All this negative talk about McMansions hurts my feelings. Because I live in one. It is not without its charm, even though “Modern Tudor” (as I like to call it) is not necessarily my favorite kind of house. I live here because it is my husband’s dream home, even though Modern Tudor is not necessarily his favorite kind of house. It’s one of those houses built on the street you grew up on smack dab in the woods you grew up in, ruining those woods–unless you move into the house and the woods become your yard–which is what we did. It might not be big enough to qualify as a McMansion, but you get the idea. It’s new and open and made of stucco and stacked rocks. It’s probably just how you are picturing it. It has no “character.” It is not mid-century modern.
I grew up in a hundred-year-old house surrounded by orchards. It had nooks and crannies and a ditch and. . . bricks! I loved that house. I lived in a basement with 2-foot-thick cement walls and nary a piece of texturized sheet rock in sight. I wanted an old house. I am drawn to charm and originality and history. But this house was available and we were lucky to get it–at an auction, no less! So that’s kind of charming. It will be a great story someday. The kind of story old people can tell about their 1950s houses now. They had to be new sometime, right?
I hope and fully expect that years from now McMansions will become quaint and sought after. Just like the once-maligned, now-embraced split-levels of the 1970s. One of my neighbors told me that they brought pieces of my house in on a truck. It was pre-fabricated to some degree. It was a kit house. If you pooh-pooh McMansions that probably makes you think, “Ugh.” But what if it were the 30s and it was a Sears kit home? Suddenly it’s so charming and awesome and you love it! Buying a house from Sears 80 years ago just has a certain cachet that, say, buying a Dyson from them now lacks. Oh well. I love my house. And I understand the backlash. It’s just that, well, there are real people living in those McMansions. People who don’t know how to fix old things when they break. People just like me.
Remember, if you live in a Glass Box house you shouldn’t throw stones.
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