McMansions: Dude, Pimp My House
October 27, 2008 – 4:31 pm by Andrew Paul Wood
McMansions are metastasizing all over New Zealand, fruiting like fungi on any empty land adjacent to a lake, seacoast or golf course. They clot the hillsides of Sumner, the upper tiers of Queenstown, and in certain suburbs of Auckland, any villa without a heritage protection order is fair game to be torn down and “upsized”.
The term arose in the United States back in the big hair, greed-is-good 1980s. It describes gigantic, cheaply mass-produced houses, typically on small land lots, of shoddy construction (hence the ‘leaky homes’ fiasco) and monotonous similarity. They have other names too: Garage Mahals, Faux Châteaux and Parachute Homes (as if the building had just dropped down overnight like an alien invader in the age of in-fill).
McMansions began arriving in Australasia in the 1990s. In Melbourne they are known as Toorak wedding cakes. In Sydney, tract suburbs quickly sprang up with streets being named for the trees bulldozed to build them. These gated developments (sometimes known as “privatopias”) were rapidly fueled by self-made arrivistes fleeing the Western Suburbs for a slice of off-the-peg luxury. This trend was quickly echoed in ever Sydney-struck Auckland and spread like bird flu.
Essentially McMansions are what Ty Pennington on Extreme Makeover: Home Edition gives to the deserving poor in an attempt to assuage middle class America’s guilt about end-game capitalism. You start with an enormous Gib-board box and stick bits to it to make it look baronial, and then slather it with stucco. Often they are disparate mixtures of Mock Tudorbethan, Victorian Colonial, Pride-and-Prejudice Georgian, Mexican Hacienda and whatever makes you feel good. At the more extravagant end, you arrive at a tasteless orgy of dormers, gables, Palladian windows and neoclassical feature porches (complete with columns). In fact, gables are essential – they are the archetypal symbol of the home. Remember the opening credits for Playschool?
The bloated size of such buildings doesn’t leave much room for a garden. There may be some a small Mediterranean courtyard with some terracotta pots in back. More expensive versions may have a pool and spa, but your back deck will almost certainly be less than four meters from your neighbour’s back deck. The front garden will be strictly stock landscaping plants like pin oak, agapanthus and severely nip/tucked pyracanth. In the US they go in for transplanted mature trees. These are exclusively male to prevent fruit dropping on the SUV, but this has lead to terrible pollen-induced epidemics of hay fever. There will almost certainly be a gargantuan three-door garage to house the two-to-three cars, ride-on lawn mower and boat. The driveway will be stenciled concrete – possibly stained terracotta, and there will almost certainly be a feature letterbox.
Despite the fact the front door will be some enormous brass-and-oak confection surrounded by columns and a stained-glass fanlight window, it will hardly ever be used. The house is primarily entered from the garage or the open plan kitchen-casual living room. But were you to open the front door, you would probably find yourself in what American critics call a ‘lawyer foyer’, complete with reconstituted marble, tiles, chandelier, and a feature staircase fit for Eva Peron. You could be looking at anything between $80 000 for a suburban start-up castle to $2 million for a five bedroom lakeside Xanadu.
Now I wouldn’t want you to think I was an elitist snob. It is natural enough to want to announce your success, and it is the Kiwi dream to be a homeowner. What I want to do is to strike a blow for architecture as an art – for the McMansion is not the product of an architect’s vision.
“Well-building hath three conditions,” wrote the humanist Sir Henry Wotton in 1624, “Commodity, Firmness and Delight.” By “Commodity”, Wotton meant that a building should suit its purpose and its inhabitant’s needs. I am not convinced this is the case with McMansions, which seem to dictate so much the lifesyles of those who live in it. The sheer size of a McMansion makes it a difficult prospect to heat and keep clean. Essentially they are the house equivalent of a gass-guzzling American SUV. The design of McMansions with their acreage big windows (glass is cheaper than brick), proximity to other houses and lack of concealing verdure or garden to act as a buffer, also rather seems to defy the purpose of a house – ie, to offer privacy from the outside world. What you do, in fact, wind up with, is an inability to monitor what your kids are up to at the other end of the house.
“Firmness” refers to the durability of construction, and in the case of many McMansions, any solidity is vinyl veneer thin. Sound carries. Hollow wooden doors offer little in the way of security. Previous shoddy construction resulted in a plague of leaky houses costing their owners and the country an obscene amount of money. Most of the materials used are the cheapest – plastic and polystyrene – to off-set the expense of the house’s scale. Most McMansions are not designed to last more than twenty years in the expectation that you or someone else will tear it down before then and build something even bigger and flashier.
Finally Delight. Now I concede delight is a personal thing, and that some people might get a kick out roofs without eaves or proper guttering, near-identical buildings lacking any aesthetic sense of balance and proportion, or buildings that completely fail to fit the character of their environment. A concrete hacienda just looks stupid in most New Zealand settings. I don’t (and nor to a number of disgruntled residents of the leafier suburbs, I imagine). I see them as further symptoms of a dehumanizing market-research-driven world. Architects are being driven out of domestic building.
Nikolaus Pevsner, the preeminent architectural historian of the mid-twentieth century coined it exactly. “A bicycle shed,” he said “is a building, Lincoln Cathedral is a piece of architecture.” After all, one does not consult a GP for brain surgery. Pevsner visited these shores in 1958. This event was most notable for resulting in a heated argument with architect William Toomath over the merits of a carport column. What Toomath saw as pragmatic and straightforward, Pevsner saw as crude and rough. Personally, I wouldn’t waste my breath over a carport, but the argument suggests the birth of a specifically New Zealand architecture, and I would posit that both points of view have merit in relation to it. Admittedly New Zealand vernacular architecture has evolved from untutored sheds and the like, but this has been adapted by architects to give an aesthetic sense of completeness and satisfaction. Emphasis on natural materials and simplicity in a wooden villa or rammed earth home seems to me far more decorous than a scaled-down gingerbread version of Chatsworth or Hampton Court rammed into the other half of someone’s quarter acre. After all, most of the people who lived in such places were merely inbred educated brutes with titles and estates.
Overseas, the McMansion is slowly falling out of fashion in favour of smaller, better built, more environmentally conscious, balanced buildings in a human scale. Many American towns have introduced size-restricting covenants to maintain the character of their communities. I’m not advocating that – it seems a bit draconian and undemocratic, but the day is not too far off when we will see a similar backlash here.
This is a plea for modesty, humanism, good design and the environment. This is a plea for a New Zealand architecture for New Zealanders. Size isn’t everything.
