proxy) has put a huge emphasis on the large house as a symbol of success and wealth.
Suburban living is the cultural picture of the American dream. It wasn’t always, but the development of media such as television coincided with suburbanization and spread its bucolic image far and wide. Later in the 20th century, the obsession of celebrity culture and fine living further solidified the ideal of the large house in the mind’s eye of Americans. In addition, outside the cities, the rental market is drastically small, so homeownership is the norm.
In European countries (for example Italy) and Asian countries (for example Japan), multiple generations commonly live together in one house. Crowded space is associated with family rather than poverty. In America, every person has their own room, because that is our cultural definition of comfort, and until that definition is modified, the US will continue to build larger homes.
Well, that does it for this primer on why we build McMansions. Again, I apologize for the delay! Stay tuned for Thursday’s Arizona McMansion, and Sunday’s in-depth look at the McMansions of Canada.
