Howdy folks! In honor of Halloween, here are some of the scariest houses currently for sale in the ever-cursed suburbs of Washington, DC. It’s been awhile since I checked in on this particular hotspot, and once more, it did not disappoint.
I’ll just get this one out of the way. Long-time McMansion Hell-heads are well aware of this monster estate in Potomac, MD, once allegedly owned by a particular professional athlete who will not be named, because the house should suck on its own merit. The only nice thing I can say about this house is that the designers kept the materials and colors consistent, which adds some unity to what is, in reality, five turrets in a trench coat.
Some things, the economists tell us, are too big to fail. This is not one of them. Let’s move on.
Many McMansions exist to mock the concept of architectural consistency and historical continuity. This is one of them. About every single type of expanded second-story window elaboration exists here: bay window, covered balcony, juliet balcony. None of them work. The house can’t decide if its 19th century eclecticism or tony DC Georgian/Federal cocktail. The random cupola merely adds insult to injury.
I don’t know where realtors learned how to do photoshop, but whoever taught them should have their Adobe licenses revoked. There’s a certain type of McMansion I call a “hat house” - which is exactly what it sounds like. It’s a house with multiple bays or masses and each has its own special hat. This is one of the most egregious examples because all of the hats are different shapes and scales. Not even the most Disney Theme Park pink sky and fairy lighting can mitigate the controlling aesthetic influence of hät.
No compilation of Bad Facades would be complete without at least one Frankentudor™. Rich people in America really like to harken back to the days of feudalism, yet uglier, more drab, and using materials mostly derived from petrochemicals. The lighting is not helping this house, which is about as gloomy, hulking, and bloated as they come.
I have some fondness for houses that derive new, inventive forms of being ugly. The spread eagle McMansion is one of them, two oblique wings with no real core. A corner lot specimen. This one is especially weird, with the quadruple portholes, the windowless bays, the mall foyer, and the hipped roof that’s not quite clipped, complete with tacked on gables. Kind of neat, sad to say.
I know most of you won’t agree, but I actually believe this is the worst McMansion of the set. The absolute banality of it, the out-of-proportion everything, the compound-like demeanor, the nonsensical spacing of the mind-numbingly identical windows. The most infuriating part is that whoever designed this had some kind of order, continuity, proportion in mind and just failed utterly at it, like Sideshow Bob stepping on all those rakes. I hate it!!!!
When rich people try to make overly-inflated temples to their dumb piles of money, it’s deeply satisfying when they end up looking like this house, which is just a pile of roof and wall tacked on to the worst proportioned portico imaginable. Classic McMansion Hubris. Let us all laugh.
Now we’re getting into the more eldritch horror part of the list. Some houses make me wonder if I have the same set of eyeballs and conceptions of what “a house” looks like as other people. This one is playing dress up games with foam stickers. It looks like Steve’s shirt from Blues Clues. It abuses the prairie muntins, which is an insult to my chosen hometown of Chicago, Illinois. Bad house.
Not enough time is devoted on this blog to bad modernism, though it would be rather generous to call this house modern. It’s more like postmodernism trying to remember what modernism looked like and tripping down a flight of stairs collecting random masses and windows on the way down. Houses like this give modern architecture a bad name. It’s borderline libel. Also it looks like it was made out of cardboard.
This brings us to our final, and objectively worst house:
I don’t even know what to say about this freak of architecture. I don’t know how it came together or why. I don’t know what it wants or even pretends to do. It is a horrorshow. Gables protruding from random places, stealth roof fragments, windows too small for the walls they’re embedded in, a weird cathedral-like entrance, the mosquito-infested pond, the worst example of realtor sky I’ve ever seen, all of it is terrible. It’s haunted. Trick or Treat, but without the treat.
Anyway, that does it for this installment. If you’re curious about more McModern badness, this month’s Patreon bonus post will be to your liking!
Happy Halloween and Día de Los Muertos!