McMansions 101 Special Edition: Mansion vs McMansion (Part 1)

I get a lot of emails these days, (a good thing!) and a lot of them involve people sending me links to houses (or pictures of their own) asking me whether or not the house in question is or is not a McMansion. This post aims to explain the important differences between the two.

Part Two will make examples of specific houses (including houses that teeter on the line between mansion and McMansion) and explain why they are one vs the other.



For the purpose of clarity, I have omitted modernist and postmodernist houses from this guide. That’s a whole different can of worms that I’ll eventually address in its own post.

First off,

Where does suburban home territory end and Mansion/McMansion territory begin?

For the purpose of this exercise, Mansion/McMansion territory starts at a house that has two or more of following characteristics:

1.) 3000+ square feet

2.) 5 or more bedrooms

3.) 3 or more full bathrooms

4.) a three car garage.

Why?

- The average American has 2.5 kids. A 4-bedroom house enables each child to have its own room (something important when you’re a teenager, trust me) plus a guest room, where an elderly relative or other guests can stay for an extended period or merely spend the night. 2-to-2.5 bathrooms accommodates this family perfectly: the kids have a bathroom, the adults have a bathroom, and the house has a shared powder room or bathroom for visitors to use.

This means that each of the rooms has a designated purpose/person, and enables the family to live in complete luxury and comfort, with nobody having to sleep on the couch when grandma comes over.



Below: Typical 4-bedroom Ranch floor plan



(Personally, I think a three-bedroom house meets these accommodations perfectly well, in addition to still being livable as the parents become empty nesters, but many people defend the four bedroom house for these reasons.)

Also, I want to note an important caveat: Bedrooms are not always used for their intended purposes. For example, a bedroom can be used by someone who is a musician for a living might need a space to practice without disturbing others, and someone who works from home needs an office where they can work in peace. For these people, the extra space is integral to their living and working comfortably, and there’s nothing to mock about that. For people who have a craft room or any other such space, it is my belief that making art is one of the true joys in life and is fundamental for human happiness, and a space devoted to creative activities is always a good space.

- Why 3000+ square feet? This number rounds out the highest square footage of American homes (2,736 in 2015) and is 500 square feet above the highest recorded average home size before the recession (2,521 in 2007). Houses of this size can appropriately be deemed above average.

Now that’s out of the way, the MAIN EVENT:

Mansion or McMansion: What Distinguishes the Two?

The distinctions between a Mansion and a McMansion can be divided into three categories:

1.) Age

2.) Craftsmanship (e.g. being designed for the space of the lot, the quality of the building materials)

3.) Architectural and Stylistic Integrity (how well historical design styles are integrated or reproduced, attention to detail and principles of design)



Starting off with No.1:

Part One: Age

Most “true” mansions are generally old, as the McMansion did become a phenomenon until the 1980s. Few large houses were built in the 1970s because of the energy crisis, and large houses above 3000 square feet built before 1980 and especially before 1960 were usually designed by architects. However, there are many, many homes designed in the 80s and beyond that are mansions rather than McMansions.

Large houses built with great care for historical precedence fall under what is called the New Traditional style. Architect Robert A.M. Stern is often credited as being the founding father of this style; his Shingle-style houses from the late 1970s inspired other architects to leave their modern academies and refocus themselves on traditional architecture.

So how do we determine between a McMansion and a New Traditional house?

Part Two: Craftsmanship

One of the defining features of a McMansion is that they were built big, and they were built cheap.

Relationship to the Landscape

Often, a New Traditional mansion carefully considers its environment and is built to accentuate, rather than dominate it.

A McMansion is out of scale with its landscape or lot, often too big for a tiny lot.



Choice of Materials

New Traditional houses tend to be clad in materials that reflect the specific styles they are trying to emulate. These are often masonry such as high quality brick or stone, and wooden shingles or siding.

McMansions on the other hand, tend to be clad in many different materials, often all at once, applied to the exterior as if they were wallpaper. Typical McMansion exterior claddings include manufactured stone veneers, stucco board (EIFS), vinyl siding, and later on imitation wood such as HardieBoard. (Note: the author would like to point out after many emails that I personally do not dislike HardiePlank. I think it is a much better system than vinyl siding and can be done very tastefully. However, I think the HardieShingles are worthy of scorn because they take away the depth and texture of real shingles and replace them with a 2D cartoonified version.)

As you can see, in the New Traditional houses, great care was taken to use high quality and historically accurate building materials, whereas in the McMansions, cheap materials were used and the houses pay little attention to architectural precedent, eschewing quality for size.

Part Three: Architectural and Stylistic Integrity

New Traditional houses take care to follow both the composition and earlier styles of their architectural precedents. This includes choosing appropriate details such as windows, columns, and ornamentation such as braces, stickwork, half-timbering, and shutters.

New Traditional houses replicate with integrity and care the characteristics from the styles they base themselves upon. These aesthetic predecessors are wide-ranging and stylistically/chronologically diverse. Styles reproduced in New Traditional architecture include the Colonial Revival, Neoclassical, Italian Renaissance (Italianate), Tudor Revival, French Eclectic (Chateauesque), Mediterranean (usually Spanish Revival), Shingle, Victorian, Craftsman, and Prairie styles.

The best New Traditional houses are those who are virtually indistinguishable from the styles they represent.

McMansions tend to be either a chaotic mix of individual styles, or a poorly done imitation of a previous style. This house in Texas invokes four separate styles: the Gothic (the steep angle of the gables), Craftsman (the overhanging eaves with braces), French (the use of stone and arched 2nd story windows), and Tudor Revival (the EIFS half-timbering above the garage), each poorly rendered in a busy combination of EIFS coupled with stone and brick veneers

You’ll never find fake Palladian windows on a real French Eclectic house.

Some McMansions don’t even bother to imitate architectural styles at all. This is a big enough phenomenon that in the newest edition of the Field Guide to American Houses by Virginia McAlester, she includes an entire section devoted to what she calls the “Millennium Mansion” (McAlester, 706-715).

McAlester’s criteria for a McMansion (reformatted by me here) are as follows:

“-Complex high pitched roof with lower cross gables or hips

- Tall (1.5-2 story) entry features, often arched

- Haphazardly applied dormers

- Multiple wall cladding materials applied to single surfaces

- Windows of differing sizes and shapes, often arched

- Structure is commonly asymmetrical with tall vertical appearance.”

If a house meets 3 or more of these criteria, it is pretty safe to call it a McMansion.



(p. 707)

I’d like to add a few qualifiers of my own to her criteria in order to paint a more specific picture.

- Attached 2 or 3 car garage

- Side elevations are often clad in cheaper material and have few windows

- Front facade sometimes will feature a multiple-story window, often an indicator of the presence of the “great room”

- Architectural ornamentation is applied with little consideration for historical precedence (e.g. craftsman columns on a house that is mostly French Eclectic) and are often constructed from foam injected plastic or EIFS.

- House is often out of scale with the lot it was built on





That’s it for this week’s McMansions 101, folks! I hope this guide helps to clear up the differences between Mansion and McMansions. Later on, I’ll be posting pictures of trickier houses to identify, where the line is blurred as to whether or not they are in bad taste.

Stay tuned for next week’s Sunday Special: McMansions 101: Windows & Doors

Disclaimer: All photos are screenshots from real estate aggregate website Zillow.com, and are used in this post for the purposes of education, satire, and parody, consistent with 17 USC §107. If you are a real estate photographer and your photos have ended up in any of my post, please send me an email so I can revise the post and properly credit you.

Like this post? Want to see more like it? Interested in access to behind-the-scenes material and bonus content? Consider sponsoring me on Patreon!