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.
Howdy folks! I’ve decided to go a little out of order here and get right down to West Virginia. Things have been a bit bleak lately to say the least, and I wanted to share with you a house that pretty much captures the national mood:
This 6 bed, 6 bath brown “contemporary” (contemporary is realtor speak for a house that doesn’t have any shutters) boasts a whopping 6900 square feet and was built in 1993. It can be all yours for around $850,000 USD!
Tort Lawyer Foyer
As we can all see, we’re starting pretty early on with the dreary vibes this house has to offer. This is probably the dreariest lawyer foyer I’ve ever seen, but to be fair, there are some pretty dreary lawyers out there and they deserve representation too.
Formal Room In Which The Family “Sits”
Every decade or so there’s some uncomfortably commodified idea of “Asian” decor that becomes popular, but nothing beats that time in the late aughts where HGTV did those hmmm “feng shui” shows. (if you are an academic writing about material culture, this would be a really interesting paper topic.)
Dining Room
I would have a china cabinet and fill it with all my silly knick knacks. As someone with a chronic case of the “oopsies” i will never have expensive china.
Living Room
hi mom love you
Kitchen
I swear I’ve seen those chairs in like a Boston Market or something. What’s funny about 90s beige is that it’s more gray-tinged (i.e. ‘cold’) which makes it slightly more dreary, whereas 2000s beige is more yellow-tinged (i.e. ‘warm’) and is more mindnumbing. Beige, you see, is a spectrum.
Master Bedroom
Strange that these folks don’t have a little side table or anything to put their phone on before going to bed. even if they’re analog folks, where are y’all gonna put your alarm clock?? on the floor?? i have Questions?
Master Bath
Cell phones definitely killed the intercom market. Generations of wealthy pranksters have been denied the opportunity to harass an entire household of people at once. It’s okay though, they’ve pulled the wool over our eyes anyways by, like, controlling the whole economy and government and stuff.
Bedroom 2
(TED Talk voice): There is the “sincere” market for home goods, and then there is the shadowy “irony” market, which poses a strategic problem for design and its investors.
Bathroom 2
rip beige toilet. u taught me it was ok to be weird.
Hobby Room
ha ha it’s great to do jokes when all i want to do is hide under the covers and sleep away the uncertainty and fear
Den
This is like one of those hacks in video games that lets you dual wield swords or something. (dual wielding living rooms with identical microfiber sectionals is not as cool, admittedly)
Well, (fortunately? unfortunately?) we’re out of rooms, so, without further ado:
Rear Exterior
it is rumored that “computers” may be involved, at this very moment, in the act of “posting”
Anyways folks, that’s it for West Virginia. Up next, Vermont! We’re almost done with the 50 states, folks, and I’m so excited, personally because that means I don’t have to have a tab permanently open that lists them in alphabetical order because no, i didn’t learn the song, sorry.
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I’ve been poisoning my brain the last couple of weeks narrowing down 2000 prospective McMansions to 16. Please give me a round of applause for this immense personal sacrifice. Instead of ranking them myself like I usually do, I will be doing a bracket at the end of the next post where you can vote for the Most Terrible in Texas! (After all, everything’s bigger in Texas!)
Without further ado, here are our first 8 contestants (in no apparent order):
Comal County (House 1) (AKA: White Castle)
I don’t know if this is “starting out on an easy one” because frankly none of them are easy. To understand the vastness of this sample size, this one random Texas McMansion is the equivalent to the worst McMansion from pretty much every other state in Tornado Alley.
Travis County (House 2) (AKA House of Topiary Torture)
For goodness sake, they’re plants, not poodles, Darleen.
Montgomery County (House 3) (AKA Cascading Nope)
this is the house version of when windows freezes and you can drag the little windows around
I feel like the people who built this house started off with a reasonable house, but, like a zit on prom night, they just kept picking and picking at it and now Joey from math class is staring right at you and your whole life is literally over.
Kendall County (House 4) (AKA Pastiche Castle)
People do realize that all the castles in the US are built by rich people playing king and not actual kings right? Nothing says “I love siege warfare” like a keep that’s half glorified foam.
Denton County (House 5) (AKA Mt Nub)
all you kiddos studying for the SAT can thank me for putting you on the spot with such 10-cent words as “porcine” and “ass.”
Rockwall County (House 6) (AKA The Gray Expanse)
Please keep photoshopping the sky and making my job much easier. The one good thing I can say about this house is that it at least retains the same material throughout instead of playing heirloom quilt with tile and stone.
A politics joke??? In MY blog devoted to lambasting the Ugliness Brought Upon This Earth by the obnoxiously wealthy??
I hope you’re excited for Round 2, which will be posted early next week. We’ve got some, uh, unique houses coming your way! Be sure to check out Patreon where there are 5 Good Houses of the Week if you are in need of an eye rinse. I hope all of my fellow LGBTQIA+ followers had a Happy Pride!!!
There is a whole new slate of Patreon rewards, including Good House of the Week, Crowdcast streaming, monthly roasts of Important Architecture, and bonus essays!
Not into recurring donations or bonus content? Consider the tip jar! Or, Check out the McMansion Hell Store ! 100% of the proceeds from the McMansion Hell store go to charity!
Howdy folks! This post has been a long time coming, as Williamson County seems to be a frequent fixture of my inbox. Fortunately, the Nashville suburb did not disappoint.
This 4500 square foot esteemed piece of real estate, built in 2012, boasts 4 bedrooms and 4 baths, and somehow manages to spend over $1 million USD doing it.
Despite spending that much money, they fortunately didn’t allocate funds to a lawyer foyer, so we’re left to start with the formal dining room.
Dining Room
You see, stolen window units are just a risk of ground-floor urban life, and if you don’t like it you can go make enough money to rent some place with central air in this economy!!
Office
The best thing about this house is that it’s decorated as if the recession never happened and we all just kept doing 2005 forever.
IN THE TOP LEFT HAND CORNER OF THIS IMAGE YOU CAN SPOT THREE MORE TEAPOTS.
Master Bedroom
this is a suspicious number of pillows. pretty sure we might be witnessing a case of illicit pillow laundering.
Master Bath
The only thing that can explain the excessive number of duplicate objects in this house is elaborate divorce planning. What cynical times we live in.
Powder Room
did they glue that seal on there or???
THEATRE ROOM
man don’t u hate it when u spend all ur money on a theatre room and u don’t have enough left over for the theatre part? relatable content
Game Room
A huge subset of middle-class and rich people decorating is spending money on signs that signify what a room is used for (KITCHEN = the word EAT; pictures of food. BATH = the word BATH; pictures of tubs.)
Well, folks, that does it for the interior portion of our house but don’t worry, there’s still the
Rear Exterior
Why is it that there’s often better symmetry in the rear exteriors of McMansions? My guess: custom home clients are only really concerned with the front facade and therefore it’s subject to more of their meddling.
Well, that does it for Tennessee! Stay tuned for a new Looking Around this weekend and next week’s TEXAS SPECIAL. Stay cool!
There is a whole new slate of Patreon rewards, including Good House of the Week, Crowdcast streaming, monthly roasts of Important Architecture, and bonus essays!
Not into recurring donations or bonus content? Consider the tip jar! Or, Check out the McMansion Hell Store ! 100% of the proceeds from the McMansion Hell store go to charity!
