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: