"McMansions" remind some neighbours of architectur

beatriz

"McMansions" remind some neighbours of architectural junk food
Deutsche Presse-Agentur - HousingZone.com

The decision to buy the house was very quick, even in the hot U.S. real estate market.
"They didn't even go upstairs," said Bing Moore, the seller who was moving into a home for senior citizens after 40 years in a house his parents built themselves north of the nation's capital.

The elegant couple agreed to Moore's asking price - nearly 800,000 dollars - upon viewing the house just once. (....)

The enormous two-and-a-half storey house with 4-metre-high ceilings, four fat pillars in front and a massive roof with dormer windows filled nearly the entire lot it was built on. A Japanese cherry tree was sacrificed to make room for the house, along with a thicket of lush rhododendron bushes. In what had been the house's garden, sycamore trees were chopped down.

The completed structure looks like an oversized hamburger sitting on a little piece of lettuce.

"McMansions" is the term used in the United States to describe such large houses, especially those that look mass-produced and are built on lots barely big enough to hold them. The pompous houses typically are lightweight wood frame construction finished with an outer covering of bricks in an attempt to give them a stately look.

According to the U.S. Census Bureau, the size of U.S. houses has grown from an average of 105 square metres 50 years ago to about 200 square metres today. Two years ago, a third of the new houses built had more than 222 square metres of living space, according to the National Association of Home Builders. (....)

continue reading: http://housingzone.com/index.asp?layout=articleXml&xmlID=300401305

Anonymous

images: Mcmansions in Melbourne eastern suburbs (Australia). Disregard for the environment and bad taste is not limited to USA borders - unfortunately.

The swelling McMansion backlash
Local governments and ordinary citizens are saying 'no' to so-called Hummer houses and starter castles. Tactics include energy-consumption restrictions, petitions and outright building moratoriums.

By Christopher Solomon
MSN: http://realestate.msn.com/buying/Articlenewhome.aspx?cp-documentid=418653&GT1=8012

Release the zoning hounds: The McMansion backlash has begun.
Reeling from the towering megahouses that have been cropping up in neighborhoods nationwide, communities aren't just standing by and letting them flourish unchallenged anymore.

From Atlanta to Austin, Texas, and beyond, more governments have started imposing stricter building limits and even temporarily halted new construction while they try to get a handle on the explosion of these 4,000- to-10,000-square-foot homes, sometimes sneeringly called "garage mahals," "Hummer houses" or "starter castles."
(....)
Super-size me
A drive around many American neighborhoods confirms it: Today’s homes are big. No, not big -- huge. The average American home swelled from 983 square feet in 1950 to 2,349 square feet in 2004 -- a 140% increase in size. And everything about them is bigger, from their three- and four-car garages to the professional-grade stoves and refrigerators. In 2004, 43% of new homes had 9-foot ceilings, up from less than 15% in the 1980s.
(....)
Austin's fight
Austin typifies the McMansion craze -- and the backlash that's followed. Several of the city's neighborhoods like Tarrytown and Travis Heights have seen an influx of large homes, said Kathie Tovo, president of the Bouldin Creek Neighborhood Association, who lives in a "funky, fun" area just south of downtown that also has seen some change. Just down the street from their modest home, Tovo and her architect husband bought a house as an investment. After they finished remodeling it, the home next door got knocked down and replaced by a 4,000-square-foot building housing two condominiums. "What had been not a tiny, but a modest-size and -scale cottage, has been replaced by something hugely bigger than what's the scale along that street," Tovo said. "The entire yard is now lined by this massive house," she says of her house.
(.....)
MakingThink green. Also in Marin County, projects that must undergo design review, or get a variance -- that is, any home over 4,000 square feet -- must fill out a green-building checklist and meet a certain number of points.big houses go green

One strategy some governments have pursued in trying to discourage larger houses, or at least shrink their impact, is to make them pay their way, energy-wise:

Shrink the energy footprint. In Marin County, Calif., where planners are now making sustainability a hallmark of the county plan, newer rules require that any project of 3,500 square feet or more, whether a new home or a remodel, meet the energy budget of a 3,500 square-foot home. In short, the bigger the house, the more efficient (relatively speaking) it has to be, said Alec Hoffmann, the county's green building program coordinator.

Go big -- and pay. In Pitkin County, Colo., home of Aspen, if a new home is more than 5,000 square feet, the builder must either provide onsite renewable energy (via something like solar panels) or pay a $5,000 fee to the Colorado Office of Resource Efficiency, which will use the money for renewable energy projects elsewhere. If the house is 10,000 square feet more, the fee goes up to $10,000 if no onsite renewable energy is provided. And if a home exceeds its property's allocated energy budget as determined by local codes -- due to a large spa, a heated driveway, etc. -- the homeowner must "buy" energy from the Renewable Energy Mitigation Program, up to $100,000.

(.....)

continue reading: http://realestate.msn.com/buying/Articlenewhome.aspx?cp-documentid=418653&GT1=8012