(Photo: Kate Wagner)
I knew it was inevitable, but it still surprised me when it happened: The McMansion is back as a cultural icon. This time it’s young people who see it as an ideal—a romantic one, even—of a now lost time in history. The fad, like most these days, both began and is largely relegated to short-form video content on platforms such as TikTok and Instagram. The first video I saw in this vein (it’s since been deleted) featured a blond girl of around 16 or so, touring her parent’s “vintage” house, gushing over the cherrywood cabinets and granite countertops, the dramatic staircase in the two-story foyer, the beige walls, and generic earth-toned art.
In another video, the beauty influencer @emilylulamay brags about ditching the “modern white hospital house” by buying a “cozy” house from the early 2000s, complete with beige bathtub, cherry cabinets, and screened-in pool. #TuscanKitchen has grown into its own vibe institution. Image slideshows of tacky décor (ferns on top of kitchen cabinets, goofy figurines, sponge-painted walls) coexist with wistful music. By all accounts, the subjects of McMansion Hell have ascended to McMansion Heaven.
But, one must ask, why? How can these houses, long emblematic of pre-recession greed and excess, now be recast as aspirational, not in their size, but in their whimsy? And what redeeming qualities do they have that contemporary homes lack?
Before we are too quick with our architectural condemnations, it’s worth understanding the cultural context that this material is a part of: When Gen Z scours the web for representations of childhood, which they can only remember piecemeal, they are doing so to augment and substantiate those memories in whatever ways they can, usually by forming mood-board–like structures or groups of “aesthetics,” often devoid of context beyond shared visual or temporal commonalities. Thus, in many ways, the McMansion is not beloved as such—it is merely one iteration of a certain “2000s-ness.”
Furthermore, the McMansion, along with other unsavory phenomena of the 2000s such as Butt Rock and pedal-pusher pants, has arrived quite late in the process of aesthetic reclamation of its era. After an endless parade of Y2K electronics, sequined jeans, flash games, and old Disney Channel shows, the search for new content to satisfy the itch must inevitably expand into less-celebrated but still (at the time) popular territories. Because of the mediated nature of social media, nostalgic content usually comes in the form of collections of images or videos of how people looked or the things they owned. But the 2000s are unique in history because, especially with regard to content from the internet at that time, such images are harder to come by due to the earlier digital turn itself; much of that period has disappeared into defunct websites and broken USB drives. Architecture, then, becomes one of the only lasting and easily available testimonies to the way things were.
This practice of recontextualization, however, is not new. I remember the early days of Tumblr and Pinterest, when millennials pioneered the taxonomic assimilation of images into “aesthetics” so as to collate the ephemeral images of their youth. These were almost overwhelmingly images of postmodern architecture, which had a rich and extensive print culture more conducive to projects of digital archiving. The mention of postmodernism is itself important, because it was the last cohesive aesthetic and ideological movement in the field. What came after ranged from deconstructivism to pixelated high-rises to minimalism. If you are looking to feel nostalgic toward the architecture of the aughts, the McMansion, despite (or perhaps because of) its simultaneous elite and vernacular status, was one of the only architectural symbols ubiquitous within mass culture, from rap videos to television shows like The Sopranos.
But perhaps the most simple reason why McMansionism has acquired a forgiving sheen is because, like the girl in the TikTok said, new mass-produced houses in the United States are sterile now. Along with the celebrity house, the McMansion was the apotheosis of the idea that “making it” in life could be rewarded with architectural individuality. Down with the starter home, up with the dream house. Despite the pejorative, McMansions’ customized interiors, layouts, and the pursuit of an ever-lengthening laundry list of amenities, gave each one its idiosyncratic (albeit inflated) form. Indeed, the more amenities—pools, theaters, bars, gyms—the house possessed, the closer it was to the “dream home” ideal, and the relation of value and size was an unshakable one.
The American home, although always considered a personal investment, was not yet culturally thought of as an illiquid financial asset, the built equivalent of stocks or bonds, but was instead considered an extension of the self. The Great Recession changed this mindset, in part because the financialization of housing became normalized, and in part because its wreckage left millions of vacant or foreclosed properties that could be flipped and sold at a profit, which itself became a considerable national pastime. Housing scarcity, especially in cities, only exacerbated this motive, which saw houses not as places people experienced their lives, but as mere financial instruments.
In this shift, the concept of home lost a critical characteristic: personalization. This might lie at the core of what Gen Z longs for. Tacky décor and fun or cozy interiors might be cringe, but they reflect the personalities and lifestyles of the people who chose them: their daily rituals, preferences, needs, and desires, problematic or not. These homes, missing from a majority of design media, are carefully tailored containers of life, spaces designed and accentuated with things that make its inhabitants feel good to use and experience—which can incidentally make for compelling photos, since this kind of stuff doesn’t follow trends. It’s an expression of the person who lives there. The ultra-customization of the McMansion was seen as a form of self-actualization. No one was thinking about selling such houses before even building them. Building them was the point.
The now maligned all-gray interior, which many of the videos condemn, is ultimately a function of economism. Its cleanness and neutrality signifies both newness (itself an amenity and a justification for a higher cost) and safety as an investment. To customize a house is to risk it as an asset. The constant parade of gray interiors on real estate aggregators—which eclipse traditional shelter media in monthly views by a country mile—reinforces both conformity, the idea of a safe interior, and the economic validity of the quick flip. Staging and living have become interchangeable.
But, to younger people, conformity is lame. The cold economic logic of the gray interior mirrors a world in which we’ve turned homes into capital to such an extent that they have been stripped of their personality and personalization, and made exceedingly, devastatingly unaffordable. In our present age, when one and only one kind of house is seen as viable—stark white, black mullioned, blandly contemporary—can we really blame the youth for seeing the value in Tudors and Tuscans?
They’re looking beyond the ferns and figurines, taking stock of what makes a house a home. We don’t have to give the McMansions of old a pass, per se, but maybe we ought to do the same.