bad architecture

I don’t know why, but every city, no matter how big, has some insanely stacked dictator-looking McMansion somewhere outside the city limits. If you sort your Zillow results as Price: High - Low, this house will pop up first. It costs something like $5,000,000. It is 10,000 square feet. There are usually frescos and tawdry gildedness of some variety. The realtor’s text brags of marble and uses the word “Manor.”

Today, our house, squarely in this category, is found in the suburbs of Milwaukee, WI, not really a place known for unhinged 21st century robber barons. In fact, I find Wisconsin to be one of the least McMansion-dense states in the country. Even the guy who invented Culvers or the Milwaukee Bucks probably has a much less insane house than the one I’m about to show you:

New bonus post: the weirdest lil house in Denton County, Texas:

Howdy, folks! I hope all of my fellow Midwesterners are enjoying this year’s false spring. Seventy-degree days notwithstanding, the snow will indeed be back, and, as such, I have prepared for you a house to enjoy (?) alongside a miserably late-in-the-year hot cocoa. 

Now, this house isn’t as oppressively horrible as the last one, however, the point of the Yearbook is to show off how houses evolved overtime, and also to celebrate some of the kookier time capsules left out there. Our current house falls into the latter category, and to be honest, I find it weirdly endearing. 

Located just outside of Detroit, this 5 bed, 4.5 bath house tops out at over 10,000 square feet. Yes, you read that right. 10,000. You’ll see why later. Anyways, if you want to purchase said house, it can be all yours for just under $1,000,000. A steal!

(back of a quirky literary novel voice): Sometimes, things are not what they seem. An architecture critic disappears for three months to follow bike racing around Europe, rife with questions of becoming and desire. A real estate agent uploads a listing to an aggregator, knowing that it will be a difficult sell but thinking not much of it, for, like Tolstoy’s unhappy families, all houses are difficult to sell in their own way. A house is built in 1980 in Staten Island and would have thrived as an anonymous bastion of tastelessness had the internet not been invented. But the internet had been invented. All of these things are brought together here, through truly unlikely circumstances.

Let’s not bother with the formalities this time.

None of you will buy this house.

Hello everyone! We return to the great state of Illinois (where I live) to bring you this wonderful time capsule from DuPage County (where I don’t live but have ridden my bike.) There is actually much more house to get through than in the usual McMansion Hell post so Iet’s not waste time with informalities.

Behold.

This incredible 70s hangover is served (with a fine line on a silver tray) at a neat $5 million. It has seven bedrooms for maximum party discretion and 4.5 bathrooms also for maximum party discretion but of a different sort. Shall we?

For reasons architecturally unbeknownst to me, the McMansions of Chicago’s suburbs are actually insane. Perhaps it makes sense that Chicago, America’s mecca of great and distinguished architecture would also give birth to what can be appropriately called the netherworld version of that.

For six years, I have run this blog, and for six years I have been absolutely amazed by the formal leaps and bounds exhibited by the McMansions of Chicago’s suburbs. This area is undisputedly the fertile crescent of unhinged custom homebuilding and while I’ve heard other claims made for the gaudy, compact McMansions of Long Island, the paunchy shingled stylings of Greenwich, Connecticut, the Disney-Mediterranean hodgepodges of Florida, the oil-drenched nub mountains of North Texas, you name it – nothing comes remotely close to that which has been built in the suburbs of Cook, Lake, and DuPage Counties. (In the case of the houses featured in this post, nine of ten are located in Barrington, IL, which just might be the census designated place known as McMansion Hell.)

Fans of this website will perhaps remember a certain house from the “worst of suburban Illinois” post. I’m here to alert you to the fact that the interior of said house may in fact be the pinnacle of what has been dubbed by my colleague Cocaine Decor as “Cocaine Decor.” This 1990 house has lived rent free in my brain for a while, and now it will live rent free in all of yours. It sits at $1.1 million USD and precisely 10,000 square feet, each of which exists in ignorance of the Light of God.

Remember her? I wish I didn’t. Anyway.

Živjo from Slovenija, where there are no McMansions. (I finally know peace.) And yet at the same time I grew homesick enough to make my way back into the Cook County Suburbs, namely Barrington, namely South Barrington, namely McMansion Hell. If only in spirit.

This $3 million, 19,700 square foot house (built in 2001) showed up in a previous post, but only its facade. I promise you it’s worth cracking it open and seeing the insides, like a gooey, ugly egg. This is probably the first post in this blog’s history where there were no bedroom photos in the listing. Perhaps Realtors™ have learned a lesson from the “Welcome to Poundtown” incident. Anyway, here goes.

Remember her? Wish I didn’t.

Howdy, folks! Today we will be heading down south to the Atlanta suburbs to view what may be the most yassified house in existence.(The quality of the photos is proportional to the quality of the estate, my apologies.) Also, special thanks to my friend Kristjan who contributed to finding the house and also some of the captions (fondue machine all was him.)

Built smack dab in the Pimp My Ride era (2007) it’s got 8 bedrooms and 8.5 bathrooms, totaling a completely reasonable and not at all absurd 17,500 square feet. $7,750,000, it’s up there as one of the more expensive houses on the blog in its six (6!!) years. (Happy Birthday McMansion Hell!)

Without further ado:

Howdy folks! Pardon my July hiatus, as I was uhhhh covering the Tour de France. Anyway, before I get started, I’m back now and have some good news, which is that the McMansion Hell Patreon tiers have been updated – it’s never been such a good time to support McMansion Hell.

For $1/month you can get access to the Good House posts (McMansion Eyebleach) and the wonderful McMansion Hell Discord, a great, friendly community which is where many houses on here now come from. $3/month tiers will now receive an entire bonus MMH post in addition to the Good House posts that follow every edition of MMH. $5/month tiers still get a monthly house roasting livestream complete with bingo. $10/month tiers now get a bonus livestream that’s much more intimate and also includes voice chat participation. All in all, it’s more of what you want from McMansion Hell. Tiers above $10/month get a selection of exclusive merch along with other benefits.

Ok, awkward marketing moment over. Let’s get down to business. Big business.