McMansion

A series of "McMansions" in Leesburg, Virginia

McMansion is a pejorative term for a large, "mass-produced" house in a suburban community that is marketed to the upper middle class in developed countries.

Virginia Savage McAlester, who also gave a first description of the common features which define this building style, coined the more neutral term Millennium Mansion.[1] An example of a McWord, "McMansion" associates the generic quality of these luxury houses with that of mass-produced fast food by evoking McDonald's, an American restaurant chain.[2]

The neologism "McMansion" seems to have been coined sometime in the early 1980s.[3] It appeared in the Los Angeles Times in 1990[4][5] and The New York Times in 1998.[6] Other terms used to describe "McMansions" include "Persian palace",[7] "Garage Mahal", "starter castle", and "Hummer house".[8] Marketing parlance often uses the term "tract mansions" or executive homes.

  1. ^ Virginia Savage McAlester: A Field Guide to American Houses. The Definite Guide to Identifying and Understanding America's Domestic Architecture. Second Edition, Knopf, New York 2013, ISBN 978-1-4000-4359-0
  2. ^ McFedries, Paul (2008). The Complete Idiot's Guide to Weird Word Origins. Alpha Books. p. 99. ISBN 978-1-59257-781-1.
  3. ^ An example from Braces, gym suits, and early-morning seminary: a youthquake survival manual (1985) by Joni Winn [Hilton]: "The McMansion, by the way, is really just the largest house in the neighborhood"
  4. ^ Book Review: Search for Environmental View of Design, Review of 'Out of Place: Restoring Identity to the Regional Landscape', by Michael Hough Yale University Press. Los Angeles Times, July 17, 1990. "What character their history and ecology might offer is being strip-mined to make way for anonymous residential projects, monolithic office towers, climate-controlled retail complexes of questionable design and awkward transportation systems—all in the abused name of progress. We are talking here of the march of mini-malls and 'McMansions.'"
  5. ^ "Interiors; Getting Smart About Art of Living Small". LA Times. September 19, 1998. The size of the average new single-family home has gone from 1,520 square feet (141 m2) in 1971 to 2,120 square feet (197 m2) in 1996, according to '1998 Housing Facts, Figures and Trends,' published by the National Assn. of Home Builders. 'But not everyone is living in a McMansion or aspires to it," said Gale Steves, editor of Home Magazine". "Every time we do a small house in the magazine, there is lots of mail."
  6. ^ Cheever, Benjamin (August 27, 1998). "Close to Home; Life in a Crater Will Do, For Now". The New York Times. ISSN 0362-4331. Retrieved January 10, 2022. Twenty mansions were planned for the development, each designed to look like the biggest house in town. The McMansion we thought of as ours had an enormous kitchen, more than two stories high.
  7. ^ The term Persian palace mainly refers to such houses in Los Angeles and West Hollywood and refers to houses built by Iranian immigrants, not to Iranian architecture.Goldin, Greg (2006-06-17). "In Defense of the Persian Palace". LA Times. Archived from the original on 2012-01-14. Retrieved 2010-05-26.
  8. ^ Filter, Alicia (2006-04-20). "McMansions: Super-sized homes cause a super-sized backlash". Illinois Business Law Journal. Archived from the original on 2009-09-29. Retrieved 2009-05-28.