There's a method to the McMansion madness: the houses are designed in a sort of modular style that assumes the owners will regularly reconfigure and remodel to keep up with the latest trends.
Kitchen out of date? Gut the kitchen module and replace the parts. Home theaters are out, and home gyms are in? Gut the theater module and reconfigure it into a gym. Sticks-and-drywall construction can be demolished and rebuilt in practically a day. Room "pods" can be torn down, merged, or separated at will, with little impact on the livability of the rest of the house. There's a lot more (ostensible) flexibility in an amorphous blob of room modules than there is in attempting to maintain a coherent, symmetrical, balanced architecture. The traditional house is a fixture; the McMansion is a living, changing, multicellular organism.
McMansion developers aren't selling houses; they're selling services. All of this runs parallel to, and feeds off of, the macro-social trend favoring interiors over exteriors. People care more about kitchen appliances and countertop surfaces than they do about architecture. It's crass, tasteless, and economically silly. But it's the prevailing culture. And it's designed to keep selling things.
McMansions aren't bought by the rich. Mansions are.
McMansions are an exercise in echoing certain features of the latter on the cheap, but they are primarily an embodiment of social positioning within the upper middle class.
Exactly correct. McMansions are expressions of middle-class "success" yet are often just "normal" cheap houses built on a bigger scale -- same contractor-grade fittings and finishes.
For example, I bet you'd rarely see actual Venetian plaster in a McMansion, but you'd see a "faux finish" version of it. McMansions are movie sets and the owners are playing a "role" of a "successful" person/family.
> McMansions are movie sets and the owners are playing a "role" of a "successful" person/family.
Ah, I love that. Applies to so many people I know. Well, at least, it DID apply to them before they lost their McMansion and, in some cases, went bankrupt.
That pew study is income relative to worldwide range, which is fairly pointless in this context. Nobody is talking about upper/middle class boundaries in these terms, and McMansions are largely a US (North American?) phenomena.
Any family in the US with a very low six figure household income (or even a very high five figure) can choose to finance a McMansion. They are not rich by US standards.
That's only for America (and maybe Australia/NZ? I wouldn't know at least). Most houses in Europe are solid brick on the outside, and solid concrete walls on the inside. Not something you remodel in a day.
Kitchen out of date? Gut the kitchen module and replace the parts. Home theaters are out, and home gyms are in? Gut the theater module and reconfigure it into a gym. Sticks-and-drywall construction can be demolished and rebuilt in practically a day. Room "pods" can be torn down, merged, or separated at will, with little impact on the livability of the rest of the house. There's a lot more (ostensible) flexibility in an amorphous blob of room modules than there is in attempting to maintain a coherent, symmetrical, balanced architecture. The traditional house is a fixture; the McMansion is a living, changing, multicellular organism.
McMansion developers aren't selling houses; they're selling services. All of this runs parallel to, and feeds off of, the macro-social trend favoring interiors over exteriors. People care more about kitchen appliances and countertop surfaces than they do about architecture. It's crass, tasteless, and economically silly. But it's the prevailing culture. And it's designed to keep selling things.