McMansion connoisseur Kate Wagner (previously at BB) has found the ultimate example of the genre: "we've found it folks: mcmansion heaven". She anticipates that you will see the above photograph and assume hyperbole. But no, you haven't seen anything yet. — Read the rest
Vlogger Aaron Vankampen goes around to expensive houses with opulent cars in the driveway, knocks on the door, and asks the occupants what they do for a living. It's hard to believe people are willing to even speak to him, especially since he is videotaping them. — Read the rest
Some professional athlete with too much money and too few financial advisors built an insane mega-mansion and soon abandoned it because of the undoubtedly mind-boggling upkeep costs. The house has an indoor pool, bowling alley, movie theater, and regulation basketball court. — Read the rest
The latest installment of the always-delightful McMansion Hell (previously) departs from the usual format of mercilessly skewering the tasteless custom homes of the contemporary super-rich and instead delves into their historic precedent, the 1970s-vintage "proto-McMansion," AKA the "Styled Ranch."
Last year, McMansion Hell (previously) inaugurated its annual gingerbread McMansion competition, inviting America's bakers to challenge themselves to build the largest, most ostentatious, most ill-conceived McMansion in gingerbread form.
It's hard to believe, but the latest installment of McMansion Hell's (previously) tour through the architectural monstrosities of America's tastleless elites is even better than the previous ones — possibly that's because in this edition, editor/critic Kate Wagner is visiting Virginia's Fairfax and Loudoun Counties, these being affluent DC suburbs where beltway bandits and other swamp-dwellers make their dens.
McMansion Hell (previously) continues to tear through America's most affluent ZIP codes with trenchant commentary on realtors' listings for terrible monster homes; in the current edition, critic Kate Wagner visits Campbell County, Wyoming, home to some of the most ill-considered monstrosities in America. — Read the rest
McMansion Hell (previously) rounds up the ten stupidest megahomes of Waukesha County, Wisconsin ("perhaps one of the most underrated McMansion counties in the country"), which is such a target-rich environment that proprietor Kate Wagner couldn't "choose just one to do a takedown of."
It all seemed so innocent when architecture grad student Kate Wagner started pushing her charming brand of millennial snark on us with her acerbic critiques of gaudy, poorly executed monster homes, but architecture is no laughing matter.
Yesterday, federal authorities announced 50 indictments of college personnel, wealthy parents, and fixers who ran a multi-million-dollar bribery ring that ensured that the slow, plodding, undeserving fruit of wealthy grifters' loins could be admitted to the top universities in America.
Last month, he amazing architecture-snark criticism site McMansion Hell (previously) announced gingerbread house contest to create "the most nubtastic, gawdawful gingerbread McMansion in all of McMansion Hell!"
Kate "McMansion Hell" Wagner (previously) has put out a call for "the most nubtastic, gawdawful gingerbread McMansion in all of McMansion Hell!" (no styrofoam or support materials allowed) with prizes starting at $200 and a t-shirt and 3 pins from the McMansion Hell store.
Kate "McMansion Hell" Wagner is carrying $42,000 in student debt; heiress Betsy "Marie Antoinette" DeVos is the anti-public-school advocate whom Donald Trump put in charge of the nation's public schools, and one of her first official acts was to end the rules limiting sleazy student debt-collection tactics, even as Trump was ending debt relief for students defrauded by diploma mills (like, say, Trump University).
As far back as 2012, UCLA researchers were publishing studies that showed that Americans basically never used their "formal spaces" — dining rooms, "great rooms" and parlours — instead, they spend most of their time in the kitchen and the "informal" den.
On the first anniversary of its triumph over Zillow's censorious attempt at copyfraud, McMansion Hell is back and better than ever.
Update: Zillow has dropped all its absurd copyright claims after hearing from EFF and McMansion Hell is coming back!
The Electronic Frontier Foundation has published its letter to Zillow, explaining in eye-watering detail how wrong the company was to threaten the McMansion Hell blog over its use of realtors' glam-shots of shitty houses. — Read the rest
McMansion Hell is a hilarious blog where Johns Hopkins Peabody Institute graduate student Kate Wagner posts scorching critiques of the architecture of McMansions — but this week, Wagner announced that she had shut down her blog after spurious legal threats from Zillow, which admits that it doesn't even hold the copyrights to the images it wants Wagner to stop using.
Between the Reagan years and the crash of 2008, developers absorbed the skyrocketing wealth of the 1% with monuments to bad taste and ostentation: the McMansion.
Mark and Brenda Voss learned that the 5,300-square-foot vacation house they built at a cost of $680,000 "actually sits on the lot next to the one they own in the gated Ocean Hammock resort community" of Daytona Beach. The result? Lots of lawyers and finger-pointing.
Disney is building a bunch of multi-million-dollar McMansions in a gate-guarded suburb on the grounds of Walt Disney World. It's the latest in a series of urbanist experiments stretching back to the original vision Walt had for the Florida property — the Experimental Prototype Community of Tomorrow, or EPCOT. — Read the rest
