#i live in mcmansion hell

[icarus-suraki]

Look at the fucking massing on this fucking McMansion.

I'm gonna...yartz...

[mcmansionhell]

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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[mementokorie]

oh shit catching up on McMansion Hell for the first time in a few months thanks to that little detour and, OH, my god,, the genius. the poetry. my soul.

[uh-mxtx]

Modern-au Binghe who inherits Tianglang-jun’s massive fuck off mansion with like 4000 rooms after living on the streets/foster system after his adoptive mom died (idk i just need him to have big house) and he goes “what the hell am I supposed to do with this” and Meng mo (cant be a demon here ive decided he’s a weird homeless guy who gives him advice. That or a schizophrenic hallucination) goes “fill it with women” and binghe who knows he is gay goes “no”

But then he hears some girls complaining about the safety of some of the campus housing/thier boyfriend or parents kicked them out/ect and he’s like “well, i can fix that” and offers his mcmansion up as apartments. He’s loaded so he barely asks for rent and he just keeps inviting women in hard times, like his mother used to be.

But his real calling is cooking so he keeps feeding his tenants and asking what they like. He’s got a youtube cooking/home ec channel and they’re his taste testers. And they start inviting their freinds over like “hey wanna meet our big gay himbo landlord who feeds us” and their freinds are like “boy do I”

Binghe is absolutely gleefull about this. More people to feed. Fuck yeah he gets to be housewife. The gossip sessions are unmatched. He ends up making a full banquet every night and you can either show up in your pj’s or a ballgown to match the decor.

And eventually all this snowballs and hes got a whole sorority in his mcmansion. and they casually call him husband/boyfreind/sugar daddy as a joke bc Binghe is JACKED and they can get rid of men real fast if they pull their six foot seven guard dog out of the crowd. For the sign off/video end the taste testers on Binghe’s show kiss his cheeks as thanks. Binghe doesn’t know half the people in his house. Some girl he never met (came out of SHL’s room and is COVERED in hickeys) just smacked his ass and stole a stack of pancakes. He doesn’t even react he just makes more. This is the best for his touch starvation.

And oblivious people(you know who) dont realize most of them are lesbians using him as a beard, (ignoring the makeouts and pride flags in the background of some videos) and they absolutely believe Luo Binghe seduced a crowd of women into a harem by the power of cooking, cleaning, and great sex.

Cough cough, Shen Yuan

[hometoursandotherstuff]

Sometimes, a home like this 1996 build in Peachtree City, GA has a sweet surprise in store for you. $899K isn't a bad price for this large 5bd, 6ba home, but it's the secret surprise that makes it worth it. Check this out.

The entrance to your usual, open concept, McMansion. It does have lovely wainscoting, though.

Off to the side is this cozy red room with a fireplace and checkered floor.

Lots of columns are around the open living/dining combo.

I like the wainscoting, built-ins, fireplace, inlaid flooring, and mezzanine.

Nice cabinetry. The kitchen is very spread out and opens to a huge sun porch.

Let's go upstairs and get to the main attraction.

But, first, the primary bedroom. Nice walls and ceiling.

En suite and closet.

It's this room- it's probably meant to be a child's room w/en-suite.

The en-suite has a small, child-sized door.

It's not your usual cubby, either.

There's a whole n'other room in here and it's huge.

Now, this is a kid's room. I would've lost my mind if I had a room like this.

To be a rich kid, huh? Hell, I'd like it even now.

The man cave ain't bad, either. Beautiful paneling.

Is that a library with a safe?

2nd kitchen with dining area.

And, check out the lady cave craft room.

Is this a dance studio w/a wine closet? That's a barre on the wall and the mirror, but why would they put a wine closet in here? Unless it's for shoes.

Outside has beautiful grounds on a .53 acre lot.

https://www.zillow.com/homedetails/305-The-Enclave-Peachtree-City-GA-30269/14607968_zpid/?

[intheholler]

This might be a bit of a random and tangety question, but I was wondering if y’all also experience the erasure of people already livin’ in areas about to be or in the process of gentrification.

Cause I’m from the Mornington peninsula, this relatively mid sized region in Australia, some of it can be pretty rural, over all we have a population density of 230 per square km (which is 88 per square mile??) which is mostly because of the few bigger population centres.

Anyhow when I was growin’ up the ninch (as we call it) was seen as this largely poor, backwards, farming/fishing region full of conservatives who hated outsiders or somethin’ (to be honest the last part is correct)

But these days a lot of people have shifted from viewing people on the ninch from backwards hill dwellers to… not even existing?

A lot of our towns are seen as desirable as holiday realestate but this hasn’t rehabilitated people from the ninch in the eye’s of outsiders but instead they just ignore that we are even here, and that they are displacin’ us.

Does this happen in gentrified parts of Appalachia or are outsiders still hostile to locals?

i definitely do still notice hostility, but in a way, it can absolutely be framed as them just... not seeing us, like you said. they aggressively want to scrub clean the culture n the people to get to the pretty parts, to the point where, no, they don't consider us unless they're looking down on us as they "clean up the place."

ppl will come here n complain about how UnSaFe it is cause they hear guns going off in the woods with ppl just mindin their business, hunting on their own land or just shootin having fun. they come here n mock our accents and the way we live, pearl clutching bc they have to drive two hours away to get to a Target. then they just start filling in the commercial gaps instead of accepting that just aint how we live here. things like that.

basically, they want a pretty lil mountain view out the back of their vacation home, but they don't actually want the mountains; they want it to be like where they came from. hell, sometimes they dont even want the view. theyll flatten ridges to build their mcmansions instead. so, no, gentrification definitely hasn't redeemed appalachians in the eye of the general public that flock here, either.

anyway, solidarity <3 sounds like there's a lot in common between our region and yours

[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

[drdemonprince]

i work in food delivery and have taken to fingering my ass before taking the food bag to the doors of people who live in mcmansions with teslas parked out front but tip me peanuts. i keep hand sanitizer and disinfectant wipes to use afterwards and am very careful not to to touch anything else until i get to my next pickup and can wash my hands ¯\_(ツ)_/¯

hell yeah

[beechersnope]

short preview of a thing that's in itself a small part of a longer thing

***

They'd decided to do fully matching costumes this year instead of contrasting costumes with a similar theme. Lando had splurged on them, hiring someone on Etsy to handmake shimmering metallic bodysuits with glow-in-the-dark circuitry and fully functional LED buttons that littered the colored panels of both the front and back of the suit, along the breastplate and hips, down each arm, and along the length of the spine. The only difference between the two is the color: Lando’s bodysuit is a pearlescent fuchsia while Oscar’s is a shimmering teal.

The silvery face paint and white iris contact lenses pushes it over the top—in Oscar’s opinion, Lando has gone so far that even with the skintight bodysuits, they are firmly in the realm of scary versus sexy.

“I don’t think you’re going to get laid this year,” Oscar tells Lando honestly, turning to find a matching cyborg face staring back at her.

“There’s a zipper in the crotch,” Lando counters, the implication going miles over her head. “Easy access. I planned ahead.”

Oscar just turns back to Lando’s vanity and lets out a soft sigh.

The party is in full swing by the time they arrive at Daniel’s mountainside—well, Oscar still doesn’t like calling it a mansion, but calling it a McMansion seems worse, even if that’s exactly what it is. Regardless, they have to park halfway down the narrow street at the very end of a line of cars that spills out of Daniel’s already outrageously expansive driveway.

Oscar eyes Lando’s beat-up Toyota with a dubious frown, slightly worried that the parking brake won’t hold its own against a seven-percent incline.

Lando doesn’t seem similarly concerned, locking the doors with a carefree whistle and then tossing her keys as well as both their cellphones into her purse. Their bodysuits might have crotch access, but they sure as hell don’t have pockets.

By the time they ascend the foothill Daniel’s house sits atop, where it overlooks the tiny city in the valley below, Oscar is somehow sweating from exertion and yet freezing all at the same time.

The front door is wide open, and inside, the soft orange overhead lights that Oscar remembers from her previous visits have all been switched out with black light bulbs instead. The décor is different, too. It looks like Daniel plundered an entire warehouse full of Halloween kitsch to achieve the effect he’s gone for, which seems to be turning his entire house into a walk-through haunted house experience.

Oscar follows Lando closely as they move from the foyer—which has ghoulish portraits that shift between scenes, reminiscent of the Haunted Mansion at Disneyland—into the living room—which is now a museum of cryptid taxidermy, around which partygoers converse with glowing concoctions in their hands, though Oscar spies more than one couple with their hands down each other’s pants as she and Lando traverse the room.

They finally find Daniel in the kitchen: presently, a mad scientist’s laboratory, complete with bubbling potions and blinking machinery lining the walls. And of course, Daniel, as the host and de facto bartender, is dressed as none other than the mad scientist himself.

He looks elated when he glances up to find Lando and Oscar standing in front of him at the island in the middle of the room after waiting for the half-dozen people in front of them to be served first.

“Can I get you ladies something to drink?” he asks with a broad grin. “I don’t mean to brag, but I make a mean mojito.”

Oscar’s heart jumps a beat. It’s impossible to tell from Daniel’s expression or tone whether he meant to use the phrase they agreed upon previously, but just in case he had— “Yes,” Oscar says emphatically as she scoots a bit closer to the bar. “I’d love something to drink.” She’s aware of Lando giving her a strange look, but Oscar ignores it, focused entirely on the brief flash of recognition that crosses Daniel’s face. Even if he hadn’t intended to ask her permission, he now knows he has it.

[silver-wield]

Everyone except Tifa pushes cloud around, invades his personal space, and laughs at his discomfort. Especially aerith. You can see how annoyed cloud gets when she gets pushy with him. I think he feels he's been treated like a kid

Tifa on the other hand always asks clouds opinion, gives him space, always makes sure if he wants to do something before going forward, and most importantly respects him.

Aeriths never been my favorite but I liked her in remake despite her flaws. Now after reading totp and seeing her latest shenanigans in rebirth trailers I find her extremely annoying, privileged, spoiled and bland. She has zero respect for other peoples personal space, always tries to get her way with everything. Sure she has a good heart but her behavior is toxic

And she says her life has been at least as bumpy as tifas. At least?

Aerith's deluded.

She wasn't tormented or anything in the Shinra building because Ifalna protected her. Then she spent 15 years living like a privileged princess in a McMansion with a bunch of bodyguards and didn't even have to work.

Tifa had a normal upbringing and then five years of hell living in a shipping crate, being taken advantage of by assholes, losing her family, home, all her possessions and even all the muscles and skills she gained. She even almost died.

There's no comparison.

Aerith is as deluded as her stupid ass fans.

[qwertyu858]

Its actually kinda interesting to see a post in mexican social media and realize you live in a complete different reality than a lot of those people

Like I have read a bunch of posts about the eternal question about if moving or staying is the right answer. Inmigrating is perhaps one of the top three questions in a lot of mexican social media

And well, there is always a bunch of guys talking about how actually moving outside the country isnt that great (which is fair, I agree you shouldnt put a country on a pedestal and believe its perfect, bc you will get dispointed), and then, in their reasons list, a lot of them are like "yeah, its safe but what you earn is not worth the expenses bc you will have to live in an apartment instead of a mcmansion, you will not be able to go vacationing to europe every three months and you cant no longer have a stay at home maid".

Like bitch, I dont own a house anyways, I cant pay for vacations outside mexico and I dont have (and cant even pay for) a regular maid, even less one that stays at the house that I dont own. Like tell me real reasons about why I shouldnt move, like idk, perhaps its actually unsafe as hell or perhaps I will get hatecrimed or perhaps that I will never manage to see my family in years or the cultural shock will make me feel lonely and depressed or literal any other stuff that matter

[icarus-suraki]

Really tempted to a McMansion Hell homage with this incredibly fucking weird McMansion, built in 2014, six bedrooms, nine bathrooms. You could shit for days!!

[mcmansionhell]

namesake mcmansion

Howdy folks! Today's McMansion is very special because a) we're returning to Maryland after a long time and b) because the street this McMansion is on is the same as my name. (It was not named after me.) Hence, it is my personal McMansion, which I guess is somewhat like when people used to by the name rights to stars even though it was pretty much a scam. (Shout out btw to my patron Andros who submitted this house to be roasted live on the McMansion Hell Patreon Livestream)

As far as namesake McMansions go, this one is pretty good in the sense that it is high up there on the ol' McMansion scale. Built in 2011, this psuedo-Georgian bad boy boasts 6 bedrooms and 9.5 baths, all totaling around 12,000 square feet. It'll run you 2.5 million which, safe to say, is exponentially larger than its namesake's net worth.

Now, 2011 was an anonymous year for home design, lingering in the dead period between the 2008 black hole and 2013 when the market started to actually, finally, steadily recover. As a result a lot of houses from this time basically look like 2000s McMansions but slightly less outrageous in order to quell recession-era shame.

I'm going to be so serious here and say that the crown molding in this room is a crime against architecture, a crime against what humankind is able to accomplish with mass produced millwork, and also a general affront to common sense. I hate it so much that the more I look at it the more angry I become and that's really not healthy for me so, moving on.

Actually, aside from the fake 2010s distressed polyester rug the rest of this room is literally, basically Windows 98 themed.

I feel like the era of massive, hefty sets of coordinated furniture are over. However, we're the one's actually missing out by not wanting this stuff because we will never see furniture made with real wood instead of various shades of MDF or particleboard ever again.

This is a top 10 on the scale of "least logical kitchen I've ever seen." It's as though the designers engineered this kitchen so that whoever's cooking has to take the most steps humanly possible.

Do you ever see a window configuration so obviously made up by window companies in the 1980s that you almost have to hand it to them? You're literally letting all that warmth from the fire just disappear. But whatever I guess it's fine since we basically just LARP fire now.

Feminism win because women's spaces are prioritized in a shared area or feminism loss because this is basically the bathroom vanity version of women be shopping? (It's the latter.)

I couldn't get to all of this house because there were literally over a hundred photos in the listing but there are so many spaces in here that are basically just half-empty voids, and if not that then actually, literally unfinished. It's giving recession. Anyway, now for the best part:

Not only is this the NBA Backrooms but it's also just a nonsensical basketball court. Tile floors? No lines? Just free balling in the void?

Oh, well I bet the rear exterior is totally normal.

Not to be all sincere about it but much like yours truly who has waited until the literal last second to post this McMansion, this house really is the epitome of hubris all around. Except the house's hubris is specific to this moment in time, a time when gas was like $2/gallon. It's climate hubris. It's a testimony to just how much energy the top 1% of income earners make compared to the rest of us. I have a single window unit. This house has four air conditioning condensers. That's before we get to the monoculture, pesticide-dependent lawn or the three car garage or the asphalt driveway or the roof that'll cost almost as much as the house to replace. We really did think it would all be endless. Oops.

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[velvetvexations]

I usually like your non discourse posts but that mirror shine BMW makes me want to go outside and let down every tyre on my street.

I'm unfortunately superficial as hell. Growing up it was my dream, as a poor person, to live in a McMansion like the upper class folk around here do. My only real limit is gold-plating guns and that's mostly just because it's cliché.

[caffeineandsociety]

The thing that gets me about the whole gendered terms discussion is-

I am a firm believer in the idea that any word can be used in a gender-neutral way. I am one of the people who fully does not care what gendered terms someone uses on me as long as it's not being done as a means of talking down to me or some shit. I live in California, so almost 90% of nouns and a good number of interjections can be replaced with "dude" by default. I don't mind being the subject of "bro"-romanticism OR the entity invoked with "girl help".

But if someone asks me not to use terms that are associated with a gender that is not theirs, I'm...going to respect that, no questions asked, and it's fucking baffling to me that people will insist they're totally not transphobic while refusing to do that, because-

What do you do when your cis male coworker doesn't want to be called "dude?" When your cis female classmate doesn't want to be called "sis"? When your friend doesn't like the nickname you came up with for them? What do you do when a cis friend isn't comfortable with terms that are sometimes gendered, sometimes gender-neutral, specifically because their sometimes-gender doesn't match?

It's not inherently a fucking gender thing, it's a matter of not calling people things they don't like to be called, which is a completely neutral matter of common decency! You shouldn't do that to ANYONE!

Why is "but I mean it as a gender-neutral thing" a defense for INSISTING it's your divine right to call a trans woman "dude" or "bro" or "buddy"? Why is it, less frequently but at a very much non-zero rate, an excuse for INSISTING you should be allowed to call trans men "girl" or "sis" or "princess"? Why is it that with cis people* you will gladly respect what they do or do not want to be called for any reason including absolutely none, but trans people just have to "get over themselves" and accept that it's totally a gender neutral thing and you WILL keep calling them whatever you want?

How can you hold that double standard if not just straight up fucking transphobia?

*Not to say that ALL cis people are respected this way - if I had a dollar for every time a Black cis male friend or family member has complained about some white asshole in a position of authority INSISTING on calling him "buddy" no matter how much he asks them to stop as a way of modernizing the use of "boy" as a racist slur, I would be able to buy us a McMansion to live in as a group - but that only strengthens the point: the only reason not to respect what someone does or does not want to be called is because you think they're beneath you for some reason. It's a way of flexing power. It is a very explicit display of disrespect.

So stop fucking doing it and just call people what they want to be fucking called, fucking hell were you raised in a fucking barn????

[rigginsstreet]

Billy who was fucking some McMansion dwelling trust fund baby back in Cali moving to Hawkins and going to Steve’s house for a party after hearing of his legacy and being like “I am NOT impressed” and Steve’s wondering how this bitch has the audacity to judge because he knows what street billy lives on what the hell does he know