McMansion

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

McMansion is a pejorative term for a large new house which is judged as pretentious, tasteless, or badly designed for its neighborhood. Alternately, a McMansion is a large house in a sub-division of similarly large houses, which all seem mass produced and lacking distinguishing characteristics, and at variance with established local architecture.^[1]

The "stunt word" McMansion seems to have been coined some time in the early 1980s.^[2] It later appeared in the Los Angeles Times in 1990^[3][4] and the New York Times in 1998.^[5] Other terms applied to this type of dwelling include "Persian palace,"^[6] "garage Mahal," "starter castle," and "Hummer house."^[7] An example of a McWord, McMansion compares the generic quality of these luxury homes with mass-produced fast food meals.

Architecture

The term is generally used to denote a multi-story house of no clear architectural style,^[8] with a larger footprint than existing homes and either located in a newer, larger subdivision or replacing 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]

Typically it will have a floor area 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

Starting in the 1980s in California,^[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 over the next 20 years. Attempts to save money may have led to a decline in quality of some new homes, prompting the coinage of the term.

Reports suggest that the most recent recession has caused house sizes in the United States to stabilize.^[11]

Criticism

The general criticisms stem from disagreement over the overall look and feel of the homes as not being appropriate for a given neighborhood, being wasteful in terms of space (too much room for too few people) and resources (building materials, electricity, gas), perceived pretentiousness (and lack of taste or refinement) of parvenu owners^[12] and differing architectural preferences.^[13]

Design

A McMansion often mixes multiple architectural styles and elements, combining quoins, steeply sloped roofs, multiple roof lines, complicated massing and pronounced dormers, all producing what some consider a displeasingly 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 criticism is that a McMansion has been designed from the inside out, rather than from the outside in. Because priority has been given to the interior, the house's exterior appearance suffers, with oddly placed windows and an amorphous bloated quality.^[14]

This home has a large garage with a short driveway depth taking up a large amount of street frontage. It also has 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, WA, (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.

See also

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

References

1. ^ Dictionary.com
2. ^ An example from Braces, gym suits, and early-morning seminary: a youthquake survival manual (1985) by Joni Winn [Hilton]: "The McMansion, by the way, is really just the largest house in the neighborhood"
3. ^ Book Review: Search for Environmental View of Design, Review of 'Out of Place: Restoring Identity to the Regional Landscape' , by Michael Hough Yale University Press. Los Angeles Times, July 17, 1990. "What character their history and ecology might offer is being strip-mined to make way for anonymous residential projects, monolithic office towers, climate-controlled retail complexes of questionable design and awkward transportation systems—all in the abused name of progress. We are talking here of the march of mini-malls and 'McMansions.' "
4. ^ Interiors; Getting Smart About Art of Living Small. Los Angeles Times, September 19, 1998. The size of the average new single-family home has gone from 1,520 square feet (141 m²) in 1971 to 2,120 square feet (197 m²) in 1996, according to "1998 Housing Facts, Figures and Trends," published by the National Assn. of Home Builders. "But not everyone is living in a McMansion or aspires to it," said Gale Steves, editor of Home Magazine. "Every time we do a small house in the magazine, there is lots of mail."
5. ^ Cheever, Benjamin - Close to home; Life in a Crater Will Do, For Now. New York Times, August 27, 1998. Twenty mansions were planned for the development, each designed to look like the biggest house in town. The McMansion we thought of as ours had an enormous kitchen, more than two stories high.
6. ^ The term Persian palace is specific to Los Angeles and West Hollywood and refers to houses built by Iranian immigrants, not to Iranian architecture. Goldin, Greg (2006-06-17). "In Defense of the Persian Palace". LA Times. http://articles.latimes.com/2006/dec/17/magazine/tm-palaces51. Retrieved 2010-05-26. 
7. ^ Filter, Alicia (2006-04-20). "McMansions: Super-sized homes cause a super-sized backlash". Illinois Business Law Journal. http://www.law.uiuc.edu/bljournal/post/2006/04/20/McMansions-Super-Sized-Homes-Cause-a-Super-Sized-Backlash.aspx. Retrieved 2009-05-28. 
8. ^ ^{a b} Stephen A. Mouzon, Susan M. Henderson. Traditional Construction Patterns. McGraw-Hill Professional, 2004. "(1) Victorian door and side lights on vaguely classical McMansion, (2) Victorian door and side lights on vaguely Georgian McMansion, (3) possibly an Oriental moon gate door on a vaguely classical house..." Pages 144 and 190.
9. ^ ^{a b c} Cecelia Techi. Exposés and excess: muckraking in America, 1900-2000. University of Pennsylvania Press, 2004. Pages 33-34.
10. ^ Used as a working definition by the Environmental Design Research Association in a 2006 report. This represents a floorspace "30 percent larger than the average new house and larger than 80 percent of houses" according to the 2000 Census. EDRA37: beyond conflict : proceedings of the 37th Annual Conference of the Environmental Design Research Association, May 3–7, 2006, Atlanta, Georgia. Page 254.
11. ^ Fletcher, June (2009-06-29). "McMansions Out of Favor, for Now". Wall Street Journal. http://online.wsj.com/article/SB124630276617469437.html. Retrieved 2010-05-25. 
12. ^ Miles Jaffe. The Hamptons Dictionary: The Essential Guide to Class Warfare. Constellation, 2008. Page 82.
13. ^ Fiona Allon. Renovation nation: our obsession with home. UNSW Press, 2008. Page 151.
14. ^ From Metropolitan Home, Volume 24 (1992): "This is no McMansion. Every door is perfectly placed, every proportion is exactly right."
15. ^ Chiu, Lisa (2006-06-08). "Big homes on small lots crowd Kirkland neighbors". The Seattle Times. http://seattletimes.nwsource.com/html/localnews/2003046945_lotsize08e.html. Retrieved 2008-02-11. 

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.