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Comment by mseebach | Hacker News Reader

The McMansions showcased in the articles are well beyond cramming anything (they are huge) and does not look like the kind of house where the owners would appreciate having 12 other houses looking the same as neighbours. Indeed, as soon as you're stamping out houses, you'll want to hire a real architect to make them appealing to as many people as possible, which means balanced, proportioned and symmetric (if unoriginal, but that's not what the article is about).

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

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I used to know an architect who designed stamped-out houses. According to her, she'd present an aesthetic design, and then the building corporation would trim away all the better elements to cut costs, leaving an ugly vaguely historical-looking box with windows, a door, and a roof.

> 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.

Would most houses in Beverley Hills or Bel Air be considering McMansions? I thought the vast majority are pretty far from that style. When I think McMansions I think Hollywood Hills or Atherton or even Los Gatos.

I dunno. Uncle Phil's house was what came to my mind for many years when hearing "McMansion."

> It's easy - and fun - to scoff

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?

You have an interesting perspective.

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'm not arguing that it's a positive signal. I'm saying they (the home owner) think it's a positive signal.

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?

> Whole towns replicating iconic Western cities

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

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

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.

The Nordic countries, at least. In general you're not supposed to show your wealth, though wealth in any case isn't very common as the societies are very equalizing due to low income differences and progressive taxation.

Read about the "Law of Jante" for the extreme of this mentality (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Law_of_Jante). I think the first rule pretty well sums up the thought behind this:

  You're not to think *you* are anything special.

I think this point of view is a bit exaggerated. For example, 1% of the world's USD billionaires live in Sweden. (More billionaires per capita than e.g. the US.) If you walk around in Swedish cities (at least the major cities) it’s not really hard to tell that some citizens are a lot more wealthy than others. I’m not sure about the other Nordic countries but I would guess the situation is similar in at least Norway and Denmark.

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

As a casual observer, it seems to me that these countries have little income inequality. Wealth inequality certainly exists. I would argue that the latter is actually a bigger problem.

so you don't believe wealth begets income? strange view.

Yes, I suppose I was exaggerating. But the equalizing mentality does exist, even if it probably grows weaker with every new generation.

Ingvar Kamprad, the founder of IKEA, is one of these fabulously rich Swedish people. He drives around in an old Volvo; and lives in a modest house. This is how he wishes to be seen.

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

Warren Buffet drives a plain sedan to work in Omaha.

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).

>Ingvar Kamprad, the founder of IKEA, is one of these fabulously rich Swedish people. He drives around in an old Volvo;

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).

Disingenuous I think.

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".

Yes we have Warren Buffet worth over $60B, but lives in a relatively small house, has a $100k salary and so on.

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

I guess it's no problem to be rich, as long as you don't pretend it makes you in any way superior to others. Enjoy it, but don't flaunt it. Don't make others jealous of what you've got and they don't.

Its quite different how one shows their wealth country to country. Houses I thought were complete dumps in Rome are amazing to see at night - the lights go on and massive oil painting and amazing interiors are visible in what looked like near derelict buildings.

It's common enough. Outside of the US, it's referred to pretty commonly as 'Tall Poppy Syndrome' (especially AU and NZ) pr the 'Crab Mentality'. In Ireland, it's related to the twin concepts of 'Begrudgery' and 'Notions'. The Netherlands has 'Maaiveldcultuur'. And the Law of Jante has already been mentioned.

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.

Such attitudes themselves are often associated with classism -- ostentatious possessions are generally the realm of the nouveau riche.

In Berlin in particular, and Germany/Austria in general. There are some very fancy districts in Berlin but in most of it I think driving a very fancy car will cause more negative than positive reactions.

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."

Irish guy I knew once told me:

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)

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

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

America finds it acceptable to flaunt wealth in a few places: Vegas. LA. Miami. SV, some. New York, kind of. But what happens in Vegas stays in Vegas.

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.

> 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.

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.

Didn't have a house. Grew up in a tiny 1 room appartment with my parents, then moved to a 2 room appartment and actually had my own room since 2nd grade. And yes that was a "great house". The 2 room tiny appartment felt like so much space.

" gives you 3x more cleaning to do."

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.

> I feel like all we do is clean.

> 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.

I know what you mean. I have all hardwood and 4 dogs. I basically run our roomba everyday to help a little bit and still need to vacuum every weekend. The little guy doesn't do any damage, yet. I'm in the middle of nowhere so I cut about 5 acres out of the 15 I own. It used to take 4-5 hours to cut grass. I got a zero turn mower and it takes about 2 hours now. I guess that's the tradeoff for living on what basically looks like a national park.

> 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.

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

I live on a 50 acre farm and work (mostly) remotely.

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.

> 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.

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.

Completely off topic, but what happened to Smartflix and its assets (DVDs)? Is there a writeup/explaination somewhere (since the website is no longer available)?

Around the time I moved to a farm, I sold the firm to an employee for a nominal fee, she ran it for another year, and then shut it down.

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. :)

40,000, wow. I guess it would be a lot of work to auction those off on ebay one at a time. Maybe you could bundle them up in ~10 DVD bundles for specific topic areas, like metalworking, etc..

It sounds like you need to buy a Roomba for your hardwood floors.

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.

> It sounds like you need to buy a Roomba for your hardwood floors.

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.

Maybe I'm missing something, but if you spill a bunch of food all over your floor, you're supposed to sweep it up right away, before people step all over it and make a huge mess; that isn't something that's supposed to wait for a regular cleaning. At least, that's how normal people live.

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.

> is someone in the family a huge klutz or something?

(quoting myself)

> Two kids under 4

So, yes. :-)

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

> Two kids under 4

Whoops, missed that part! That explains everything.

The conversation always seems to get very judgy when taking about American suburbia. Yes, most houses are ugly, and have too much shit packed into them, but I think you can find that anywhere. Rich people and poor people in cities and rural areas alike will probably keep stuff around that they don't need, and want more rooms than needed in their current home.

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.

Rich people who live/ed in actual mansions often end up just using a mini apartment inside the thing and the number one complaint is how long it takes to walk somewhere. They where large for parties, to support staff, and look impressive not because people actually wanted a lot of space.

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.

>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.

And look where that got us: we went from Windows XP, Vista, and finally 7, to the UGLY horror shows of Windows 8/8.1 and 10. You may think your Apple UI looks nice, but for 99% of office workers, they're now either stuck with the hideous Metro UI, or they're going to be really soon as soon as their IT department upgrades them.

> 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.

That trend did not last very long:

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

The suburbs that are gaining people are becoming more urban-like, or at least more old-school-small-town-like, since the newcomers expect urban amenities such as bike and pedestrian friendly streets.

I live in a mid-sized city. You can pretty correlate younger people moving away with school lottery results.

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.

Is it a popular design? In most of these new building associations, you only get one or two floor plans to choose from.

> According to her, she'd present an aesthetic design, and then the building corporation would trim away all the better elements to cut costs, leaving an ugly vaguely historical-looking box with windows, a door, and a roof.

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?

No, she was hired specifically to make something that looked good with a reasonable budget.

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.

McMansions look asymmetrical and have terrible "rhythm" on purpose, because it makes it MUCH more difficult for a casual observer to tell they are cookie cutter.

I'm a bit confused about what McMansion refers to. Is it cheaper-than-they-look 13-a-dozen suburban hell houses? Or is it gigantic sprawling mansions for those with more money than taste?

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