Posted on 3 November 2016

99% Invisible talks to Kate Wagner about just what it is about McMansions that is so grating. There’s a lot of reasons, but I found this one illuminating:

“According to Kate, the age of the McMansion saw the shift of the house from a place that we live in, potentially for the rest of our lives, to an asset that we are decidedly not supposed to live in forever.
“‘People started designing their houses with the notion of selling them in mind. Realtors would advise ‘oh, I wouldn’t buy or do this because then the house isn’t going to sell very well.’
‘So we sort of devised this culture where we thought about selling our houses before we spent one night in them.'”

When I was buying a house the focus seemed to be on potential resell value rather than, you know, what it would be like to actually live there.

Filed under: design