Is there some sort of construction advantage to having all those gables ?
The proportions just look wrong, and with that many gable fronts, its just overdoing it somehow.
The other thing that really spoils these houses are the overly large garage doors, and the overly large garages, they are just carbuncles tacked on the main residence.
A genuinely wealthy mansion place would have garages tucked around the back out of the way in the mews area.
No tact, no taste.
Sweet god, you reminded me of the garages! Who decided that they are single most attractive part of the house, and often times in McMansion neighborhoods is the ONLY thing you see when you come down the street? I hate front facing garages, I hate front facing garages that overpower the entire rest of the house.
If I lived in one of those neighborhoods, I swear, I’d have to spray paint a huge red X on the garage so I could find my home. Heck, I’ve had my car (generic minivan) for a year and STILL can’t find the nondiscript f*(#$# in a parking lot. It doesn’t help that it isn’t any real color. Some days it is green, some blue, some grey.
Except the point of the gigantic three car garage is to show everyone that you have a three car garage. If the neighbors can’t see those three garage doors, how will they know you’re rich enough to afford three cars? “McMansion” implies an aesthetic or social critique of the house. The gigantic monstrosity cited above built for a man with his two wives isn’t a McMansion, it’s a plain old fashioned mansion.
A McMansion is a house built for middle-class people who have “made it”, or want to appear to have “made it”. They don’t just want to have money, they want everyone to know, or think, that they have money. There’s also a class-resentment issue. The buyers of McMansions are jumped-up, they may have money but they don’t have taste, and so on.
So anyone designating a house as a “McMansion” is intending to critique the house in some way. It isn’t a large house, or a fancy house, or an expensive house, it’s a house built for the wrong reasons for the wrong people.
garages are probably in front because you would waste whatever land was left on the lot just to make the driveway to the back of the house.
It makes sense to have the garage in the front because there are alleys so you can park behind the house. For the most part, these houses aren’t on large lots. Oftentimes, they aren’t particularly well built either.
I have acquaintances who own a McMansion. The house is huge, they have a giant entryway and a large kitchen. They also have next to no furniture. I hate going to their house at night because I can’t read the house numbers due to there not being any street lights, and the houses all look alike so you can’t just look for the brown brick house with the gable and a two or three car garage.
The other things about most McMansions I’ve seen is that the house may be massive and built to impress but the use of space is inefficient. A two story entryway is incredibly useless.
I think this is very accurate, if jaded. Builders are selling the image of a mansion at the expense of other qualities like having enjoyable (or even just livable) communities.
Class warfare, that’s about right.
Around here, they’re usually “Tuscan” villas, but I don’t think the South African version is a patch on the US kind, because these things are mostly still built with brick throughout. Still, there’s that gated community pillars-and-gables vibe here too.
You mean because he has 2 wives?
But that’s not illegal. It is illegal (bigamy) to marry another while still legally married to the first wife – in the United States. But NOT in many of the countries of the Middle East, where he came from. And traveling into the USA, or even residing here for a while, does not invalidate any of your legal marriage contracts entered into back in your home country.
Here in Minnesota, we have the Mayo Clinic, which often has Middle East dignitary patients, often accompanied by multiple wives, children, & household members. It’s not uncommon for them to rent a separate hotel suite for each wife & her children. And the Mayo Clinic even has guidelines in how to deal with multiple wives, especially as related to which one is ‘next-of-kin’ and which one makes medical decisions if the patient is unable to do so.
Right. If a person has legally married more than one person in their home country, a trip to the US doesn’t invalidate those marriages, or make the person a criminal. It just means that US law only recognizes the first marriage. If this person tried to get legally married to another spouse in the US, then they’d have committed bigamy. But if they married the other spouse according to their custom and didn’t try to get the other marriage legally recognized, they’re fine.
i think mcmansions are best described by the folk song:
“little boxes on the hillside. little boxes made of ticky-tacky. little boxes on the hillside. and they all look just the same.”
Oh, I always assumed he was singing about crappy little tract houses a la Levittown. McMansions don’t blend in even that well, they overshadow the neighboring houses and even their own undersized lots.
McMansions are by definition the opposite of little. Nor do they all look the same. And there are few places there are rows of them, because if there were they wouldn’t look out of place.
As Krokodil says, this was a reaction to 1950s suburbia. The song was written in 1962 by Malvina Reynolds and is supposed to be about Daly City, California. Not a McMansion in sight.
So would something like this: Bing Maps - Directions, trip planning, traffic cameras & more not be considered one?
On the other hand, near my old house they started a new section of homes on an old lot and I think by every definition they’d be considered McMansions because you should see how oversized some of the houses are… Literally feet from the brick fences surrounding the new development. You can see some of the (outdated) construction here: Bing Maps - Directions, trip planning, traffic cameras & more
Krokodil, I’m from this area, and I think it’s fair to say that the Washington DC suburbs are McMansion Central…
There’s this one especially hideous one on south side of Route 7, kind of in the Reston/Dranesville area. It looks like it was trying to be a castle but it is just hideous. It’s got a stone facade, and it took several years for it to be built. Have you seen it? I must take a photo of it because it has to be seen to be believed.
Actually it’s on the north side of Route 7, at the corner of Sugarland Rd. Here it is on Windows Live (make sure it’s on bird’s eye view. Of course this was taken when it was under construction. It is covered in tacky stone now, and is a horrible eyesore.
I’ve always looked at the 1990’s McMansions with an eye as to how they’ll eventualy be divided into apartments.
I’ve lived in Midwestern towns where the old 1890’s robber-baron era mansions fell into decay a la “The Magnificent Ambersons,” including one old limestone wedding cake that was converted into a dorm for college women and was raided one night by an assailant who lined the women up and gave them all enemas (Frank Zappa later imortalized him as “The Illinois Enema Bandit”).
So whenever I’m a guest in these recent houses, I imagine particle-board partitions and common through-ways, but I’m always stumped as to what will happen to that one huge bathroom.
My guess is that virtually none of today’s McMansions are in areas that are zoned for apartments.
One of the reasons I like Bay Hill so much is that it is not a cookie-cutter community. All of the homes are upscale, but each one is different from its neighbor. It’s nice to drive through and see some character to the houses instead of one size fits all.
Frankly, I think the term ‘McMansion’ is just a way to get a shot in at people who have more money or less money than you do.
The very rich don’t liike them because they take away some of the cachet of a ‘real’ mansion.
The lower middle class don’t like them because they are a visible sign that other people in the middle class are doing better than they are.
Why in hell would you care why someone builds a home, what the quality of construction is, or whether it’s practical to live in? What business is it of yours, or a city council’s? By the way, I don’t buy the drainage and fire arguments - McMansions, while fairly tightly packed together, are still more spread out and generally have more green space around them than do the rows upon rows of zero-lot line ‘starter homes’ that most neighborhoods around here are made of. These are homes with postage stamp sized backyards, and with only enough space between the houses for a sidewalk. And yet, no one seems to have a problem with these.
If people spent less time sneering and more time trying to understand the economic forces that drive ‘McMansions’, they might see reasons for them other than snobbishness or a desire to impress the hoi polloi. Let’s look at some of those forces:
More people work at home, even those who work in an office, because of flex-time, telecommuting, etc. So many people want a decent home office.
People tend to have two cars or more these days. Thus the desire for large garages. Front-attached garages are a huge benefit - they’re attached to the house, they can be easily heated, they’re easy to get in and out of, and they make great workshops when you need to build things.
The rise of HDTV and big screen TV’s and surround sound mans that the days of having a 27" TV in a 10 X 10 ‘family room’ are over. People want media rooms, home theaters, etc.
The rise of the ‘master suite’. Most people want bedrooms with ensuites. Jacuzzi tubs are becoming a normal item. These requirements drive the size of bedrooms up.
The general trend towards ‘cocooning’. Back in the day, when people were in the home they were either reading in a chair, or watching a relatively small TV, or asleep. They went out for entertainment - movies, drive-ins, etc. People are much more likely to want to entertain themselves in their homes now. So they want the living space. They want the two-story ceiling because it opens up the house and makes it more comfortable to live in when you’re in it all the time.
The increase in personal wealth. People can afford more, and many choose to spend their wealth on the things most important to them - their homes and their cars, typically.
We have more gadgets which need space. Dishwashers, laundry, microwaves, 3 or 4 TV sets, computers, fancy coffee makers, electric devices for all sorts of things. So we want larger kitchens and more floor area in general.
And yet, with all this pressure to be able to do more in the home , lot prices are skyrocketing. So people can choose to have a larger lot with a smaller home on it, or a smaller lot and use the left-over money to max out the size of the home. It’s basically a ‘more bang for your buck’ tradeoff.
Go try to find a house big enough to have a decent sized home office, a media room, maybe a pool table, sewing room, hobby room, or other specialized room, and space for a couple of cars, maybe a motorbike, golf clubs, several bicycles, and other trappings of modern middle class existence. Guess what? You’ll be buying a McMansion.
