McMansions 101: Front Entries
What makes a textbook McMansion front entry? Front entries are one of the key indications that a normal house has taken a wrong turn into McMansion territory.
The McMansion front entrance is riddled with at least one of these four fatal flaws:
- Can’t find the goddamn door.
- Clutter, clutter, clutter
- Entryway is out of proportion
- Front façade is so top-heavy it either completely obscures the door or appears to be on the brink of structural collapse
Full Frontal Flaw #1: Can’t find the goddamn door
Okay, it’s not as if the door is lost in space or anything sinister like that. The door isn’t even necessarily drowned out in the façade (that’s number 2). The goddamn door is simply lost in its own entryway. This is usually because there is no termination point above the door itself; the eye often keeps traveling upward - passed the goddamn door and towards the goddamn roof.
This is the most easily fixed of the fatal flaws, so I have included two positive examples as well.
In the below example, the door is hidden in two separate ways:
1. The front door is dwarfed by the height of the columns and obfuscated by the depth of the portico.
2. The columns do not end in a terminating beam which not only makes the façade seem visually and structurally unstable, but also causes the eye to drift upward towards the massive, ugly roof.
Here is an example of a suburban house with a proper door-to-darkness and column-to-beam ratio:
Granted, this house is still poorly-proportioned (that 2 car garage, anyone?) - but the door is still the focal point of the façade and the column height and entryway depth are appropriate.
In some house styles (such as craftsman, prairie, and bungalow) a deeply recessed door is customary. Here is an example of a newly-constructed craftsman-style house with an appropriate entryway:
Full Frontal Flaw #2: Clutter, Clutter, Clutter!
A cluttered façade refers to a façade that has one or more of the following characteristics:
• Conflicting secondary masses. (See the Required Reading: Why McMansions Are Bad Architecture for more info about mass)
• Conflicting architectural details or design elements (e.g. corinthian columns on a craftsman house, or tudor windows on a colonial)
• The use of three or more exterior materials (e.g. a house whose exterior is composed of brick, stone, and vinyl siding)
• The overuse of decorative elements such as columns, keystones, decorative brickwork, and others.
A cluttered entryway originates from the rather ubiquitous design philosophy that placing objects around, in front of, or on top of an entryway achieves emphasis and focus. In fact the opposite is true and the whole entry becomes a complete mess.
Below, an “Italianate” house that is anything but:
Now that the craftsman style has come back in the form of a rabid craze, builders have started to tack random craftsman elements on otherwise “traditional” houses.
Full Frontal Flaw #3: The Out-of-Proportion Entryway
This flaw is so ubiquitous in houses built c.1980-present that in the newest edition of Virginia McAlester’s magnum opus A Field Guide to American Houses (Knopf, NY 2013), she describes it as being one of the defining features of what she politely dubs “Millennium Mansions.”
This is perhaps the quintessential architectural feature of the McMansion, instantly recognizable. As your humble curator, I promise to bring you two examples of the most egregious offenders.
Example No. 2
Full Frontal Flaw #4: Top-Heavy Façades
Top-heavy elevations are all about balance and mass. It’s about making sure that the illusion of weight is evenly distributed. When the top half of a façade dwarfs the bottom half, it gives the elevation an impression of instability. Most importantly, when columns are involved, they should be proportional to the mass they are supporting.
If the following house (complete with horrible gothic windows) isn’t proof that rich people have more money than taste, I don’t know what else is.
The following example is almost comical.
That’s it for doors. Next up: columns.
All photos taken from screenshots of Trulia.com. The use of this content for the purposes of education, satire, and parody, consistent with 17 USC §107.
