Kate Wagner of McMansion Hell found a large home for sale in the Chicago suburbs. This one was built in 2001 at the height of the McMansion craze and it shows. It has a large lot, but that is no reason to build a 12,700 house on it. I mean, there are reasons to build a very large house, like if you have a family of twenty people, but that reasonably means more normal-sized rooms, except for a large dining room. In this case, the rooms are just huge for the sake of being huge. Sure, it has five bedrooms and 7.5 bathrooms, but they are all larger than is practical. That means it will be hard to regulate the temperature, especially with super-large windows without blinds or draperies. And where do you find furniture big enough to make it look normal?
But that's just the beginning of the details that Wagner points out for us in this home. Not only is her takedown funny, but all her criticisms of McMansions teach us new details about architecture, style, balance, and usability. Most of us could see a home like this and dismiss it for being hard to heat, hard to clean, and too pretentious, but she can explain exactly why big, pretentious, yet cheaply built houses can creep us out. See the latest carnage at McMansion Hell.