#mcmansion
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we've found it folks: mcmansion heaven
Hello everyone. It is my pleasure to bring you the greatest house I have ever seen. The house of a true visionary. A real ad-hocist. A genuine pioneer of fenestration. This house is in Alabama. It was built in 1980 and costs around $5 million. It is worth every penny. Perhaps more.
Now, I know what you're thinking: "Come on, Kate, that's a little kooky, but certainly it's not McMansion Heaven. This is very much a house in the earthly realm. Purgatory. McMansion Purgatory." Well, let me now play Beatrice to your Dante, young Pilgrim. Welcome. Welcome, welcome, welcome.
It is rare to find a house that has everything. A house that wills itself into Postmodernism yet remains unable to let go of the kookiest moments of the prior zeitgeist, the Bruce Goffs and Earthships, the commune houses built from car windshields, the seventies moments of psychedelic hippie fracture. It is everything. It has everything. It is theme park, it is High Tech. It is Renaissance (in the San Antonio Riverwalk sense of the word.) It is medieval. It is maybe the greatest pastiche to sucker itself to the side of a mountain, perilously overlooking a large body of water. Look at it. Just look.
The inside is white. This makes it dreamlike, almost benevolent. It is bright because this is McMansion Heaven and Gray is for McMansion Hell. There is an overbearing sheen of 80s optimism. In this house, the credit default swap has not yet been invented, but could be.
It takes a lot for me to drop the cocaine word because I think it's a cheap joke. But there's something about this example that makes it plausible, not in a derogatory way, but in a liberatory one, a sensuous one. Someone created this house to have a particular experience, a particular feeling. It possesses an element of true fantasy, the thematic. Its rooms are not meant to be one cohesive composition, but rather a series of scenes, of vastly different spatial moments, compressed, expanded, bright, close.
And then there's this kitchen for some reason. Or so you think. Everything the interior design tries to hide, namely how unceasingly peculiar the house is, it is not entirely able to because the choices made here remain decadent, indulgent, albeit in a more familiar way.
Rare is it to discover an interior wherein one truly must wear sunglasses. The environment created in service to transparency has to somewhat prevent the elements from penetrating too deep while retaining their desirable qualities. I don't think an architect designed this house. An architect would have had access to specifically engineered products for this purpose. Whoever built this house had certain access to architectural catalogues but not those used in the highest end or most structurally complex projects. The customization here lies in the assemblage of materials and in doing so stretches them to the height of their imaginative capacity. To borrow from Charles Jencks, ad-hoc is a perfect description. It is an architecture of availability and of adventure.
A small interlude. We are outside. There is no rear exterior view of this house because it would be impossible to get one from the scrawny lawn that lies at its depths. This space is intended to serve the same purpose, which is to look upon the house itself as much as gaze from the house to the world beyond.
Living in a city, I often think about exhibitionism. Living in a city is inherently exhibitionist. A house is a permeable visible surface; it is entirely possible that someone will catch a glimpse of me they're not supposed to when I rush to the living room in only a t-shirt to turn out the light before bed. But this is a space that is only exhibitionist in the sense that it is an architecture of exposure, and yet this exposure would not be possible without the protection of the site, of the distance from every other pair of eyes. In this respect, a double freedom is secured. The window intimates the potential of seeing. But no one sees.
At the heart of this house lies a strange mix of concepts. Postmodern classicist columns of the Disney World set. The unpolished edge of the vernacular. There is also an organicist bent to the whole thing, something more Goff than Gaudí, and here we see some of the house's most organic forms, the monolith- or shell-like vanity mixed with the luminous artifice of mirrors and white. A backlit cave, primitive and performative at the same time, which is, in essence, the dialectic of the luxury bathroom.
And yet our McMansion Heaven is still a McMansion. It is still an accumulation of deliberate signifiers of wealth, very much a construction with the secondary purpose of invoking envy, a palatial residence designed without much cohesion. The presence of golf, of wood, of masculine and patriarchal symbolism with an undercurrent of luxury drives that point home. The McMansion can aspire to an art form, but there are still many levels to ascend before one gets to where God's sitting.
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Large whirlpool tub is central focus on two bath wings. Built-in neck roll allows relaxed soaking; blinds provide privacy; wall sconces add drama at night.
Ideas for Great Bathrooms, 1991
#vintage#vintage interior#1990s#90s#interior design#home decor#bathroom#soaking#raised#bathtub#bay window#wall sconce#flowers#balloon curtains#neutral#contemporary#McMansion#style#home#architecture
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Steve's House From Hell
I'm bastardising @mcmansionhell's carefully honed craft to make fun of Steve's house from Stranger Things. If you like making fun of far more ridiculous houses and learning about architecture along the way give them a follow!
The Harrington's house is actually in Atlana. 8253 Carlton Road, Riverdale to be specific. With that in mind, lets get into the epic highs and lows of this property.
FRONT EXTERIOR
Built in 1976 when Steve was the tender age of ten, this grey hunk of bricks boasts 4 beds, 5 baths, 2 acres of land, and of course the heated pool. These photos are a mix of shots from the show and pics taken when the property was last sold in 2009.
FOYER
There isn't physically a chandelier in the Harrington's foyer but spiritually there is.
MAIN ROOM
I think Steve's Plaid RoomTM was a set built separatley from the house? Unless that balcony bit has been renovated since 2009.
POOL ADMIRATION ROOM
Why this room has two giant empty doorframes into the main room I don't know. Otherwise it's kinda cosy!
A KITCHEN
I have no idea where this kitchen is in relation to any of the other rooms.
REAR EXTERIOR
(as someone who has zero garages I may have gotten emotional here)
I hope you enjoyed this foray into all the photos I could find of Steve's dumb rich people house! Worth an estimated $421,700 today, it's nowhere near the fanciest or most ridiculous McMansion out there. Nonetheless I hope this inspires you to include it's more nonsense features in your fics.
#stranger things#steve harrington#steddie#harringrove#cant tag all of steves fictional boyfriends but i know they all take the piss out of this place#robin is like steve you werent in the closet about your sexuality you were in the garage#mcmansion#netflix
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I finally met God and he was just a balding guy with a McMansion in the clouds.
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In Houses without Names, Hubka breaks the working- and middle-class houses that predominated during the twentieth century into three domestic zones: the living room, kitchen, and bedroom(s). The rise of each of these zones is linked to immense changes in standards of living, such as the internalization of plumbing and the advent of electricity, the shift of work outside the home, and the moment in the middle of the last century when individual privacy became attainable in working-class homes. The McMansion adds a fourth zone for entertaining, reflective of the increasing social alienation and distance from urban centers caused by decades of sprawl. Such a profound shift in American life necessitated the internalization of communal spaces—bars, gyms, billiard halls, and the like—into the home itself.
Not that this development is entirely new. There has always been a connection between increasing wealth and intentional isolation, from the palace of Versailles to the petit bourgeois homes of the nineteenth century that were designed for live-in labor. However, between the streetcar Victorians of the 1890s and the McMansions of the 1980s, our entire social and economic order transmogrified. Industrialization and unionization meant the working class could suddenly afford better and bigger homes. Technological progress, standardization of construction, the invention of the automobile, exclusionary financial incentives—including those sponsored by the government—and a century of social unrest drove the almost uniformly white middle class out of the city and into the periphery. The interiors of their homes reflected these seismic transformations.
[...]
The McMansion has also endured because, in the wake of the recession, the United States declined the opportunity to meaningfully transform the financial system on which our way of life is based. The breach was patched with taxpayer money, the system was restored, and we resumed our previous trajectory. The McMansion survived what could have been an existential crisis; it remains an unimpeachable symbol of having “made it” in a world where advancement is still measured in ostentation. It is a one-stop shop of wealth signifiers: modernist décor (rich people like modernism now), marble countertops (banks have marble), towering foyers (banks also have foyers), massive scale (everything I see is splendor). Owing to its distance from all forms of communal space, the McMansion must also become the site of sociality. It can’t just be a house; it has to be a ballroom, a movie theater, a bar.
It is a testament, too, to a Reagan-era promise of endless growth, endless consumption, and endless easy living that we’ve been loath to disavow. The McMansion owner is unbothered by the cost of heating and cooling a four-thousand-square-foot mausoleum with fifteen-foot ceilings. They see no problem being dependent—from the cheap material choice of the house to the driving requirements of suburban life—on oil in all its forms, be it in extruded polystyrene columns or gas at the pump. The McMansion is American bourgeois life in all its improvidence.
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On this week's page of BICYCLE BOY, we go back to the incident that started it all.
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#liminal spaces#mcmansion#nostalgia#2000s core#2000s#liminal core#liminal vibes#suburbicore#suburban gothic#suburbia#suburban
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Please forgive me a moment but oh my gaw... For just $1,600,000 this narco-chic house in beautiful Raleigh, NC, could be yours.
Excuse me while I get my @mcmansionhell on but oh. my gaw. There's a lot of repainting and staging in this one, but they can't hide all the beautiful, beautiful sins in this house. Personally I think the new owner should embrace this house as a lost set from Miami Vice or Scarface. Lean into the pastels, get 1980s furniture, add so many houseplants, and get your "greed is good" on.
tl;dr: this would be a great house to do cocaine in.
Also: mirrored toilet.
Knock knock! Mr. Montana? Are you in?
Built in 1988; 4 beds, 5 baths, 5360 square feet
Of course it has a lawyer foyer--kind of.
It's like a disbarred lawyer foyer. Crooked lawyer foyer.
That chandelier looks like a shower head leaking goo and I hate it.
Now we're getting into it:
The first of many, many mirrors.
The current owners have clearly repainted the whole place in "modern" colors but you can't fool us. We see that carpeted open-riser staircase that's just perfect for Michelle Pfeiffer as Elvira Hancock to saunter down before taking another bump of cocaine.
Oh here we go:
Is that... Is that...
YEAH IT IS, BITCH. THAT'S AN ETCHED MIRROR TWO-STORY FIREPLACE DEPICTING ATHENA SENDING FORTH HER OWL HOLY SHIT. And that's not the end of the mirrors and etchings in here either:
The etched glass. The columns. The weird ceiling.
It's a shame this is the only glimpse we get into the dining room because I fucking love the rando traditional chandelier in there. There are also double doors on the dining room and I believe they're etched too. I can just make out what looks like a peacock on one of them in the last fireplace photo.
Yes, they've done their best to stage this place with (slightly ironic) contemporary furniture, but it's not really proving that this house is anything besides a great place to do cocaine.
AHOY MATEY! Love the giant gold vase + bonus faded an art.
Yes, welcome to my home. Please stand under the tube of slime. (Seriously: paint that thing and make the glass green and it's 100% Nickelodeon.)
Love how the wall of the Disbarred Lawyer Foyer interrupts the weirdly traditional wrought iron bannisters. Seriously, wut?
Bedroom photos:
MORE MIRRORS FUCK YES. Honestly I do love the 1980s-does-art-deco fireplace. I could make it PoMo. Why did they un-80s this place? I weep.
What's that? You want EVEN MORE MIRRORS???
You could snort cocaine off almost ever surface in this house. Also I love the door for your bathroom elf there by the tub. He brings you more toilet paper when you run out.
Blah blah blah, there's also a sauna, don't care. MOVING ON: the mystery of the portholes is solved!
Awww, Tony Montana has a sewing room. He mends his own Hawaiian shirts.
Blah blah blah, STILL MORE MIRRORS in another one of the bedrooms...
I didn't mention the pool, did I? Well, there's a pool:
The back: another view of the pool in its concrete hellscape and the yard where you can keep your pet tiger.
But I've saved the best for last: the downstairs bathroom. Based on the reflection in the mirrors (plural, yes), I think this room is just behind the kitchen/bar, behind the wooden door. It's basically under the portholes.
Are you ready? Are you sure? Get your spoons and your straws ready because...
You can snort cocaine off any surface in this room.
The walls, the ceilings, the countertop, the toilet lid, anywhere. Imagine being drunk as hell and trying to use this bathroom. Imagine tripping balls and trying to use this bathroom.
I am speechless.
So thanks for stopping by on this tour of an Escobar-approved narco chic classic in beautiful Raleigh. Bye!!
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Modern Rustic Mansion Interior | Minecraft
Timelapse vid is on our YouTube channel: Fiki & Biki 🐔
#minecraft#mineblr#minecraftbuild#minecraftbuilds#minecraftbuilding#mcbuild#mcbuilds#mcbuilding#modern#rustic#mcmansion#mccabin#mcmountainhouse#minecraft monster school#modernbuild#rusticbuild#minecraftmodern#minecraftrustic#minecraftinterior#minecraftinteriors#mcinterior#mcinteriors
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And yet, they'll let these homes rot while tearing down forests to build deluxe condos.
#make it make sense#homelessness#housing#America#land of the free?#abandoned homes#rebuild#mcmansion#corporate greed#help those in need#dont feed the greed#help the homeless
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mojo dojo casa house
Howdy folks! Sorry for the delay, I was, uhhhh covering the Tour de France. Anyway, I'm back in Chicago which means this blog has returned to the Chicago suburbs. I'm sure you've all seen Barbie at this point so this 2019 not-so-dream house will come as a pleasant (?) surprise.
Yeah. So this $2.4 million, 7 bed, 8.5+ bath house is over 15,000 square feet and let me be frank: that square footage is not allocated in any kind of efficient or rational manner. It's just kind of there, like a suburban Ramada Inn banquet hall. You think that by reading this you are prepared for this, but no, you are not.
Scale (especially the human one) is unfathomable to the people who built this house. They must have some kind of rare spatial reasoning problem where they perceive themselves to be the size of at least a sedan, maybe a small aircraft. Also as you can see they only know of the existence of a single color.
Ok, but if you were eating a single bowl of cereal alone where would you sit? Personally I am a head of the table type person but I understand that others might be more discreet.
It is undeniable that they put the "great" in great room. You could race bicycles in here. Do roller derby. If you gave this space to three anarchists you would have a functioning bookshop and small press in about a week.
The island bit is so funny. It's literally so far away it's hard to get them in the same image. It is the most functionally useless space ever. You need to walk half a mile to get from the island to the sink or stove.
Of course, every McMansion has a room just for television (if not more than one room) and yet this house fails even to execute that in a way that matters. Honestly impressive.
The rug placement here is physical comedy. Like, they know they messed up.
Bling had a weird second incarnation in the 2010s HomeGoods scene. Few talk about this.
Honestly I think they should have scrapped all of this and built a bowling alley or maybe a hockey rink. Basketball court. A space this grand is wasted on sports of the table variety.
You would also think that seeing the rear exterior of this house would help to rationalize how it's planned but:
Not really.
Anyways, thanks for coming along for another edition of McMansion Hell. I'll be back to regular posting schedule now that the summer is over so keep your eyes peeled for more of the greatest houses to ever exist. Be sure to check the Patreon for today's bonus posts.
Also P.S. - I'm the architecture critic for The Nation now, so check that out, too!
If you like this post and want more like it, support McMansion Hell on Patreon for as little as $1/month for access to great bonus content including a discord server, extra posts, and livestreams.
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#architecture#design#mcmansion#mcmansions#ugly houses#interior design#bad architecture#2010s#2019#Illinois
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The Complete Book of Home Decorating, 1999
#vintage#vintage interior#1990s#90s#interior design#home decor#living room#half moon#window#quilt#aqua#dining room#light oak#sculpture#print#McMansion#contemporary#style#home#architecture
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If you like a fancy schmancy house with cozy indoor gazebo-style structures, this is the perfect home in Chelsea, Alabama listed for $3.995M.
The grand entrance with balconies, a fancy ceiling, lanterns, and a big stone fireplace.
As if it isn’t ornate enough, they put ropes over the chairs and draped the chandelier with beads.
So this must be the family room with a vaulted ceiling.
The first cozy structure is in the kitchen.
And, what a kitchen. Look at the carved stone sink and the pattern on the quartz countertops. From under the cozy kitchen canopy, you can see right into the family room.
There’s also a bar and a butlers pantry.
The next gazebo cozy enclosure is the the shower in the bathroom. Look at the ivy on the roof.
The next is this bar in what to appears to be a game room.
Here, you’ll also find the home theater.
And, if you’re going to entertain, you need an industrial kitchen.
Outdoor family room on 2nd level covered patio.
Plus a large wraparound porch. They don’t show any of the 8 bds. or the 9 full baths and 3 partials.
https://www.rockethomes.com/homes/274-autumn-ridge-dr-chelsea-al-35051?gallery=1
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But what is a McMansion, exactly? Well, you know it when you see it. Take a look at any remotely desirable area on Zillow, sort by “new construction,” and you’ll see an endless array of them: bloated, dreary, amenity-choked domiciles. When I venture out from Chicago’s Logan Square, where I now live, to scope out the new suburban standard in housing, I find that even once-empty lots in existing McMansion neighborhoods are being crammed full of these hollow, made-to-order giants. Though draped in “farmhouse modern” trappings, they fit right in with their forebears. Once thought vanquished by the recession, the McMansion really hasn’t gone anywhere. From 2010 to 2021, the rate of construction of McMansions (loosely defined as homes at or over 3,000 square feet) was on par with the more classical McMansion period between 1999 and 2004. Census data backs this up: in 2021 alone, 426,000 homes were built with an area larger than 2,400 square feet; 68,000 of those were 4,000 square feet or more, firmly in McMansion territory.
Seven years ago, I started the blog McMansion Hell to document—and deride—the endless cosmetic variations of this uniquely American form of architectural blight. I’ve mostly tackled prerecession McMansions, just for the novelty of houses both dated and perched on the ugly/interesting Möbius strip. But I worry that I’ve actually reinforced the idea that McMansions are a relic of the recent past. In fact, there remains a certain allure to these seemingly soulless suburban developments, and, more specifically, their construction and inhabitation. Increasing interest rates, inflation, and supply chain disruptions notwithstanding, the McMansion is alive and well. Far from being a boomtime fad, it has become a durable emblem of our American way of life.
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We need, quite literally, a revolution. And every revolution, lest we forget, is an architectural revolution. The Industrial Revolution brought about the dawn of modernism; the Russian Revolution initially saw the demise of bourgeois opulence in favor of Constructivism. The French revolutionaries looked upon the palace of Versailles with disgust, for it represented everything loathsome about monarchist French society: inequality, waste, and excessive filigree. So, too, under increasingly dire material conditions spurred by climate change and intersecting political catastrophes, will we look upon the McMansion. Maybe sooner than we think.
The present crisis surrounding the depleted Colorado River, owing to overconsumption and a world-historic megadrought plaguing the Southwest since the 2000s, will be the first real test of the McMansion way of life, the life of endless plenty. If the recession saw entire suburban developments reduced to eerie ghost towns, imagine what water rationing will do to golf courses in Phoenix, Arizona. Already, the nearby city of Scottsdale has cut off the wealthy suburb of Rio Verde from the municipal water service, leaving residents holding the bag. When the resources of the commons no longer subsidize the whimsies of the rich, when there is truly nothing left to drink or burn in the tank, then, and only then, will we be able to look at the McMansion in retrospect.
Kate Wagner, Bad Manors: The McMansion as harbinger of the American apocalypse
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