McMansion

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A large suburban house with complex rooflines under construction in Louisville, Kentucky.

In American suburban communities, McMansion is a pejorative for a type of large, new luxury house which is judged to be incongruous for its neighborhood. Alternately, a McMansion can be a large, new house in a sub-division of similarly large houses, which all seem mass produced and lacking distinguishing characteristics, as well as at variance with the traditional local architecture.^[1]

The stunt word "McMansion" seems to have been coined sometime in the early 1980s.^[2] It appeared in the Los Angeles Times in 1990^[3][4] and the New York Times in 1998.^[5] Related terms include "Persian palace",^[6] "garage Mahal," "starter castle," and "Hummer house."^[7] An example of a McWord, "McMansion" associates the generic quality of these luxury homes with that of mass-produced fast food meals by evoking the McDonald's restaurant chain.

Description

The term "McMansion" is generally used to denote a new, or recent, multi-story house of no clear architectural style,^[8] with a notably larger footprint than the existing houses in its neighborhood. It may seem too large for its lot, closely abutting upon the property boundaries and appearing to crowd adjacent homes. A McMansion is either located in a newer, larger subdivision or replaces an existing, smaller structure in an older neighborhood.

One real-estate writer explains the successful formula for McMansions: symmetrical structures on clear-cut lots with Palladian windows centered over the main entry and brick or stone enhancing the driveway entrance, plus multiple chimneys, dormers, pilasters, and columns—and inside, the master suite with dressing rooms and bath-spa, great rooms, breakfast and dining rooms, showplace kitchen, and extra high and wide garages for multiple cars and SUVs.^[9]

Typical attributes also include a floor area of over 3,000 square feet (280 m²),^[10] ceilings 9–10 feet high, a two-story portico, a front door hall with a chandelier hanging from 16–20 feet, two or more garages, several bedrooms and bathrooms, and lavish interiors. The house often covers a larger portion of the lot than the construction it replaces. McMansions may also be built in homogeneous communities by a single developer.^{[citation needed]}

Origins

A luxury home in a small town

Beginning in California in the 1980s,^[9] the larger home concept was intended to fill a gap between the more modest suburban tract home and the upscale custom homes found in gated, waterfront, or golf course communities. Subdivisions were developed around such communities, as well as in pre-existing neighborhoods, either in empty lots or as replacements for torn-down structures. The larger homes proved popular and demand increased dramatically, particularly in light of new land-management laws that were enacted in the 1980s and '90s. Efforts to economize may have led to a decline in quality for many of these new homes, prompting the coinage of the disparaging term.

In a development that runs counter to the previous boom in construction of McMansions, recent reports suggest that the Great Recession (2008–2009) has caused new house sizes in the United States to stabilize.^[11]

Criticism

The widespread disdain for the McMansion stems from perceptions that these houses look and feel inappropriate for a given neighborhood, are wasteful in terms of space (too much room for too few people) and resources (building materials, electricity, gas), project the pretentiousness (or lack of taste or refinement) of their owners,^[12] and a general discordance in architectural preferences.^[13]

Design

McMansions often mix a bewildering variety of architectural styles and elements, combining quoins, steeply sloped roofs, multiple roof lines, complicated massing and pronounced dormers, all producing what some consider a unpleasant jumbled appearance.^[8]

The builder may have attempted to achieve expensive effects with cheap materials, skimped on details, or hidden defects with cladding:^{[citation needed]}

Though construction quality may be subpar and materials shoddy (from faux stucco to styrofoam crown molding and travertine compounded from epoxied marble dust), McMansion buyers are eager; the real-estate writer locates them in the generation of my angst-ridden Boston University students: "mostly young, mobile, career-oriented, high-salaried 30- and 40-something individuals" who are too time-squeezed to hire an architect but seek "a luxury home" that they might soon (and easily) sell whenever "it's time to move on."^[9]

Another unflattering observation is that some McMansions have been designed from the inside out, rather than from the outside in. Because priority has been given to the interior, a house's exterior appearance suffers, with oddly placed windows and an amorphous or bloated quality.^[14]

Home with large garage and short driveway depth taking up a large amount of street frontage. Also evident: several cheaply-installed neoclassical elements, a brick facade, no side windows, and poorly-proportioned windows on the front.

Size

The construction of what seems to be too large a house on an existing lot will often draw the ire of neighbors and other local residents. In 2006, for example, a recently built house in Kirkland, Washington — an affluent suburb on Seattle's Eastside — stood so close to the house next door that, in the words of the chair of the city's Neighborhood Association, "you can read the lettering on the canned vegetables in the house next door."^[15] Built as tract "mansions" or executive homes in marketing parlance, they generally are found in outlying suburban areas because lot sizes in older neighborhoods generally are not conducive to residences of this large scale. These homes usually are constructed among other large homes by a subdivider on speculation; they generally are built en-masse by a development company to be marketed as premium real estate, but do not feature custom features.

In popular culture

• The family of the mob boss featured in the celebrated television series The Sopranos (1999–2007) lives in a North Caldwell, New Jersey, house bearing many of the hallmarks of the typical McMansion.^[16]

• In the 13th season of the animated television series King of the Hill — in the episode entitled "Square-Footed Monster" (2008) — a McMansion is built in the local neighborhood to the dismay of the show's protagonist, Hank Hill. The structure has to be destroyed during a strong windstorm as it had been cheaply built and posed a risk to the local community.^[17]

• In a scene during True Blood's 3rd season, the vampire antagonist Russell Edgington, after first murdering a fictional news anchor on live television in front of the broadcast's American audience, mocks mankind for what he sees as a multitude of actions. During this rant, Russell expresses disdain for many different types of behavior performed by a people that he sees as lesser beings than himself and his kind, at one point expresses hate for their "garish McMansions." ^[18]

• In The Cleveland Show episode "There Goes the Neighborhood", Donna mentions to Cleaveland that if he had not spent so much money on their Super Bowl party he could afford to buy her a McMansion.

See also

• Gin palace
• Luxury real estate
• Mansion
• Urban sprawl

References

Further reading

• Bernstein, Fred A. "Are McMansions Going out of Style?" The New York Times, October 2, 2005.
• Fletcher, June. "The McMansion Glut". The Wall Street Journal, June 16, 2006.
• Leinberger, Christopher B. "The Next Slum?" The Atlantic Monthly, March 2008.
• Rybczynski, Witold. "How McMansions Go Wrong" Slate.com, January 4, 2006
• Long, Joshua. 2010. Weird City: Sense of Place and Creative Resistance in Austin, Texas. University of Texas Press.
• On architecture: collected reflections on a century of change, By Ada Louise Huxtable, Bloomsbury Publishing USA, 2008

External links

• Photographs of a McMansion's interior, including the tall hallway with chandelier, Boston.com.