Mansion invokes the same feelings of naughtiness: You’re watching people do something that, in a fairer and more just world, you’d be doing yourself. I think of Vivian Dixon and John Chapple, a married couple that Mansion introduced us to not long ago, as the exemplars of the Mansion character. They are voluptuaries of real estate. They grab houses the way the rest of us scoop mints from the little bowl as we leave a restaurant. At the time of the article’s publication, in May, they owned six residences, though by the time the piece ends you suspect their trigger finger is getting itchy again.

The tale of the Dixon-Chapples is a saga of houses found, houses upgraded beyond recognition, houses scarcely lived in. Homeownership, for them as for so many Mansion people, is an additive activity. The most ordinary of their houses, from what I can tell, is a vacation house in Wisconsin. They bought the place for $800,000, then duded it up with a $1.8 million renovation. When their hometown of Seattle proved too rainy, they headed to the Big Island of Hawaii and bought a three-bedroom condo. From the new condo they caught sight of a three-bedroom house dangling just down the hill, ripe for the plucking. Pluck! $2.5 million.

Back at the Seattle house, their dog, a German shepherd called Max, felt cooped up. So the couple treats him to a new house in suburban Woodinville set on 2.17 “dog-friendly acres,” which are, happy to say, adjacent to a 60-acre “off-leash” dog park. Then Dixon heads down the California coast to visit her relatives at the beach. At a car wash she leafs through a magazine that features an ad she finds irresistible, for a house that happens to be nearby: 8,000 square feet of heaven, if heaven has ocean views. $5.9 million later, this house too is theirs.

We learn from Mansion that the Dixon-Chapples show as little restraint in decorating their properties as they do in acquiring them. Chapple is a sports fan. That lake house in Wisconsin—the kitchen countertops had to be of green granite, as a tribute to his favorite professional football team, the one in Green Bay. As for college hoops: “To keep him happy,” Mansion tells us, “Ms. Dixon decorated areas of the homes in … bright orange and blue in honor of Syracuse University.”

Even Syracuse’s most avid alumni have to agree that the combination of bright orange and blue doesn’t look good even on basketball jerseys, much less in bathrooms and kitchens. But the requirements of Chapple’s fandom are unyielding. When his wife swooped up the California beach house, “all the couple had to do to the house [was] paint the workout area orange and blue.” The beach house, as luck would have it, is also adjacent to a dog park, where the Dixon-Chapples let Jim Boeheim run off-leash in the summer months.

I kid. But somebody has to. Mansion’s treatment of rich people’s real-estate crochets lacks irony; it begs for snark. This is both the strength and the weakness of the Mansion approach. The article about the house-hungry Dixon-Chapples, for example, isn’t about a possibly clinical compulsion afflicting a couple with too much money but about the demands of upkeep. (The damage wrought by toads in Hawaii; the cracking marble in a master-bedroom shower: “It’s exhausting,” Vivian Dixon says. “A full time job.”)