I'd never heard of the tern McMansion before reading the article (I'm from the UK.) These poorly designed houses seem to have huge, vast amounts of land around them. In the UK plots are much smaller. Do you think cheap houses filling large plots is the issue?
The connotation I've always had for "McMansion" is the object of a middle or upper-middle class obsession with a poorly built, absurdly huge, cookie cutter house that looks just like every other house on its street, packed together on 1/4 acre or smaller lots with no lawn, yet selling for upwards of $500,000.
Not that I'm one to be snobbish, since I live in an old farmhouse that needs two issues fixed for every one that I tackle. But I'm happy that my only neighbors are a nice old lady in another little farmhouse, a church, and the animals that live in the woods behind me. It's not much to look at but it's within my means and in fact, my mortgage payment (tax and insurance escrow included) is less than a car payment for most of my peers. I'm happy that I don't feel the need to "keep up with the Joneses" and I can focus on my family's needs and my own hobbies instead.
Slight correction (that seems to be divisive on the issue), McMansions are generally characterized by not being cookie cutter. A neighborhood full of mcmansion's does have the distinguishing feature that each one is different, but they will all still feel the same. It's the result of each owner wanting something more unique and fancier than everyone else, and just smashing stuff on to do it.
Sorry, by "cookie cutter" I mean it's blatantly obvious they are all (within a neighborhood) designed and built by the same property developer. Around here, a developer will buy land for a subdivision, then hire one architectural firm and one construction crew to build 200+ houses all to the same general specs and overall theme. Yes, there are variations, but it's variations on the same theme.
They're houses built like cars. You have the six basic models. Then each of those models can have upgrade options and trim packages. Floor plan C with bay windows, sun room, and gabled roof here; floor plan E with 3-car garage expansion there; floor plan F with cupola feature and two-story deck package somewhere else.
Every house is different, but every house is the same. The only thing that really distinguishes one from the other is the finish work. The builder uses all the same parts and all the same subcontractors in each one.
The subdivisions are little more than an outdoor mass-production factory for houses. The assembly line is largely invisible, found only in the builder's sales and scheduling software.
Ah ok, when I think of a cookie cutter house I imagine neighborhoods where every house is the same with maybe an extra gable on some of them. Little boxes, and such.
It certainly doesn't help, but there are plenty of packed-in developments with similar issues. In fact I would say that the platonic American McMansion is on a fairly small plot of land and is built up absurdly close to the property line.
Yes, in fact, I always assumed the derogatory nature of the term (McX for X = mansion) is a dig at wanting an impressive-looking facade, but not being able to pay for a larger plot of land or the architect to design that big facade.
To me, "McX" evokes the image of fast food. Something bland, unappealing, and one-size-fits-all that sacrifices quality for mass production.
The later McMansions may have evolved as a response to the perception of them being generic by slapping on superficial and poorly designed accents. It doesn't change the low quality. Burger King isn't considered any better than McDonalds just because you can "have it your way".
But mostly it's about the houses being unnecessarily large. Now that I think about it, the McDonalds metaphor here is probably meant to be that they're Super-Sized houses.
Well of course it has to do with money, what you are referring to would increase the property cost by 2-3x. The same house but custom built home on an acre of land in the city in the u.s. east would run you $1million+, or have a prefab home on .3 acres (subdivision) for $400,000.
Similar to the concept of the Persian Palace in the areas I grew up - build quality was quite high in those cases, but as much of the lot as zoning rules allowed was used for two stories of house.
Depending on local zoning and "offset" rules, McMansions can be built on very small plots.
Rows of McMansion-style houses have been built with very little offset by abusing rules intended for townhouses. In the cases I've seen, a single shared wall -- often just a token wall made of brick connecting two structures on the outside -- allows the McMansions to qualify as a multiple-family dwellings and obtain higher density, dramatically increasing profit.
A "unit" isn't necessarily residential. There are mixed-use "units" on the market that might be used as homes or as offices/shops.
A "dwelling" mostly comes up in the contexts of censuses and elections. One census form needs to be filed per "dwelling", and should include information about everyone who has dwelled there for the majority of the last year. This includes, for example, people just crashing on the couch, even if they're just on vacation and "live" somewhere else. For another example, this includes homeless shelters: the people staying in them can say the shelter is their "dwelling", though they're unlikely to feel like it's their home. (Also, a "dwelling" is not necessarily residentially zoned. You might be dwelling in a storage unit. It's not necessarily legal, but the government still needs a word to describe "places people live" that includes such cases.)
There's also "residence", which is just "dwelling" in fancier clothes, though usually implies residential zoning.
I'm not sure where you got that connotative sense for "dwelling". It shouldn't carry negative value - it's a very neutral term for a place someone lives.
"To dwell on" something isn't inherently negative either, it simply means to spend a fair amount of time thinking or focusing on a single thing. Whether that's good or bad depends on the context, and is not implied by the word itself.
... yes, I'm agreeing with you. And cringing as I remember a visit to a friend who'd taken up wine cellaring some years back, describing various vintages as "product". You'll hear that in media, app design, clothing, food, restuarants. Pretty much everything. MBA-speak gone mad.
I don't know much but in US I see home is very much used in type of house sense e.g. town homes, single family homes. Home does not give any warm fuzzy feelings here.
The British equivalent is the estates of hideous mock Tudor and cod Georgian houses on the outskirts of British cities. Same concept done on less land: poor design, poor construction.
Since American TV and movies are popular, here are some pop culture examples I can think of to get a feel for the style:
* The house that Tony Soprano lives in.
* In the movie Juno, the title character drives though a sparse, affluent suburban development to meet prospective adoptive parents.
The theme is unusually large, new construction, details that look out of place. They are often built on roads with large stretches of them. Although in the town where I grew up, they sprouted up very gradually over ~20 years as remodels/teardowns of modest 1950s homes.
There are plenty of "mcmansions" in the U.K. as well. Just take a look around some areas of Bucks, such as Beaconsfield, and other commuter belt areas. The plots of land are tiny as well. It really ruins the natural beauty of those areas.
I used to live in a very small town in the Midlands, just off the M5. It's expanding rapidly because of the attraction of commuter types and all of the new properties they're building are as big as possible, on small plots of land exactly as this article describes (with the exception of the small 1/2 bed properties the developers are forced to build to meet government large-scale development regulations.
In my mind, a McMansion's defining characteristic has always been that it's far too much house on far too small of a plot.
It has pretenses of elegance that are betrayed by a gaudy claustrophobia. It's like loudly proclaiming "LOOK HOW MUCH HOUSE I HAVE," while generally sticking out like a sore thumb from the other houses in the neighborhood.
They are far too much house on far too small a budget. They are about maximizing those wealth-connotating features of a home which are comprehensible to the upper-middle-class laypeople who buy them: raw square footage, bed/bath count, "classical" architectural features (poorly executed, because the intent is to check "expensive-looking" boxes, not actually to execute a quality building).
This same style is very consistently-expressed at differing scales in different housing markets across the U.S.; the lot size varies with land prices but the ethos is the same.
Is that second paragraph unfair though? You buy/own a block and build a new house. You know there are a lot of useful things you need or might need in the future (garaging, bedrooms for future kids, etc) but your constraints of land size and budget remain so the result is often the efficient answer.
Somewhat different socioeconomic strata maybe [?], but would be worthwhile comparing to Barratt-style stamped-out suburban estate houses in the uk. UK doesn't have the spare land that the US has, so generally can't do McMansion-style construction (the stuff that looks similar is normally on estates populated by footballers et al - eg Gosforth Park near Newcastle, there's a similar estate near every major city, but the eye-bleeding prices suggest better quality builds, if a similarly awful visual side to the architecture)
