Reply to What exactly is wrong with the mcmansion?

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[quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous]So beyond their contributions to sprawl, it's that they're shoddily built (expensive, yes, but still shoddy). The McMansion style is pretty much the same from Delaware to Texas to Oregon, with some style slight regional variations. They're environmental monsters - great rooms, movie rooms, great halls, etc., are difficult to heat, cool light, etc. The rooms and layouts aren't particularly useful, i.e., 1/2 the floor space on the main floor is given over to a vast, formal living room that no one ever uses, plus it goes up two floors, meaning that the bedrooms are large closets. They play poorly with their neighbors in established neighborhoods (cough cough North Arlington cough cough), and they don't add much to Suburbia, either.

I could go on, but you get the point. To PP who rather naively assumes it's all just jealousy, I wouldn't mind having a larger house than our 1500 square foot TH some day, but I'd rather eat dirt at every meal before living in a McMansion.[/quote]

While the McMansions of the 90's and early 2000's may have all be fairly uniformly shoddy in construction, now there's a good variety of construction.  Some builders and some neighborhoods are significantly better constructed than others.  So now, McMansions have the same variation as older homes, some constructed well, some constructed poorly, some are environmentally poor and others are actually environmentally quite good and often more environmentally friendly that quite a number of older homes.  And since rooms and layouts vary as much as older homes between closed designs and open designs, homes with more smaller rooms and homes with fewer larger rooms, it's very hard to generalize the McMansion any more.   Your description above is very dated and only descriptive of a subset of today's McMansions.  [/quote]

I think this defines the term McMansion so broadly as to make it meaningless.  I think something is only a McMansion if, in addition to being large, it has pathological aspects of at least some of the following elements:  poor quality construction, poor design/taste, significantly overbuilt for lot size, grossly out of scale or character to neighborhood.  Not all 5000 square foot houses are McMansions.  [/quote]

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