> the absurdness of McMansions appears to be driven by a desire to be fancier than anything anyone has seen anywhere else.

It's easy - and fun - to scoff, but I think a lot of buyers and owners genuinely don't notice the difference between crapchitecture and something with real style and flair.

Also applies at the high end. Take a virtual drive around houses for sale in Beverley Hills. There are some real kitsch classics available - including some real architect-designed modernism-in-a-box neo-kitsch stand-outs.

I think that's a great point. It's an easy way out to frame a discussion like this. "McMansions exist because people are tacky and have bad taste".

I think it's more interesting to look at it from the other perspective. Why is it such a popular design?

Maybe the quaintness of pre-war/post-war housing did not keep up with the needs of modern life. Maybe we need more space, and more privacy from the ever expanding sprawl of suburbia to feel safe, and sheltered (in a mental sense). The cheesy facade could just be a simple tool to keep the building's quick-and-dirty plaster walls, within the scope of the suburban vernacular.

I actually grew up in a McMansion. I always thought it was a great house. We had a pool, and two concrete lion statues guarding the front door. Thinking back on it makes me cringe. How could my parent's buy a house like that? It oozed with tackiness.

But it got the job done.

It was large, had enough room for the whole family, and was a physical manifestation of their hard work.

When neighbors stopped talking to each other and only focused their attention on their own families, it became harder to flaunt wealth. Maybe the McMansions are just a clearer, and louder, cultural identifier, compared to things like gold watches and fine clothing?

If you’d grown up in a normal-sized house (maybe 1000–1800 sq. ft., depending on family size), you’d also have thought it was a “great house”.

Kids in general tend not to question their natural environment much. There are some amenities (electric lighting, hot showers, indoor plumbing, washing machines, telephones, HVAC, ...) which make a noticeable difference to quality of life compared to growing up in a wattle and daub shack with a dirt floor.

On the other hand, having an extra 6 miscellaneous rooms to store random crap, giant walk-in closets, 4 bathrooms, a huge home theater, or supersized bedrooms makes only a very slight difference to anyone, except insofar as it signals to the neighbors that you‘re rich and gives you 3x more cleaning to do.

My parents who grew up in families with 5 kids in tiny 3-bedroom 1-bathroom houses in the 50s thought their houses were great. I’m sure they would have appreciated 1–2 extra small bedrooms and an extra bathroom, but it wasn’t a big deal.

The much larger problem with McMansions is that they tend to be in suburbs with huge distances between places and streets actively hostile to pedestrians, cyclists, and public transit. Absolutely everything requires a car ride to get to: friends’ houses, the park, school, grocery stores, little shops, cafés, restaurants, the library, the doctor’s office, concert venues, museums, etc. Such an exterior/public environment is incredibly constricting for everyone, but especially for kids, the elderly, the disabled, and the poor.

Suburbs are always going to be more hostle towards pedestrians and cyclists, and we are currently seeing a trend of people moving away from them.

Unfortunately design is often used as a tool to judge others. I had the chance to study art history, but that does not give me the right to make broad and generalized statements about where people live and what they choose to do with their lives and money.

If we want to see the ugly American McMansion go away, we should spend more time coming up with good designs that fit the needs of the people who buy them, rather than trying to convince them that what they currently own Is ugly.

Apple did this with great success. They built a product that the consumer didn't know they needed. They imparted their design principles on the public through a solid product line, rather than telling them their current computer were ugly.

People might not need McMansions, but they are still going to want then. Until there is a better design for the same price, people are going to buy them.

Mcmansions are designed to be cheap to construct while being easy to sell. Buyers are attracted to distinctive structures as houses blend together when you look at 20+ of the things. They also default to check boxes has a pool y/n not aesthetics. Thus, your idea of 'a few good designs' makes them harder to sell.

Interestingly people with a lot of money (10-100's of millions) now days often go for small but very distinctive buildings. Think frank lloyd wright not huge but art in large part because they don't need or want lot's of staff and will often just rent out structures for party's.

That trend did not last very long:

http://blogs.wsj.com/economics/2016/03/24/more-americans-are...

If you draw the Montessori-esque or really good conventional school, you stay. If you draw the schools in the hood, the for sale sign is up within 72 hours. If you draw one of the ok-ish schools, it's about 50-50 based on income.

This so much. I don't have a McMansion but I have a house that was added on to and has a total of 4bed 3 bath. The living room, 1 bathroom and 3 bedrooms would be like one "great room" in a McMansion. I feel like all we do is clean. We wouldn't even use the older side of our house if I didn't have my office in it, and my 5 month-old's future room. Before that we lived in the master suite/kitchen/utility room area.

Maybe people who have McMansions can hire cleaning staff or something? We basically spend every weekend cleaning and doing yard work. There really isn't any time during the week after working so many hours, especially when I'm traveling, and taking care of a kid.

> my 5 month-old

Oh boy. You haven't even begun to clean :-)

Two kids under 4, a third on the way. We sweep the hardwoods an average of twice a day (dining room and kitchen are in the hardwood section), and it's still always gross. And that's just one thing. We burn probably 6-8 hours a week on cleaning, and definitely could do more.

And yardwork. Ugh. I hate it. I'd happily live in a house with a postage-stamp of a yard with 1/4 the total sqftage of our current one. Front yards especially. I mean, what the hell? Get rid of 'em. Especially since smaller yards would mean higher density, which means things like parks and pools are closer.

As for smaller yards, not having a yard means your neighbors are looking in your windows from their houses, and traffic is driving right by your front door, and sometimes through your front door or living room window when a drunk driver loses control.

A shared pool now means you have to have an HOA to own and manage the pool and common spaces, and they're going to charge you outrageous fees because they're embezzling a lot of the money (by hiring contractors who are their cronies, and paying them way too much), plus they'll have all kinds of rules about what you can do with your house and you'll get fines for every little thing. If you're going to live like that, you might as well just rent an apartment; at least with an apartment you're not on the hook for any maintenance costs at all, and you can move out when your lease expires without penalty, instead of trying to find some new sucker to buy your place and put up with the HOA.

Considered it, but when I asked around with other parents, reviews were universally poor. Plus so much of the stuff that ends up on the floor in the dining area is (I'm guessing) too large for a Roomba to handle without burning out the motor inside a year (think a couple handfuls worth of whole peas) so we'd end up sweeping about as much anyway.

The Roomba can handle a few stray peas here and there. I think you're underestimating it. But if you're making a huge mess on your floor every day, then it's not really meant for that, though you might want to look at why you're making such a mess in the first place; is someone in the family a huge klutz or something? I have hardwood floors on the first floor and barely do any cleaning at all, mainly I just sweep around the litter boxes more often. It just doesn't get that dirty, even with 3 adults.

(quoting myself)

> Two kids under 4

So, yes. :-)

Though this is a problem that time (and persistence) will fix, eventually.

Whoops, missed that part! That explains everything.

The best use for a yard is to turn it into vegetable gardens and animal pens. Make it productive, not just pointless, wasted space.

Most of the farm is hay fields and woodlot, but on 5 of the acres we raise pigs, sheep, and chickens, have a 1,000 ft^2 greenhouse, a vineyard, a berry patch, and two 3,000 ft^2 crop gardens.

If you're going to say "hey, I've got a solution to the hard work of mowing a lawn", we need to have a long conversation.

...perhaps while we remove rocks from one of the fields and use them to build a wall? Beverages are on me.

Heh, it's not a way to reduce the hard work, but a way to actually get a return on all that work.

Also, I am completely envious.

As per the sale agreement, when it did shut down, I ended up with most of the DVDs. So now, on the farm, I've got a tractor, hay baling equipment, a chicken scalder, a chicken plucker, an industrial meat grinder, a welding rig... and 40,000 DVDs on various how-to topics. :)

I'm reminded that in a lot of places outside of the US, flaunting your wealth is considered a big faux pas.

> and was a physical manifestation of their hard work.

Not being a home owner, or a car owner, or a gold watch owner, or fine clothing owner myself, does it seem necessary to have a physical manifestation of one's wealth to flaunt? Does it really speak positively about a person?

I also would say that flaunting your wealth is not an American invention. It's probably more common than you think around the globe. I would think that it's a common occurance in any rapidly expanding economy. China and India have some widely tacky architecture. Whole towns replicating iconic Western cities. I think it's an interesting pattern in developing economies. We all seem to look at Europe when trying to show how far we've come, or how successfull we've become. It's when people don't have an interest in, or don't have time to have an interest in design, where we see things like McMansions.

In short - Why is all tacky architecture some sort of French or British knockoff?

Only other example I can think of that goes against this trend is the fake Adobe house, or the fake Spanish tile house... The American West's and Southwest's version of the McMansion. Houses that copy the look of traditional architecture without any of the actual benefits of the design, like good insulation.

All this stuff is fascinating to me. The cross roads of semiotics and contemporary, tacky architecture. What does it mean to build a mini Versailles? What does European classicism in American architecture say about our society?

it's not just a pattern in developing economies. it also happens in las vegas, but that's different, somehow.

Where is that? In all the countries I have been the wealthy like to wear special clothes, build large houses, drive expensive cars. In some countries they wear more jewlery, in others they talk about expensive trips they go to.

Fundamentally, it's a way to promote social cohesion, albeit in negative terms. It's not, however, against success, but against the idea that success inherently makes you a better person deserving of putting on superior airs: the successful should not rub the faces of others in their success.

In Vienna in my experience it is very important to seem cultivated (knowledgeable in the arts, music, etc), but wealth doesn't seem to be as big a factor (more so than in Berlin though).

Munich is supposedly a lot more wealth-focused but I think probably still not quite as much as some places in the US. Extreme but slightly relevant example: http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-3260135/I-ve-created...

"The multi-millionaire and his pneumatic wife told us how they were hounded out of Germany for being too flashy, saying people would spit on their Ferrari and sneer at Maria's large breasts.

So Bastian packed up his life and settled in LA to fulfill his dream of living the 'Baywatch life' after he became obsessed with the show while growing up in cold, landlocked Munich."

The difference between the an American and an Irishman is that the American looks at the mansion on the hill and says, "someday, I'm gonna be that guy". The Irishman looks at the mansion on the hill and says, "someday... I'm gonna get that bastard".

(I'm sure this is an old joke and he didn't think of it, and it's probably been applied to many nationalities)

[Edited to add more ”meat” to the comment.]

The fact that he also owns several sports cars and a villa on the French Riviera, is not something he wants publicized.

That seems like a bad idea to me. Old Volvos were indeed very safe by the standards of the time, but compared to a modern car, they're simply not. Here in the US, 30,000 people die in auto accidents every year (it's somewhere around 250k/year worldwide). If you have a ton of money, you might as well get a new car and protect yourself. A brand-new bottom-of-the-line Volvo will let you walk away from crashes that some old Volvo would kill you in. And surely a new V60 or S60 (their lowest-end models IIRC, unless they still have S40s there) wouldn't look too out-of-place in Sweden of all places (where the cars come from).

Steve Jobs never swanked up his house either.

Bill Gates's mansion was built primarily to try to showcase Microsoft development efforts (don't laugh! okay, laugh).

I would rather someone who has legitimately made a billion dollars just go buy a yacht and a Ferrari and drive them around.

Kamprad has a pretty solid tax-avoidance scheme going on too. Completely legal but frowned upon by those who think he should "pay his fair share".

But he is the exception not the rule when it comes to how the wealthy live typically.

Here in Yankee-land, it is also frowned upon.

In day-to-day America, claimed frugality wins. Most Americans will tell you their house was a "deal" in a place with good schools. Our cars are huge because we drive long distances with large families. Our warehouse memberships are to gain purchasing power over toilet paper and peanut butter - not gulfstreams or penthouses.

Granted, as Tom Wolfe observed in another place, our plumbers now live better than most Roman emperors. But you don't want to see an America that actually internalizes wealth flaunting.

Couldn't it then be argued that her design did not fit the specification? If these houses need to be produced as cheaply as possible, wouldn't it then be better to focus on achieving aesthetics using the minimal amount of extra materials, ensuring that there is nothing to trim away?

Then when she made something that looked good, someone else was hired to cut costs further.

You might think this makes no sense at all. But to a certain kind of business-oriented mind, it's perfectly logical.

A huge problem with traditional business process thinking is lack of organic understanding. It's incredibly hard to find people who can understand a project/process in the round with a deep understanding of cause and effect, and not just as a collection of formulas - one of which always seems to be "cut costs" - applied mechanically.

Of course it can appear to make sense in pure financial terms. But there are social and environmental costs which don't appear on the balance sheet, and possibly also opportunity costs in lost customer goodwill.