Is It Okay to Hate McMansions Now?

I have long hated McMansions for a simple aesthetic reason: they're ugly. With their stone veneer facades (an authentic Atlanta chateau!), "Palladian windows" (rounded on top, usually over the front door) and four-car garages, most of these starter castles are atrocities from the outside. They're equally abominable on the inside: who among us has walked through a "Great Room" and not expected to meet The Bachelor's Chris Harrison waiting with a rose?

Of course these houses (can a McMansion ever be a "home"?) are more than just ugly. Their lack of proportion is revealing: Don't the owners realize how transparent they're being, moving into a house with a footprint nearly equal to its plot of land? A faux chateau for the faux successful. A Hummer House for a Hummer driver who can't get a hummer without paying for it.


There's no place like ... wait, is that my home? Or am I in the one next to it?


They're a child's version of "fancy," in the same way that a child's favorite color is purple. Ironic, since the adults who move into these Garage Mahals, these Frankenhouses, often have one or no children at all! I remember visiting one when I lived in Plano, TX (Plano's Palazzos are among the most exquisite). The colleague of mine who lived there had one child. I remember seeing the kid play wanly with a bunch of toys strewn sadly in the back corner of the uncarpeted Great Room. Who knew that loneliness could echo?

I don't care so much if they're built for subdivisions, on empty land. (The contrast between a Tucson Tudor and the surrounding saplings is hilarious.) What really gets me ticked is when houses with any distinct character are purchased as "tear downs," only to be razed for a McMansion. All too often that means throwing off whatever balance the neighorhood may have had, ignoring the sensitivities of people who've lived down the street for years. It's the ultimate in unneighborliness. (The equivalent of bumping into somebody at a party, spilling punch all over him/her, then reaching past to grab the last deviled egg, all without ever saying "hello" or "excuse me.")


Cruella de Villa


About four years ago, when I was doing pieces for NBC's Today, I pitched a story about my hatred for McMansions. The suburban Maryland neighborhood I grew up in, where my mother still lives (in a 3-bedroom split-level) was hardly historic. Our house was built in 1958. Still the neighborhood was charming. Care was taken by the developer to give each house a personality. And the houses had lawns! [Funny: until I was about 6, Senator Ted Stevens lived catty-corner to us in a nice, surprisingly modest house. (Okay, modest for a crook.) His house had what seemed to me then like a giant hilly front yard. One of my earliest memories in life is playing King of the Hill with his kids. Alas, ours was an unassuming "Neighborhood to Nowhere" so Stevens moved on to bigger more prosecutable things.]

But about 10 years ago, a blemish appeared up the street. Could it be Beltway Baronial? Indeed our neighborhood was hit with a neo-Classical cancer that metastasized quickly. (Whoever develops a vaccine for McMansions has a Nobel waiting.)

The producer shared my loathing for McMansions but turned down the pitch: "We can't do that story, Mo. Our audience is mostly people who want to live in those houses." He had a point, even though I was certain that there was a grumbling silent majority (?) out there who could see that 100 years from now, a Persian Palace in LA will still have no charm.


Need more turrets!!!

But now, with the financial collapse of the Western World, there comes a very thin but nonetheless gleaming silver lining: we can all trash McMansions and their pseudo-squire owners -- and we can even do it with a sense of righteousness! Too many of them bought beyond their means and ruined neighborhoods in the process. (March '08's Atlantic speculates that some deserted McMansion subdivisions may even become slums!)

What do you think? Do you hate McMansions? Or am I being unfair? And will McMansions ever have character?


Dear Mr. Gables...