Polls will be closed next Thursday, July 26th at 12 PM EDT. Happy voting! Stay tuned for this week’s Utah McMansion (which looks quite sane compared to the houses from Texas!)
Howdy Y’all! Everyone give me a pat on the back because I finally finished moving to my new place, which I will of course be writing about for Looking Around. Moving gives one time to re-evaluate one’s life, and by re-evaluate I mean ask oneself why one has so much crap, junk, and also more crap.
Speaking of crap: It’s time to return to our Texas Standoff! Reminder: At the end of this post will be a bracket and a link to a Google Form where you will be able to vote on the first round for Worst Texas McMansion!
Montgomery County (House 9): AKA The Columned Catastrophe
TFW u love Big Oil so much u design a house just to waste energy and laugh at the dying earth
Comal County (House 10): AKA Bitches Brew
Instead of cooking Hansel and Gretel in a puny (yet rustic) wood stove, the Witch decided to #upgrade and get a $6,000 Wolf range/stove combo with dual burner action. She lusciously prepares the aftermath on her granite countertops complete with built in #farmhouse sink. Before being cooked and eaten, Hansel and Gretel complemented the witch on her tasteful #subway #tile backsplash!
Kendall County (House 11): AKA The Compound
The only thing I can think of that’s as futile as trying to grow that grass is trying to put together the Ikea furniture you just bought after a day of loading and unloading boxes. But this isn’t about me, is it?
Travis County (House 12): AKA FastFood FanFic
[AU] [T] [Romance] Olive Garden x Taco Bell. It’s 1908, and Olive, an Italian immigrant seeking greener pastures in Southern California has her life turned upside down when she meets the bold, brash, and ambitious Mexican-American boy who helps his family run the taco joint down the street.
[I would like to take the time to apologize for these words which I have just put into this world]
Collin County (House 13): AKA Smallpox Estates
I didn’t realize Hobby Lobby sold home exterior decorating kits!! Brb hot gluing a bag of river rocks to my window trim.
Denton County (House 14): (AKA Clone Wars)
Sometimes a house is so wild, more than one joke on the picture would ruin its natural dramatic effect. Hence, the author would now like to use this space to point out that this house also has a nub, lol.
Fort Bend County (House 15): Lawyer Can of Shame
Sadly, the Smithsonian is not interested in my extremely fascinating and culturally important research on extremely bad and ugly home foyer typologies. I’m also probably on a government watchlist now.
Without further ado, our final house!
Rockwall County (House 16): AKA Satellite of Nub
Everybody who has been to college (or even a coffeshop near a college) knows that guy who pretends to be a beat poet and thinks that smoking joints in public and treating women like garbage makes him extremely cool and talented. The sixties were 80 million years ago and yet beatnik cosplayer dudes remain their longest-running export. (Stuff with The Beatles on it is the second longest running export.)
There is a whole new slate of Patreon rewards, including Good House of the Week, Crowdcast streaming, monthly roasts of Important Architecture, and bonus essays!
Not into recurring donations or bonus content? Consider the tip jar! Or,Check out the McMansion Hell Store ! 100% of the proceeds from the McMansion Hell store go to charity!
I’ve been poisoning my brain the last couple of weeks narrowing down 2000 prospective McMansions to 16. Please give me a round of applause for this immense personal sacrifice. Instead of ranking them myself like I usually do, I will be doing a bracket at the end of the next post where you can vote for the Most Terrible in Texas! (After all, everything’s bigger in Texas!)
Without further ado, here are our first 8 contestants (in no apparent order):
Comal County (House 1) (AKA: White Castle)
I don’t know if this is “starting out on an easy one” because frankly none of them are easy. To understand the vastness of this sample size, this one random Texas McMansion is the equivalent to the worst McMansion from pretty much every other state in Tornado Alley.
Travis County (House 2) (AKA House of Topiary Torture)
For goodness sake, they’re plants, not poodles, Darleen.
Montgomery County (House 3) (AKA Cascading Nope)
this is the house version of when windows freezes and you can drag the little windows around
I feel like the people who built this house started off with a reasonable house, but, like a zit on prom night, they just kept picking and picking at it and now Joey from math class is staring right at you and your whole life is literally over.
Kendall County (House 4) (AKA Pastiche Castle)
People do realize that all the castles in the US are built by rich people playing king and not actual kings right? Nothing says “I love siege warfare” like a keep that’s half glorified foam.
Denton County (House 5) (AKA Mt Nub)
all you kiddos studying for the SAT can thank me for putting you on the spot with such 10-cent words as “porcine” and “ass.”
Rockwall County (House 6) (AKA The Gray Expanse)
Please keep photoshopping the sky and making my job much easier. The one good thing I can say about this house is that it at least retains the same material throughout instead of playing heirloom quilt with tile and stone.
A politics joke??? In MY blog devoted to lambasting the Ugliness Brought Upon This Earth by the obnoxiously wealthy??
I hope you’re excited for Round 2, which will be posted early next week. We’ve got some, uh, unique houses coming your way! Be sure to check out Patreon where there are 5 Good Houses of the Week if you are in need of an eye rinse. I hope all of my fellow LGBTQIA+ followers had a Happy Pride!!!
There is a whole new slate of Patreon rewards, including Good House of the Week, Crowdcast streaming, monthly roasts of Important Architecture, and bonus essays!
Not into recurring donations or bonus content? Consider the tip jar! Or, Check out the McMansion Hell Store ! 100% of the proceeds from the McMansion Hell store go to charity!
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.
