It is one thing to drive by the gaping foam columns and unseeing nubs of vast McMansions, projecting your judgements into the void(s), and quite another to find yourself standing in a cavernous basement as the owner shows you the stationary bicycle he pedals while watching the Augusta Masters next to his wall of Costco backstock, under a vast castle of unused “amenities.”
“This one might be a bit big for your needs,” the real estate agent had told us of the house, but it was in the town we liked, and in our price range. The town’s claim to fame was Martin Van Buren, but it had, since his time, become the kind of place where rich Manhattanites spend millions on refurbing “antique” barns and drive around with the top down on weekends in a white “pant.” We had just seen a tiny cabin gutted to be open concept, with dark rafters glued on for charm, and even though it was ridiculously tiny and terribly overpriced, I’m a sucker for an exposed beam, whether or not it’s supporting anything. Adds charm.
Darryl: See that lattice up there?
Valuer: Yeah?
Darryl: Fake. Plastic. Gives the place a Victoriana feel. Chimney. Fake too.
Valuer: Why’s it there?
Darryl: Charm. Adds a bit of charm.
When we pulled up to the McMansion, down an ominous cul de sac of like homes in a named development, I said to Noodle Hubs, “let’s just run through and get out of here.” But the owner was there to personally show us through, leading us into empathetic purgatory #417: Trying to seem pleased and impressed while feeling adamant that you do not want this person’s life.
From the foyer, a staircase rose up to the second level, but in a bad way, like you’ll pass into a dove grey wall and never see your loved ones again. To the left was the office, which had the aesthetic of an expensive three-hole punch; to the right, a Great Room, leading on to a dining room. “Also has a living room,” the Man gestured toward the luxury all around, leading us into the kitchen, which had the vibe of a Granite City chain restaurant, a plinth big enough for Aslan functioning as the “island,” and everything else shiny, steely, or marbled and the color of a cable remote. The living room was sunken, couches occupying the shallows, an immense HDTV where the sun might set over the water. Out on the deck, another dining setup, tall chairs and a tall square dining table by a grill big enough to toast a human on. Beyond, two acres of grass extended toward a distant woods, mowed, but free of people, or items, or purpose, a real-life clone stamp tool.
If you count the plinth with stools, there were four separate dining areas (that I counted), but no signs of life. It was as though the Patriots had lost the Superbowl at the exact moment the S&P went into freefall and aliens zapped all humans from existence, leaving behind nothing but some salmon planks and a set of rocks glasses sweating Disaronno.
McMansion Man was lovely, approaching retirement and ready to sell, the kids already flown. He was thin and fit, thanks to the bike, had worked hard to build a bit of wealth. In each room, he explained the assets, offering up a vision of life there, and by extension an accounting of his own environmental and existential crimes. (“Your [contractors] were so preoccupied with whether or not they could, they didn’t stop to think if they should.”)
I didn’t blame him, I blamed the culture that allowed his house to be built.
Upstairs, he showed us the carpeted bedrooms with their carpeted closets that were easily the size of a Brooklyn bedroom. At the end of one bedroom’s closet-bedroom was yet another bathroom.
The agent naturally wanted some feedback, and my honest feeling was, “Man, that house was a bummer.” Instead, I think we said it was simply too big for us.
I couldn’t get out of my head the sheer heft of all the stuff that such a house encouraged. While scrolling Zillow one day, I had come across the still rendering of a 3D tour, which gave the appearance of a house’s innards having been emptied out into a steaming pile, a life measured in cubic feet:
Picture the innards shook out of a mansion’s endless storage spaces — the Stacy’s pita chips and the Pull-Ups and Tide Pods and vats of apple sauce and La Croix and paper towel and sandbags of frozen shrimp. I remember reading Noah’s Castle as a kid, about a father who hoards supplies in the cellar when hyperinflation hits Britain and the rest of the country can no longer afford a loaf of bread, creating a separate crisis of morality for his kids. In the excess, you can draw a line from Jay Gatsby floating in his own fountain to Tony Soprano watching the ducks fly out of his pool and then faceplanting by the barbecue.
Cursed
The haunted houses in movies and books are always Victorian, creaky and yet — one must admit — proportional, pleasing, offering symmetry! Architecturally speaking, I’d rather risk a ghost than expose my children to the bad juju of the McMansion. Maybe what we are scared of in a Victorian house is simply the feeling of aliveness — what might satisfy our need for “biophilia”; our “innate emotional affiliation” to other living organisms, as E. O. Wilson put it, or sense of feeling violated by oversized dormers. There is plenty of evidence that architecture impacts our psychology, but we never seem to talk about the petri dish we put our kids in when we choose a home. What is in this Sea Monkey water?
A paper published last year in Australia noted that there is a long and dedicated history among social scientists of worrying about, and looking for evidence of, the effects of “overcrowding” (read: poorer families in smaller houses) on children. This concern is generally racist, wrote Michael Dockery in the 2020 paper:
The commonly used term in Australia of ‘overcrowding’ carries with it the connotation of negative effects of household density beyond some threshold but, as noted by Memmott et al. (2012), is inherently tautological. Much of the Australian overcrowding literature has focussed on Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander persons, for whom inferior housing has been identified as contributing to poorer relative health and schooling outcomes relative to nonIndigenous Australians (AIHW 2014; Biddle 2008; Dockery et al. 2013)
This whole time, says Dockery, we should have been worrying about the children growing up in vast, empty McMansions:
Children who lived in homes assessed as requiring additional bedrooms for the number of occupants subsequently had better self-assessed general health as young adults, as well as greater life satisfaction and better mental health. […]
Australian children, in general, live in homes that are too empty.
Huh.
A 2018 piece in The Atlantic by Ian Bogost made the argument that “open concept” living was in part a way of allowing women to continue to participate in family life while slogging through their chores — otherwise, they’d be shut into the scullery shucking the ribsauce off the Pottery Barn earthenware. An attempt, in other words, to ward off the postmodern isolation and alienation of developments.
Compare the spiritual void of the oversized development house to the cozy and crowded Byers house from Stranger Things, illustrated at the jump by artist Boryana Ilieva — it is a house so boxy, overstuffed, and upholstered that it begins to feel real, becomes a conduit between a mother and her son. You can see in it the source material of E.T., set at the edge of development, back when the land seemed plentiful and generally less flammable, while, over the horizon, inequality began to really bloom.
The houses of that period remind me of my childhood home, which I once thought was daggy, too small and too overwhelmed by the bush around it, but now seems to me an Australian interpretation of the usonian dream, pouring us all into the family room, and out the sliding door onto the backyard pavers and under the gum trees.
Urban interlude
How it happened
Smart home:
Child: (announced) I need to poop!
Child: (yelling on way to bathroom) Alexa, play “We Are The Champions”
Goodies
“So buy a craft beer, you absolute rube. Perch on the grass that they planted for you. Sit in “the Amph,” which is what they cutely call their nearly-seven-hundred-seat amphitheater, and feel for all the world like a maven of the ballet. Take in a view that was worth the price of a legal battle between the people who hold power over such things.” — Michael Friedrich talking about Manhattan’s new “Little Island,” and the way urbanization has now been co-opted by private ownership, for The Baffler
“Our whole street was on an incline, and I looked out the window next to our computer one day to see one neighborhood boy riding a child’s wagon down the street with another tethered to a rolling office chair behind him. Behind them was a boy inside an upside-down trash can attached to a tree. He would run to the end of the rope and collapse, then get back up and start again. It’s this feral activity in the face of global threat that Arcade Fire so perfectly depicted. As the kids would say, “Vine energy.” — Daisy Alioto speaking to a different gen’s experience of suburban life for Dirt
“Evans recalls the bubbling rivers and lakes of her childhood, now slowly drying out. The kind of communal upbringing she enjoyed, eating freshly caught fish with her grandparents from the local lakes, eating fruit from local trees, and exchanging food with her neighbors, no longer feels possible. The trees from her childhood have withered and died, rents and utility bills have gone up, and locals are out barbecuing in usually-frigid December.” — Angely Mercado on climate change gentrification for Pioneer Works
“As time has passed, I have realized that the dynamics of wealth are similar to the dynamics of addiction. The more you have, the more you need. Whereas once a single beer was enough to achieve a feeling of calm, now you find that you can’t stop at six. Likewise, if you move up from coach to business to first class, you won’t want to go back to coach. And once you’ve flown private, wild horses will never drag you through a public airport terminal again. Comforts, once gained, become necessities. And if enough of those comforts become necessities, you eventually peel yourself away from any kind of common feeling with the rest of humanity.” Abigail Disney on dynastic wealth
“Clinton […] has proposed a tax increase on the wealthiest 2% of Americans.
Bush, on the other hand, told a nationwide television audience in his convention speech last week that he would seek an across-the-board tax cut. He has provided no details.” — Los Angeles Times, 1992
Here’s “McMansions 101” from McMansion Hell by Kate Wagner
“Canberra: The Palm Springs of Australia?” — lol, but also interesting