#mcmansionhell

[probablyasocialecologist]

Consider this my attempt to say to the field of architecture in a way that matters: Do not participate in this. Do not build shiny skyscrapers on the graves of entire lineages wiped out in a single blast, or luxury condos on the barren land where, before the bombs fell, Palestinian families were forcibly removed from their homes. Do not wag your finger and say “It’s complicated” when the world has seen the footage of people searching for their loved ones among a sea of white body bags, and of journalists weeping on television after hearing of the killing of their wives and children. Do not contribute to this violence, and do not give it an architectural form. Do not contribute to the legacy of architects who profited from the devastation of thousands of innocent human lives. Do not do it. It is my hope that many architects and firms will refuse work in an ethnically cleansed Palestine, just as they had the moral clarity to suspend their projects in Russia after Putin’s invasion of Ukraine. But to those who will answer disaster capitalism’s call: When the buildings are completed and the world looks back on this moment with great shame, you will be implicated, and those who chose not to be complicit will not forgive you.

[gimmick-blog-bracket]

Round 0

@mcmansionhell

(no propaganda submitted)

@dailykafka

(no propaganda submitted)

[notquitepublic]

it. it stack overflowed itself down through hell and back up to the pearly gates. hell did not possess the depths this house requires.

we've found it folks: mcmansion heaven

Hello everyone. It is my pleasure to bring you the greatest house I have ever seen. The house of a true visionary. A real ad-hocist. A genuine pioneer of fenestration. This house is in Alabama. It was built in 1980 and costs around $5 million. It is worth every penny. Perhaps more.

Now, I know what you're thinking: "Come on, Kate, that's a little kooky, but certainly it's not McMansion Heaven. This is very much a house in the earthly realm. Purgatory. McMansion Purgatory." Well, let me now play Beatrice to your Dante, young Pilgrim. Welcome. Welcome, welcome, welcome.

It is rare to find a house that has everything. A house that wills itself into Postmodernism yet remains unable to let go of the kookiest moments of the prior zeitgeist, the Bruce Goffs and Earthships, the commune houses built from car windshields, the seventies moments of psychedelic hippie fracture. It is everything. It has everything. It is theme park, it is High Tech. It is Renaissance (in the San Antonio Riverwalk sense of the word.) It is medieval. It is maybe the greatest pastiche to sucker itself to the side of a mountain, perilously overlooking a large body of water. Look at it. Just look.

The inside is white. This makes it dreamlike, almost benevolent. It is bright because this is McMansion Heaven and Gray is for McMansion Hell. There is an overbearing sheen of 80s optimism. In this house, the credit default swap has not yet been invented, but could be.

It takes a lot for me to drop the cocaine word because I think it's a cheap joke. But there's something about this example that makes it plausible, not in a derogatory way, but in a liberatory one, a sensuous one. Someone created this house to have a particular experience, a particular feeling. It possesses an element of true fantasy, the thematic. Its rooms are not meant to be one cohesive composition, but rather a series of scenes, of vastly different spatial moments, compressed, expanded, bright, close.

And then there's this kitchen for some reason. Or so you think. Everything the interior design tries to hide, namely how unceasingly peculiar the house is, it is not entirely able to because the choices made here remain decadent, indulgent, albeit in a more familiar way.

Rare is it to discover an interior wherein one truly must wear sunglasses. The environment created in service to transparency has to somewhat prevent the elements from penetrating too deep while retaining their desirable qualities. I don't think an architect designed this house. An architect would have had access to specifically engineered products for this purpose. Whoever built this house had certain access to architectural catalogues but not those used in the highest end or most structurally complex projects. The customization here lies in the assemblage of materials and in doing so stretches them to the height of their imaginative capacity. To borrow from Charles Jencks, ad-hoc is a perfect description. It is an architecture of availability and of adventure.

A small interlude. We are outside. There is no rear exterior view of this house because it would be impossible to get one from the scrawny lawn that lies at its depths. This space is intended to serve the same purpose, which is to look upon the house itself as much as gaze from the house to the world beyond.

Living in a city, I often think about exhibitionism. Living in a city is inherently exhibitionist. A house is a permeable visible surface; it is entirely possible that someone will catch a glimpse of me they're not supposed to when I rush to the living room in only a t-shirt to turn out the light before bed. But this is a space that is only exhibitionist in the sense that it is an architecture of exposure, and yet this exposure would not be possible without the protection of the site, of the distance from every other pair of eyes. In this respect, a double freedom is secured. The window intimates the potential of seeing. But no one sees.

At the heart of this house lies a strange mix of concepts. Postmodern classicist columns of the Disney World set. The unpolished edge of the vernacular. There is also an organicist bent to the whole thing, something more Goff than Gaudí, and here we see some of the house's most organic forms, the monolith- or shell-like vanity mixed with the luminous artifice of mirrors and white. A backlit cave, primitive and performative at the same time, which is, in essence, the dialectic of the luxury bathroom.

And yet our McMansion Heaven is still a McMansion. It is still an accumulation of deliberate signifiers of wealth, very much a construction with the secondary purpose of invoking envy, a palatial residence designed without much cohesion. The presence of golf, of wood, of masculine and patriarchal symbolism with an undercurrent of luxury drives that point home. The McMansion can aspire to an art form, but there are still many levels to ascend before one gets to where God's sitting.

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[t4tails]

[mossmittens]

made this in july while on painkillers and unable to explain myself about anything. i'm a Castle Girl, so i wanted to hunt down the potential inspo for melini castle. these are three buildings (+ a town) that i personally believe kui might have used as reference.

note: none of these are wholly medieval constructions, but the medieval european aesthetic of dungeon meshi is pretty patchwork and surface-level.

[rimouskis]

Right now — perhaps this very second, even — we need to regain an ability to ask basic, reorienting questions: Where am I right now? What am I doing? Where are the others who can help me? Who are my neighbors? How can I be a neighbor to others? What’s going on in the world and how to I get out in the world to join in? Is what I’m reading harmful to me? If so, why do I feel a desire to harm myself?

this article isn't divinatory—it's not telling you anything you haven't thought before, I bet—but it still felt damn good to read. you should read it too.

[innerchildabortionclinic]

this has to be one of the worst interiors i've seen on r/McMansionhell

[bunabi]

girl your tags about the grey on white on grey are so real. i fuckin hate this trend in modern interior design but its like. did you know this all started with hgtv and their shitty 2010s interior shows? almost singlehandedly the popularity of one of their shows where the lead couple always repainted and reupholstered everything white changed the real estate market overnight, and then things started being painted white and grey solely bc real estate agents realized they could save money and not have to stage homes in real life if they could easily photoshop stock images of furniture in for online listings... mcmansionhell has a really good post on it. anyway all of this makes me think the whitegrey bland interiors boom is what capitalism does to interior design

wow I learned something new

[copperbadge]

happy book pub day! in celebration of Eddie’s wacky CA house making it to the officially-published page, I was curious if you saw the recent-ish McMansion Hell entry? (Link below, but if it doesn’t come through it’s the 2/1 McMansion Hell post titled “we’ve found it folks: mcmansion heaven”.) it’s…not QUITE Eddie’s house, but closer than I would have believed an irl house could get.

mcmansionhell . com/post/741171396971053056/weve-found-it-folks-mcmansion-heaven

Aw, thank you! And yes, LOL, that is actually pretty close to how I envisioned Eddie's weird California compound-mansion. I've seen homes like it before (not this one in specific, which is extra-wild) so I was kind of working off a model, although admittedly not on the beach in California. The logistics of the houses "on" the beach are highly unrealistic, but I plead "romance novel" on that one :D

(Thanks to @dignitywhatdignity who also tagged me on the post! I just couldn't get my shit together to reblog it.)

Santa Luna is one of the places in the books that I have at least mental snapshots of, despite the aphantasia, mainly because it's modeled on a combination of Santa Cruz (boardwalk, weird hippie town) and Half Moon Bay (small town, secluded, but now being colonized by techbros from San Francisco if the gossip I hear is to be believed). My grandparents lived in Half Moon Bay when I was growing up, so there's a very specific stretch of beach that I think of as "theirs" on which I placed Eddie's mansion, but fortunately, at least for now, the Half Moon Bay beach has low cliffs with huge swaths of grassland between the beach and the actual town. No monstrous A-frame houses yet :D

[thetrashthatsmilesback]

The real reason we haven't gotten a phouse tour yet is because they'd end up on r/mcmansionhell

[sronti]

@mcmansionhell írása egy elég tömör összefoglalása egy közeledő válságnak, ami alapjaiban változtathatja meg a világot.

[gimmick-blog-bracket]

Round 1: The Quarterquarterquartersemifinals

@ifitwasediblewouldyoueatit

(no propaganda submitted)

@mcmansionhell

“Entertaining and high effort, maybe even too good to be counted as a gimmick (also their writing on Wagner is really good, but, that's not on tumblr)”

[gregdotorg]

a young Ellsworth Kelly just walked by this house, saw these windows, and became an accountant

glam metal modern but also your contractor is going to jail dawg

Sometimes a house is so ugly, disgust boomerangs back into a form of respect.

This is a rare phenomenon, one which should be treated seriously. I've been looking at ugly houses professionally for almost a decade now and I can say with confidence that there are only a handful of true goose eggs that meet the mark. This house -- this remarkable, revolting house -- located, of all places, in Randolph County, North Carolina, is perhaps the finest goose egg a rogue and most certainly confused contractor could possibly lay.

Yeehaw, man. For the curious, the house is on the market for over 500 grand despite being badly sited and measly 2600 square feet. Most of that is devoted to the lawyer foyer which is not the choice I would personally make, but hey, to each their own.

Most of the houses on McMansion Hell these days are submissions from members of the McMansion Hell Patreon, either in our discord server or on our livestreams. This one, however was a total fluke. I came across it by accident because my brother is looking to move to the area in order to be closer to my folks. (I doubt he'd be interested in something this, uh, unique.)

Now, in all these years, I've never devoted an entire post to the exterior of a house. As they say, there's a first time for everything. There is so much going on with this house, all of it in direct opposition to the concept of taste, it requires a deeper investigation than the initial exterior image usually allows. (Also the entire interior is, as one might expect, entirely dark gray, complete with that awful washed out laminate flooring.)

(here is a sneak peek inside. the rest is not really important nor interesting.)

Anyway, without further ado, let's hit it from the top.

First off, no, I don't know what is inside this house's giant, hammerhead-esque forehead. It's not supported by anything so my assumption is, well, nothing. They put this in there for the sheer aesthetic love of the game.

Second, we have to talk about the siding. It's vinyl, and $500 grand is firmly in Hardie®™© Board territory. You can already start to see it ripple against the cornice, which is probably fine. The cornices are painted black in a cartoony, Roy Lichtenstein fashion, that is, if Roy Lichtenstein was drunk. The can lights are a nice touch. They help highlight important parts of the facade, such as:

The vinyl siding and black trim will continue until morale improves. Also, I zoomed out here to include the forehead (fivehead?) just because the scale is INSANE -- that's like a 50-50 wall-to-fivehead ratio. Honestly, even though things in the world are pretty dire, I wouldn't trust that cantilever with my life.

The window layout on this thing makes me wonder if the people who put it together have eyes that can see and a brain that connects to them. Now, I'm not going to invoke the Greek orders or anything, but I am going to say that every single architectural rule is being brazenly broken here. Total impunity. The window and door don't line up at the top, which is the bare minimum of common decency. Then there's that little guy pulling a Leeroy Jenkins up in the corner. You go dude.

The trim on these masses is starting to look AI generated but it's probably just the HDR every realtor uses. The FaceTune of the field. Anyway, I think it's a bad idea to put what looks like builder grade wood flooring on the outside of a house. It's giving mold. It's giving sunbleaching. It's giving Etsy.

As we can see, another familiar McMansion Hell enemy has also made an appearance: the prairie mullion window. There is no reason to use this window unless it involves building a fake bungalow, but the worst possible place to use it is in this particular situation. It's the only window with white mullions, it looks weird with the siding, and it's not exactly """modern""" or whatever this house is supposed to be.

(Often I wonder if some people believe that modernism is just "doing some stuff with squares" and the more squares there are the more modernist it is. Probably not true, but then again, I'm not the one pulling massive profit on houses that look like doo doo so jokes on me.)

Zooming out again because context still matters even in the most nonsensical situations. The funny thing about this house is that the only normal part of it is the front door and even then... what?? Also, look at that siding-less patch of brick on the right. As though to say: haha! Finally, I love how the stairs lead down into a bunch of rocks. Serves you right!

Thanks to advanced screenshotting technology, we can see that there are also prairie mullions on these other windows, it's just that they're a more reasonable black. Don't worry though, the windows are still offensive. They're two windows stuck together in order to give the impression of a single continuous one. (Remember the inside shot?) Nice try, bucko. Second, why don't the two windows meet where that little band of siding is? Well, we all know the answer to this question. (We don't, in fact, know the answer to this question.)

This is my favorite part of the house. It's almost good, to me, which is why I saved it for last. I have no idea what the hell that glossy composition book siding is but I love it. I've never seen it before. I also like how they're doing a weird entablature-quoin combo thing with it, but only on the right side of the house. There's some great five-cornice action going on but, thanks to the precedents set by truly mid postmodernism, it works.

Unfortunately there are some downsides here. What's the deal with that tiny, skinny stone? brick? veneer? Second, why is the siding just hanging off the edge like that? That whole little section where the three (four?) cladding meet is precipitous. The cheapo off-white developer special garage door with the little trad elements is a nice gesture, one that tells you life has no meaning. Why bother?

Anyway, after all that, if we put it all together again, we get this:

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Not into recurring payments? Try the tip jar! McMansion Hell stocks, much like mortgage-backed securities only ever go up!

[toxicanonymity]

I don’t know if @mcmansionhell is up your alley generally, but they had this photo of a ‘bath time cuck chair’ which made me think of you. Something something Miller Bros cucking a client in a McMansion, possibly making fun of build choices.

lmaoooo000 I was unaware of this blog. The Miller brothers come over to give this couple an estimate on renovations, and one thing leads to another.

"When's the last time that cuck chair was reupholstered?"

"What??"

"I know a cuck chair when I see one," Tommy says and opens the side table drawer to reveal lube and tissues.

"There's normally a different fee for this, but your wife is hot," Joel says as he unbuckles his belt. "You want her on the counter or in the tub?"

"Uhhh"

"Not you. Tommy, where you want her?"

[icarus-suraki]

Please forgive me a moment but oh my gaw... For just $1,600,000 this narco-chic house in beautiful Raleigh, NC, could be yours.

Excuse me while I get my @mcmansionhell on but oh. my gaw. There's a lot of repainting and staging in this one, but they can't hide all the beautiful, beautiful sins in this house. Personally I think the new owner should embrace this house as a lost set from Miami Vice or Scarface. Lean into the pastels, get 1980s furniture, add so many houseplants, and get your "greed is good" on.

tl;dr: this would be a great house to do cocaine in.

Also: mirrored toilet.

Knock knock! Mr. Montana? Are you in?

Built in 1988; 4 beds, 5 baths, 5360 square feet

Of course it has a lawyer foyer--kind of.

It's like a disbarred lawyer foyer. Crooked lawyer foyer.

That chandelier looks like a shower head leaking goo and I hate it.

Now we're getting into it:

The first of many, many mirrors.

The current owners have clearly repainted the whole place in "modern" colors but you can't fool us. We see that carpeted open-riser staircase that's just perfect for Michelle Pfeiffer as Elvira Hancock to saunter down before taking another bump of cocaine.

Oh here we go:

Is that... Is that...

YEAH IT IS, BITCH. THAT'S AN ETCHED MIRROR TWO-STORY FIREPLACE DEPICTING ATHENA SENDING FORTH HER OWL HOLY SHIT. And that's not the end of the mirrors and etchings in here either:

The etched glass. The columns. The weird ceiling.

It's a shame this is the only glimpse we get into the dining room because I fucking love the rando traditional chandelier in there. There are also double doors on the dining room and I believe they're etched too. I can just make out what looks like a peacock on one of them in the last fireplace photo.

Yes, they've done their best to stage this place with (slightly ironic) contemporary furniture, but it's not really proving that this house is anything besides a great place to do cocaine.

AHOY MATEY! Love the giant gold vase + bonus faded an art.

Yes, welcome to my home. Please stand under the tube of slime. (Seriously: paint that thing and make the glass green and it's 100% Nickelodeon.)

Love how the wall of the Disbarred Lawyer Foyer interrupts the weirdly traditional wrought iron bannisters. Seriously, wut?

Bedroom photos:

MORE MIRRORS FUCK YES. Honestly I do love the 1980s-does-art-deco fireplace. I could make it PoMo. Why did they un-80s this place? I weep.

What's that? You want EVEN MORE MIRRORS???

You could snort cocaine off almost ever surface in this house. Also I love the door for your bathroom elf there by the tub. He brings you more toilet paper when you run out.

Blah blah blah, there's also a sauna, don't care. MOVING ON: the mystery of the portholes is solved!

Awww, Tony Montana has a sewing room. He mends his own Hawaiian shirts.

Blah blah blah, STILL MORE MIRRORS in another one of the bedrooms...

I didn't mention the pool, did I? Well, there's a pool:

The back: another view of the pool in its concrete hellscape and the yard where you can keep your pet tiger.

But I've saved the best for last: the downstairs bathroom. Based on the reflection in the mirrors (plural, yes), I think this room is just behind the kitchen/bar, behind the wooden door. It's basically under the portholes.

Are you ready? Are you sure? Get your spoons and your straws ready because...

You can snort cocaine off any surface in this room.

The walls, the ceilings, the countertop, the toilet lid, anywhere. Imagine being drunk as hell and trying to use this bathroom. Imagine tripping balls and trying to use this bathroom.

I am speechless.

So thanks for stopping by on this tour of an Escobar-approved narco chic classic in beautiful Raleigh. Bye!!

[ontologicaltorment]

everytime i browse /r/mcmansionhell i lose all hope…. the ones that should really feel ashamed are the cowardly architects that don’t stand up to their new money clients