Hello Friends! Now that I’ve had my brief reprieve, I’m happy to be back in the saddle again. Thank you for your patience.
This week’s Certified Dank™ McMansion comes to us from Naperville, IL - one of my most requested locations.
This 5 bedroom, 6 bathroom beaut, built in 1999, is currently selling for almost $1 million. Not a bad deal for more than 5000 square feet of space.
The Lawyer Foyer
I’m very fond of this term, because it rhymes despite the fact that it looks like it doesn’t because English is a dumb language. Also, what the hell is going on in the top right hand corner there??
Ok is there an ACLU for architecture, because I’d like to report a human rights violation.
The Sitting & Staring Room
I’m pretty sure everyone knows these rooms are just a big lie, because rooms with sofas are for watching TV and nothing more. Y’all aren’t fooling anyone; do you actually think that I sincerely believe y’all sit around and have meaningful conversations? It’s 2016!! /s
The Dining Room
For anyone salty about this year’s Thanksgiving, this one’s for you.
The “This Was Totally Always a Home Office, What Are You Talking About?”
Dang it, ain’t that just sad.
The “Great” Room
As someone who will probably never be able to afford a Noguchi coffee table, this image makes me a human salt mine.
The Kitchen
If you or a loved one knows of a kitchen in desperate need of renovation, the Kitchen Defense Fund can help: call 1-800-34-OVENS, that’s 1-800-34-OVENS. (before i get sued: this isn’t a real thing)
The Breakfast Nook?
Is anyone else laughing at the thought of the ceiling fan blowing people’s napkins off the table or is it just me?
The Master Bedroom
Dammit, Cheryl.
The Master Bathroom
Do not let the softness of the pink walls fool you: the neutral sink territory is still a heavily contested area.
The Spare Bedroom
I’m sorry I can’t make a comment on this room, because I’m overcome with both bitterness and nostalgia.
The Horrifyingly Gendered Bedroom
“Mom, I want to be a mechanical engineer.” “That’s cute, princess.”
Bathroom of Said Gendered Room
Somehow they managed to pick a different colored pink from the pink in the attached bedroom…and this one’s worse.
Bedroom the Fourth
Cheryl always manages to find some way to circumvent Home Depot’s list of banned phone numbers.
MEDIA AND ALCOHOL LAIR
Disclaimer: I’m secretly into that bar.
And, now time for the obligatory…
Rear Exterior Shot!
Well, that does it for this week’s Certified Dank™ McMansion! I’m off to celebrate now, because today is my birthday!!! If anyone is interested in celebrating with me, please consider donating to my preferred charities:
Copyright Disclaimer:All photographs in this post are from real estate aggregate Zillow.com and are used in this post for the purposes of education, satire, and parody, consistent with 17 USC §107.
Howdy, y’all! It’s time for this week’s Certified Dank™ McMansion! Whichever one of my Patreon donors who suggested Fort Worth, TX gets a super pat on the back because that place is full of some serious fug.
Before I begin this post, I would like to make a note in regards to some recent emails that go something like “BUT WHY DO YOU MAKE FUN OF INTERIORS? WHAT WOULD YOU PUT IN A HOUSE????!!!!1″ The point of these weekly house post is to make fun of really tacky houses and really tacky staging by real estate agents. If you haven’t noticed, none of the houses I’ve posted look like they’ve ever been lived in by actual people. Actual people have real tastes and it’s (mostly) not fair to make fun of them. But tacky house staging by realtors? Totally up for grabs.
Anyway, back to our scheduled content.
This week’s house, a Mansard built in 1993 (but is totes 1987) is pushing 5,000 square feet, and is currently on the market for $1.3 million USD.
Now, Mansard houses are weird. The style only lasted around 20 years, and is pretty much quintessential 70s weird. Named after the mansard roof, which was popular in a French-influenced Victorian style known as the Second Empire, the Mansard style was popular from around 1965 to 1985. If you’re interested in these strange beasts, be sure to check this link from Washington State University.
However, our house was built in 1993 meaning it’s almost 10 years behind. Whoops.
The Entryway Thing
While there is a brass n glass chandelier in this home, I couldn’t seem to find any views of it, mostly because this REALLY weird staircase/catwalk kinda gets in the way of everything, even itself. The columns really obstruct the path from the front door to anything remotely near the stairs. Whooops.
The Living Room
As you can see in this picture, the staircase/catwalk thing is really weird. Not only is it low to the ground, but it basically shuts the rest of the house out from any sort of light coming from those 2-story fanlight windows. The placing and spacing of the columns would make Borromini cry.
Dining Room 1 of 3
Notes: I feel like there are way too many chairs for this one table and also can anyone else hear the SCREEEEEEEEECH sound of wood on tile in their heads?
Powder Room
Putting a cherub in a bathroom is unsettling to me for some reason. Also special lol @ that spray-painted side table.
Dining Room 2 of 3
I am seriously amazed by this wallpaper. It takes serious balls to put metallic flower-motif wallpaper on your ceiling. I could have done without the leopard print chairs, but to each their own.
Dining Room 3 of 3
I’m starting to think that there are so many dining rooms in these houses because these open, empty spaces aren’t conducive to much else. There’s no privacy and/or way to prevent noise from activities like watching TV from getting into adjacent rooms. This is the key fallacy of the open floor plan.
THIS AMAZING KITCHEN
Ok, if you want to put botanical stickers on your shabby chic cabinets, more power to you. I am really impressed by the two refrigerators. If I had two refrigerators one would be exclusively for booze.
The Dark & Dreary Office/Study
And the award for poorest quality cabinetry goes to….
Master Bedroom
One of my Twitter followers informed me recently that many people who do home staging for a living do in fact buy a lot of their furniture from hotel liquidation sales. This explains a great deal about this bedroom.
The Master Bath
I’m incredibly sad that this was the only view of the master bath, which is honestly incredible.
Bedroom No. 2
Ok don’t get too excited - I’ve only seen like 2 episodes of Doctor Who. This bedroom is almost scarier than that one episode with the weird Medusa angel statues.
And Finally (there was no backyard shots, sadly)
Bathroom No. 2
There are too many metaphors for death in this bathroom.
Well, that wraps it up for this week’s Certified Dank McMansion! Stay tuned for Sunday’s What the Hell Is… post!
Copyright Disclaimer:All photographs in this post are from real estate aggregate Zillow.com and are used in this post for the purposes of education, satire, and parody, consistent with 17 USC §107.
I’ve been bugged for a while to do a house in Marietta, Georgia, which is a goldmine of dank McMansions. It was indeed difficult to select merely one example to share with you all this week.
The house I’m about to show you is a time capsule back to 1990s interior design and it is amazing. I can’t’ even hate it it’s so amazing.
(Note the pre-2000s lack of double-height entryway.)
This house, built in 1987, and a little under 4,000 square feet, is certainly not the dankest house in and around Marietta, but that’s not why I chose it. I chose it because it’s rare to see a house with an interior that has remained unchanged for so long.
The Foyer
I swear to gawd that I went to this house at some point during my childhood, even though I was no where near Marietta, Georgia. Like, I can see myself excitedly running up those stairs, careful to not knock the random trinkets from their precarious resting place.
The Sitting Room
Has no one lived in this house in the last 26 years? It’s got every 90s design trope in the book: gigham couch, white leather chairs, white walls with teal accents, and brass and glass fan dangling from a precipitously high ceiling.
The Kitchen
OMG y’all think kitchens are white now? White was SO HUGE in the 90s. Everything was white: appliances, counters, floors, chairs, walls, ceilings, you name it, it was white. The gigham wallpaper is especially dated, but luckily for them this style is coming back again, even if white appliances never do.
The Dining Room
Ah yes, the table covered with very heavy fabric, conveniently omitting the idea that people, you know, eat at tables.
The Living Room
Those wall shelves with the chunky brackets are so of their time. And the TV!! They haven’t even bought a new TV since 1996!!!!!
The Master Bedroom
The pale blue and vaguely French-Country theme were both huge in the 90s. Note in particular the coordinated fabrics and the table that has been totally robbed of its function by what seems to be a misplaced drape.
Bathroom #1
Oh man, I used to go to my friends’ houses going up and was always SUPER JEALOUS if they had celestial wallpaper. I simply couldn’t convince my mom that having a bunch of stars and clouds and stuff on the walls was a good idea. I hate to say mom was right on this one.
Study
Fun fact: My parents painted their living room walls this color when I was a kid. Funner fact: they were sponge-textured as well.
Does the paint not going up to the ceiling bother anyone else? All they need to do, fortunately, is get rid of the wallpaper border, paint the walls, and change the bedspread and ELLE Decor will LOVE. IT. (They need to chill with the frills over there, seriously.)
Bathroom #2
Damn, the bathroom from my childhood looked a bit like this, especially that sink. Feels, man.
And, finally,
I mean, you’d be a fool to believe that those super weird ceiling shapes weren’t going to lead to some super weird roof shapes.
If this post has made y’all nostalgic, you’re in luck! While wallpaper borders won’t be coming back any time soon, the rest of this aestheticdefinitely is.
Note: McMansionHell volunteers for the NC Invasive Plant Council. Please consider doing the same for your local Invasive species organization! You’ll get fit and save the earth pulling weeds!
Anyways: That’s it for Marietta, Georgia, folks! If you like plants (or hate them) get hyped for Sunday’s Post: McMansions 101: Landscaping.
Copyright Disclaimer:All photographs in this post are from real estate aggregate Redfin.com and are used in this post for the purposes of education, satire, and parody, consistent with 17 USC §107.
Oh boy are y’all in for a treat this week. I hope y’all like words because there are quite a few in this post. You’ve probably seen me refer to Postmodernism at least once, and if you follow me on Twitter, you know that I pretty frequentlygarbage post about it.
Of all the styles in architectural history, none has become as ubiquitous in our suburban landscape as Postmodernism, later called PoMo, for short. But what is it? How did it get here? Most importantly, Why do I care?
BECAUSE POSTMODERNISM IS DANK AS HELL:
M2 Tokyo, Kengo Kuma, 1991 (Photo: flickr/wakiii)
But before we get to this dankness, we have to talk…
A wee bit about Modernism
For most of the 20th century, modernismdominated architecture. It’s focus on design efficiency and the lack or absence of ornamentation (ornament was for the Bourgeoisie) was eagerly adopted and practiced by architects such as Le Corbusier, Mies van der Rohe, and Walter Gropius who were fascinated with the technological advancements of the early 20th century, specifically, the factory.
Le Corbusier, the French-Swiss architect who famously said that a house is, “a machine for living in,” and his contemporaries were entranced both by the forms of industrial structures and their streamlined efficiency, as well as by the new materials of the modern day: steel and reinforced concrete.
Don’t worry, I’ll be doing a post all about Modernism (which is my soapbox bae) so I don’t want to spend too much time here, but it’s the starting point of Postmodernism, so it’s, y’know, worth a mention.
Here’s the thing about Modernism: it dominated architecture practiced by architects for almost a century, but made up only a small (well-documented and beloved) part of residential architecture built during its reign.
The thing is, the people who toiled their lives away in the factories absolutely DID NOT want to go home to a house that looked like the factory.
However, traditional architecture quickly (by the mid-forties) became a huge faux-pas in the practice of architects and was omitted from architectural education. In addition an exploding population that now needed housing (the Modernists thought it was a great idea to put them in high rises and we all know how well that turned out) emerged that wanted said housing to look like the centuries-old conception of home (aka a box with a door, windows, and topped with a triangle hat).
The combination of these factors led to developers sweeping in (as architects chilled in the Modernism echo chamber), and, lo and behold, we ended up with places like this:
While the modernists were practicing modernism, the rest of us were voraciously exploding out into the wilderness with our cars and highways and motels and suburbs and shopping centers and other ‘vulgar’ pursuits. And nothing communicated said vulgar pursuits better than the booming city of Las Vegas.
Over the first half of the 20th century, the field of architecture was more than a little disconnected from the general public, and without their guidance, the suburban and commercial world developed an aesthetic language all their own.
In the late 1960s, the architects Robert Venturi, Denise Scott Brown, and Steven Izenour, took a group of students from Venturi’s studio at the Yale School of Architecture on a long trip to Las Vegas.
What happened to Venturi & co. in Vegas definitely didn’t stay in Vegas, and architecture would never be the same.
Learning from Las Vegas: The Stirrings of Postmodern Architecture
Venturi & co. set out to document the landscape of the largest and gaudiest strip in the country and came out with, yes, a study of a city and its forms, but more importantly a manifesto in two parts: first, that modern architecture is ignorant of what most people want, and what most people want is worth studying, and secondly, that the past has a place in present architecture, and that ornament in architecture has meaning, is intrinsically symbolic, and can be used communicate ideas.
The underlying foundation of Learning from Las Vegas is that architecture isboth a space and a symbol, and that modern architects abandoned the symbol in favor of the space, and in doing such made the space itself a symbol, AKA:
He contrasts this to the concept of the decorated shed where the space and structure are at the service of the program (the intended use or function of a building), and the ornament is applied independently of those things.
TL;DR: The duck is a building that is a symbol, the decorated shed is the building that applies symbols. Venturi argues that the history of architecture is the history of ornament, and after this brief deviation of modernism, ornament and its symbolism is something to which we should return.
The Expression of an Idea: Postmodernism in Action
Needless to say, Venturi & Co. telling the whole world of architecture “up yours” went about as well as you’d expect. But after a bit of fighting, a school of architects emerged and began working in this new style, a style that combined the symbolism of the past with the forms of the present.
The Vanna Venturi House by Robert Venturi (1964) [Photo: Wikipedia] takes the traditional symbolism or idea of the house as a box with a gabled roof and a front door flanked by windows, and executes it in a new context - with new materials, minimal lines (hence the integration of the modern) and a bit of architectural irony and humor (e.g. the roofline above the front door is imitating a broken pediment, like one that is often found above a front door)
It quickly gained public popularity in the 80s and 90s and, thus, transformed into PoMo. (For the curious, this dichotomy between artistic Postmodernism and corporate/neoliberal PoMo is explained at length by Charles Jencks, the intensely detailed taxonomist of the movement, in his 2011 book The Story of Postmodernism.)
From Postmodernism to PoMo
In 1984, this broken pediment architectural pun skyscraper by Philip Johnson went up in New York and became the most public symbol (and triumph/downfall) of Postmodernism:
Let’s just say developers loved it. Through developers looking for a big ROI, the great, elegant glass box of modernism, was transformed through said developers into cheap, soulless office boxes, forgettable skyscrapers, and loathed public housing. Their shoddy modernist jobs were, by the 80s, becoming rather passé and unpopular. Thank gawd the Sony Building came along, the developers thought.
AND SO, the original spirit of Postmodernism, lovable, colorful, nostalgic for most of my readers and myself:
WAS NOW, through developers seeking a quick ROI, transformed into:
So, let me get this straight:
This is the crux of the failure of PoMo: Postmodernism was about using architectural ornament within a modern contextbecause we have emotional connections and connotations to architectural ornament. These buildings were about saying through ornament “I AM A HOUSE” or “I AM A BANK” mixed, of course, with a bit of clever architectural humor.
However, this was also the 80s & 90s and the global corporation ruled all, and rather than using the clever language of Postmodernism, PoMo was global corporations saying architecturally: “WORK IS YOUR HOME” or “THE MALL IS YOUR HOME” or “DOLLAR GENERAL IS YOUR HOME.”
That dull and mundane office block? Now it’s an insulting, dull, and mundane office block with a gable and Palladian windows.
Remember those people at the beginning of this post who didn’t want to live in modernist houses that looked like the factories they toiled away at?
We have no choice but to live in houses that look like our office blocks, because our office blocks took the architectural symbols of our houses. And, in response, our houses took the vomited up architectural symbols from their corporate remixes, because residential architecture almost always imitates the public architecture of the time.
Now, I’m not saying McMansions are a product of Postmodernism, or that they are themselves Postmodern architecture, because neither is true. It’s more of a coincidence than anything else that they borrowed certain tropes from the PoMo office tower and integrated them into features like the two-story entryway with the huge transom window.
So what did we learn from this endeavor?
Not much. And, much to Venturi’s chagrin, after this brief period of badly decorated sheds, architecture went right back to making, big, expensiveducks.
BONUS: here’s a pic of me speaking at TEDxMidAtlantic about how much I love buildings and want to encourage others to love buildings as much as I do:
That’s it for PoMo, friends! I’ll see you Thursday with a Dank Southern Special, so stay tuned.
