Great article. Makes me wonder about the line between decorating and renovating. Where does the type of well considered editing of spaces that you all do here in home decorating fall? On the one hand, I do spend a lot of time thinking about how to improve our home and landscape, but I think I do so because I do see it as a place to live our lives and raise our children in a pleasant, comfortable environment. We plan to live here the rest of our lives and I want it to be a warm and interesting home for ourselves and our guests.

The article really nailed it on the culture of dissatisfaction being perpetuated by Instagram and Pinterest. I’m guilty of escaping into the pretty pictures instead of getting off my duff and actually doing something to improve my surroundings.

Interested to see that it’s written by the McMansion Hell blogger.

Well, on the one hand I have renovated each of the places I've bought, but on the other hand, I've only bought places that were falling apart. And I restored, to some extent, too.

What I have noticed is that very few people renovate their houses to be a reflection of themselves, they renovate their houses to be identical to everyone else's within a certain context.

It seems like in the Kitchen and Bath forums, people agonize over the individual elements, particularly countertop stone, backsplash and decorative lighting, only to end up with a net effect that is barely distinguishable from any of a very small set of acceptable forms.

Even in the Building a Home Forum the net outcomes may be different in the overall details, but the net overall effect of many of the houses is very similar and repetitive.

That was interesting! I'm often underwhelmed by the kitchens and renos's here that are ubiquitous but I imagine if they did anything truly creative, more like what you might see in a high end magazine, there would be a lot of negativity expressed. Or very few comments at all.

Probably, but I'm not at all sure that truly creative = what you might see in a high end magazine, not these days at least. In the old GW days some of the most creative kitchens came from people with the most restricted budgets.

It's quite true that those kitchens would mostly not go over well on Houzz, though. What would people who are agonizing between three different shades of white paint think of redrange's famous kitchen, for instance? (Not that she had a particularly restricted budget.)

I find that disconnect, between the high end magazines and what people like here, confusing. Why is one kind of media (HGTV and Houzz) seen as Gospel-truth and another kind of media (high end shelter magazines) disregarded?

Writersblock, I agree, the high end shelter magazines are not all that creative, but at least they add a few different notes to the score.

True, Rita, but I just the other day ran across an article on hacking Ikea on the AD site, so who knows for how much longer?

Good article. I do defend renovating interiors when it's either that....or move. Such is the case typically on Love It or List It. The family has out-grown their space as is, either because they've had a couple more kids or their kids are now bigger taking up more space and needing spaces of their own, etc. I don't think there's anything wrong with renovating a home to make it work for you and your family. For instance, my home was a typical 60's ranch with a completely unused living room at the front of the house and super small closets in the bedrooms. One day while trying to shove my clothes into my husband and mine's tiny shared closet space my longing for a walk-in closet plan was formed. We decided to turn half of the living room space near the front window into an office and the other half which was adjacent to our master bedroom into a walk-in closet. Best thing we ever did. Now, the previously NEVER used living room space is fully utilized with a beautiful huge closet for me and a cozy comfortable office spaced used by all of us. Just trying to make a point that sometimes renovation is a good thing and necessary and not something done just to keep up with the Jones's.

Excellent article. And I had to look up (and listen to the pronunciation of) simulacrum.

I cringe when I see beautiful (to me) Art Deco tile bathrooms torn up because they are "dated". I always think that the buyers should have bought a different house, but once they buy it, they can do whatever they want.

On the show Property Virgins, the host would always tell new buyers to live with something for a year before making any changes, and while that sounded good to me at the time, I do wish I had gotten rid of my firepit on day one instead of waiting a year. We replaced it with a pergola that we use almost every day, and we did not use the firepit once.

Most of what we change at our house is in the back yard. Landscaping is always changing anyway, and this is a good way to change something that we are bored with, as Kierkegaard suggests in his Either/Or.

A very interesting article; thanks for posting. I am currently finishing a renovation of a 1933 house where I didn't remove any walls. Houses of this era have separate rooms. That's the way they were designed and if I wanted a modern house I would buy a modern house. I like stained wood trim and real divided light windows so why would I change them out just so they would be new? New that would not be new in 20 years time and then I might need to replace them again. No thanks I will stick with the originals.

I think that there has been a disconnect between the high end design magazines and their reader demographic, and I am not sure what the solution is.

I have a set of Architectural Digest magazines from the late 50s and 1960s.

At that time, adjusting for inflation, the subscription for 4-6 issues a year works out to about $15.75 per issue. The newstand rate $19.67 per issue.

The typical car advertisement was for Rolls-Royce.

But who did the houses belong to? Other than the occasional celebrity feature, the houses belonged to successful executives, successful decorators and architects, the occasional physician. And for the most part, even for the celebrities, the houses were relatively modest in scale, just decorated to the hilt. The price of the magazine essentially reflected its readership.

Now the magazine is much cheaper, and if you look at the readership demographic, the household income has, I believe, dropped a bit below $100,000.

And yet, what do they feature. Almost exclusively the houses of celebrities, tech, or financial multi-multi millionaires to the near billionaire set.

I am not saying that Architectural Digest or Elle Decor should put out issues like $100 decorating tips under $100--I understand that the magazine is meant to show design to aspire to, not the run-of-the-mill. However it's hard to aspire to a room with $100,000 worth of wallpaper in it, or an overall price tag of $1M + for the decor of the house (excluding art). It seems rather pointless to aspire to something so unattainable.

To me this one comment tells all: "Consciously or subconsciously, our constant remodeling is an effort to make ourselves more acceptable to others..."

I am sure that some of our kids and friends buy into this need to update and wonder why our 1908 house is not gray/white, granite/quartz, sleek/stark, etc. We love color and it shows. We love all of our original features and have designed our home to be comfortable, clean and welcoming. I feel sorry for those who think they must comply with the current trends and of course deny that this is the case. Your home should be exactly that.

palimpsest - I think you've pointed out a trend in much of the home decor media world. Blogs/instagram/magazines seem to be at two extremes: either $$$$ houses/decor that is WAY out of reach for most people, or "Here's how we DIY'ed our entire house from the ground up with nothing but washi tape, mason jars, and spray paint!" (this is almost preferable to the "We totally DIY'ed our extensive kitchen remodel and saved $50,000, thanks to my father-in-law's construction company doing all the labor for free.")

As a homeowner in the middle of these two extremes (but much closer to the mason jar end than the 100K area rug end), it's really difficult to find some idea of things I can realistically do in my home. Sure, I can lust after things in Elle Decor and AD, but I can't replicate things like views of the Pacific from each window, 13' high french doors, or the fact that my home is actually a 13th century French manor.

Great article. I'm not sure how much unnecessary renovation happens around here. I'm in the San Francisco Bay Area, and houses are so expensive that most people don't have anything left over for remodeling. If they had more money to spend on housing, they would have spent it moving to a better neighborhood. It is very common here to be "house poor"--you can afford to buy a median-priced home at $746,000 (in Oakland, according to Zillow, San Francisco is almost $1.3 Million), but that buys you a 1500 sq ft 3 BR 1 Bath that is structurally sound in an okay but not great neighborhood. And you basically have nothing left over for your aspiration open floorplan remodel. Or to live the kind of lifestyle that really should go with an income that can afford a $746,000 house.

My house (two units, up and down) was built in 1910, has had minimal remodels, none of them complete renovations. For the most part, they were the expected kitchen and bath remodels, or important but largely invisible changes.

1) Eary on someone wired it for electricity, as it originally had gaslight

2) Basement garage added, we're guessing in the late 40s or 50s, before my ex's grandmother acquired it.

3) Upstairs kitchen remodel circa 1980 (dark wood-look laminate cabinets with reverse beveled doors and no hardware; lighter wood-look laminate counters. This was only a 6 foot counter run; the run on the opposite wall is still original (I think; it's stick-built inset Shaker, which would have been in fashion when the house was built).

4) Upstairs back deck addition

5) Foundation replacement 2004 (when we bought it). Inspectors said you could stick a pencil 3/4" into the foundation. We expanded the garage to the full footprint of the house for a workshop and storage. Did earthquake retrofits.

6) Fixed up downstairs unit into rentable shape. Replaced the knob-and-tube electrical, all lighting fixtures (only a couple of the old ones would have been salvageable at all; most were broken or bare bulb. Replaced 6 ft of 90-year-old kitchen counter and the cabinet that vented to the outside (like the upstairs, the opposite counter run is still original). Largely re-framed the laundry room, which had so much dry rot that only memory and stubbornness was holding it together. Put in new vinyl flooring in the kitchen and bathroom, and refinished the hardwood everywhere else. New vanity in the bathroom.

7) My ex remodeled the upstairs bathroom.

It's possible that things like kitchen and bath flooring were changed multiple times, but I'm pretty sure the tubs, sinks, cabinets, and some of the plumbing fixtures we found when we bought the place dated back to when the house was built.

I adore my 1954 MCM home. I wouldn't change the redwood-toned beams and ceiling boards or the original oak floors. I wouldn't tear out the built-in desks and dressers in every bedroom or the 12' buffet in the dining room. The kitchen had already received a '90s-00's redo, but not so bad that it offends the senses. What I would change in a heartbeat? The 28" x 28" fleshtone shower. Honestly. Were we all really so columnar in 1954? I have to pop the door open to shave my legs and I'm not entirely sure my creases get the scrubbing they are entitled to on every occasion. And nevermind if it's a day I want to shower but don't want to wash my hair -- that hair's getting wet! A new master bath is on the drawing board, but we hope to do it in a way that respects the heritage of the home.

The 28" x 28" fleshtone shower. Honestly. Were we all really so columnar in 1954

Well...yes.

The average woman of today weighs as much as the average man did in 1960.

The average waist of the American woman was 28" in 1950 and is between 7 and ten inches bigger now, depending upon what you read.

The average woman over 20 now weighs almost 170 lbs.

They have grown an inch taller in that time.

So yes, we really were more columnar in 1954 than we are now, by a lot.

The same sorts of changes have occurred in men, but the average weight gain has been greater in women.

Some of it has to do with smoking, Some of it has to do with being sedentary, Some of it probably has to do with all the hormones in food.

They are going to have to change the "typical ages" of tooth eruption, which is another growth indicator because we are seeing girls age 9 who have their "12 year molars" and their premolars. That probably has to do with the hormones in food as well.

O-M-G Pal. Those numbers are horrifying.

I was going to post that article too. One of the pernicious things I hear from neighbors in my very high end urban loft neighborhood is “for re-sale.” People put in Wolf stove in a brand new total renovation “because buyers love those red knobs” wait - you’ve lived there for 15 years, just spent $200K and you’re thinking resale? Another couple said they’d raged keep a walk-in closet but will put in a second bathroom “for resale.”

Doesn’t anyone live in the present any more? Who are these “others” judging everything we do?

I don't think people live in the present anymore.

In our parents' generation, a lot of people rented until they were ready to settle in permanently. Myparents built a house in 1958 when my dad left practice and went back and specialized only because they could not find a house to rent and surburban developments were taking off. They rented again until they built the house they lived in for 45+ years.

I would say sometime in the 70s is when people really started transferring for work, where a move up the ladder no longer meant with the same company or at least at the same company in the same location.

It was then I guess that people wanted to find houses that were not too specific to someone else's taste, because 1) they were bringing furniture from somewhere else along with them and 2) they were not sure if they were going to be staying or moving again in 5-7 years.

And I think it has only accelerated since. My niece and her husband just bought a new construction house and the neighborhood was a complete slum until 10 years ago and their house is the first new house on their particular block. They have a litter strewn lot on one side and a row of abandoned houses on the other (work has started on a couple, now).

This was all part of a strategy: first in, buy low, make sure that you can either sell it to, or rent it to a responsible person (who works at the newly developing medical campus a short bike ride away). This is not the best location for either of them currently. Both have to get on the expressway to go to work and it's less convenient than before. However, it's the best location strategically to buy a first house and then get rid of it or rent it out in the not too distant future...

Make sure the finishes are nice, but don't pick the trendiest, make sure it has three bedrooms, make sure it has a flex room with a bathroom, make sure that it is going to attract another first time or second time house buyer in 5 years.

Because before they bought this house the plan was that they would live in the house 5 years or 7 years at the outside. It's all part of a strategic plan. I think if people in the past thought that in 5 years they would need a bigger/better house or a different location in the same city, they would have rented for 5 years. Not everyone, but a higher percentage than now. So certain aspects are commodities and nothing more.

And this is in an urban environment , which tends to be more flexible than a suburban environment. It seems counterintuitive, but if you live in the suburbs the more identical your house is to everyone else's, the better. I know someone who built a house with 4 bedrooms, a flex room and a three car garage, and they had no kids and one car because the husband took the train and they were sorta "green". They said that they would much rther have built something smaller without a 3+ garage, but they wanted that particular location due to a mumber of convenience factors and god forbid their house lacked an amenity the neighbors' houses had, because if they ever had to sell it would be a problem, being outside the development norms.

I think it frightening how an infomercial network can influence a population so deeply. Good friend just went through the selling of her home. I was not STUCK in the 40's but it was built then so it just is never going to be a 2018 home. It took a lot of work for her realtor to convince people if they want a master bath then it will cost a lot more because the home will be 30years newer.

I see so many 1920-1960s homes renovated in my area and the interiors -- kitchens, baths, wall colors -- all look the same. The character has been stripped in order to cater to "what people expect" from watching home shows--everything is new and freshly renovated. I think flippers are behind these makeovers, rather than homeowners, and they're not using designers or architects in order to save money and score a profit.

I see it in Paris apartment rentals, where all kitchens and baths are IKEA, the most affordable option for renovating.

Renovations are very expensive, so it's a conundrum.

If you haven't checked out the author's snarky blog mcmansionhell.com, it can be quite amusing...

I am home browsing and ran into a nice home in a great neighborhood this week that had obviously just had a "re-do" in order to boost the sale-ability of the house. Spectacular fail. It just looked BAD. And SO said not to even bother looking at it, we would be paying for new stuff that wasn't worth it, and he was right, no matter how much I liked the price and location. Not just bad design there but poor workmanship! 90's oak kitchen cabinets painted white-obvious and not charming in this case. Fake marble looking grey formica countertops-worst of both worlds. Busy weird grey backsplash tile that didn't conform well to the space into which it was installed-shout out amateur. Stark white trim everywhere and obviously poorly done built-ins painted white only to highlight their shoddiness. Dark navy walls which only highlighted the incongruous elements in the house. They would have done much better just to clean up the old house and leave the changing to whomever bought it. Or else someone did buy it, "remodel" it and then leave suddenly.

Edited to add that on the McMansion site I found an exact copy of my dining room table and chairs!! 'Cept my chairs have lime green velvet cushions. God I love them!

I find that blog absolutely disgusting...I'm sure it's amusing to some, but I feel that too many people adopt others attitudes as their own simply because of lemming mentality...

So sad.

I don't like her blog much either, pennydesign, but that doesn't prevent the article in this thread from being well-written and valid.

Agree writersblock...this article is pretty good....it's almost like they're written by two different people... ;)

Humor is not always universal. I make fun of my house all the time. In my last house, we called the master bedroom "the aquarium" because of the aqua blue trim and carpet that we never invested time in changing.

I don’t know, I think it’s pretty funny.

I think the blog is funny and educational. It has helped me to have a vocabulary about architecture that I did not used to have. I have always known what I like in terms of architectural style (more or less,) but I could never explain what I did not like until McMansion Hell taught me the language of house design better.

I enjoy McMansion Hell, it makes me laugh out loud. But getting back to the article, I thought it was great and as someone planning a kitchen renovation, it was perfect timing for me to read this now.

Sometimes I am frustrated because I can't do as much as I think I "need" to do for this kitchen. Sometimes I worry that certain choices are too idiosyncratic and won't appeal to some far-off future buyer.

But then I remember that I bought the house with its screaming yellow walls in the master bedroom, its tiny master bath (8x5), the kitchen where the knobs routinely pop off the drawers....and not only that, I had to outbid another buyer to do so!

My house is fine and doesn't need a top-to-bottom gut job to still be lovable. And the only person I need to please, within reason, is myself.

Interesting...I don't find it funny OR educational.

Thank goodness that I'm not bound by anything to read it :)

Both the main post and Airspace article were well written and certainly hold points for discussion.

There's certainly a lot of emphasis placed on "authenticity" and "individuality" in those articles, ideas I don't personally give much importance but most people probably do.

The Airspace article complains of a globalism sameness but what if the decor trends are based on factors like cost, maintenance, & broad appeal? If broad appeal exists for those aesthetics then that has value in itself.

I too live minimalism, bright spaces with touches of warmth, & avocado toast. Hard to say how much of those preferences are based on biology (introverts wanting less visual stimulus & a preference for healthy eating) & how much external influence.

I’ve always made it a point to buy older houses with good bones and some architectural interest in need of mostly cosmetic improvements. Pulling up carpets, refinishing floors, removing decades old wallpaper, replacing poorly functioning faucets, mechanicals, and other hardware, and making sure everything is fresh, clean, neatly painted, and everything ship shape.

These are all things that i would do for myself, without any thought of resale, because i never knew how long we’d be in one place. Sometimes a roof or ac unit would need replacing, but that’s normal wear and tear.

But...but....what about people like me??? I am TOTALLY into interior design. I love beautiful things. I adore “projects” at my house. Hell, we even custom built bc I was so keen to experience the process of designing a house from the ground up. I don’t intend to willingly sell this house to anyone...I designed what *I* liked. My neighborhood is filled with mostly Craftsman and European styled homes with tons of stone and natural colors. We built a traditional brick Georgian that we painted white. I can assure you...if we cared about resale we would have built a castle-looking home like our neighbors. :) I designed our house to make my family happy...not impress others.

I don't care for the interior shots from McMansion Hell.

I agree with the majority of things that she says about the architecture (although not the way she says it necessarily) But:

I think that many people who are not particularly house obsessed buy what checks boxes for location, square footage and amenities. And although I may not agree about the square footage and amenities aspects either, I can't really say how many square feet I would have if I lived in a cheaper COLA. Maybe I would have 8000.

But I think a lot of people buy McMansions and that neo-Eclectic style of house regardless of their appearance, they don't care enough to think about whether it's ugly or not...and it looks like everything else in the neighborhood.

And, I don't really think she should be making fun of what people put in these Hells, because that is their stuff and their taste (for good or bad) and that is something that they have a lot more control over, and then it starts getting more personal.

Good article! Sometimes a house is just a house.

When I was much younger I would have regaled in the skewering of Other People's Taste as in the McMansion Hell Blog. Somewhere around age 30 I realized that being really negative all the time is really, really wearing on the people around the negative person, and I determined I did not want to be that center of all-negative smarty pants mean wit. At some point in your life you have to choose if you want to be old with laugh lines or old with frown lines. I'm still working on it... But my main point, more importantly: it is very easy to be critical, even wittily so, and much more difficult (requiring greater intelligence, knowledge, and experience!) and far more productive to be constructive with commentary.

When I read about these houses bought or remodeled with resale in mind, I am reminded of a certain house my friend painted. It was truly a mixed-up, wanna-be miniature McMansion. I swear the house was designed by checklist...all hardwood, curved staircase, open foyer, double coat closet, and every other box you would find on a list of upscale features. It would have ticked every box for the Jones. Problem is the design was just a collection of random boxes all stuck together at odd angles with duct tape and baling wire.

The owners toured my house and saw a gorgeous, classic brick Georgian with a higher end paint job and they wanted the same guy to do their house. Then they wanted a cheap as possible, minimal prep paint job and expected to get the same look. Sorry, but no paint is going to make your walls plumb and the corners square. Yes, the painter can fix nail pops and the peeling drywall tape but he can't do fix the bow in the entire wall where the framing is out and so is the drywall on top. Maybe it was bait and switch because any paint job looks better on a great canvas but there is no way a suburban subdivision house is going to compare favorably with a high end custom home. Sure, this one is decades older and has only one bathroom but quality shines through over the years. It is little details like marble thresholds to the bathrooms, automatic closet lights and a 39 inch wide front door. These homeowners didnt build a big house, instead they built a nice, well designed, comfortable house for living, not showing off.

The fantastic aspect of this house is it is more than 80 years old and no one has ever needed to mess with the layout. Sure it has its issues like no coat closet but overall the design works. The rooms are generously sized with tons of natural light and the materials are high quality and put together by true craftsmen.

I dont want to live in a house on Banker's Row; regardless of the era, they are all designed to impress, not to live in. I want the quiet solid house that makes you want to move in, regardless of the color or position of the walls. That type of house is the one you can live in without the hassle of remodeling, just perhaps a new paint color every decade or two.

So...I don't think there's anything wrong at all with not liking McMansion Hell. Humor is quite personal. However, I don't think that people who find the site funny are necessarily possessed of a "lemming mentality" or are "all-negative smarty pants." (I'll confess that I could be called a smarty-pants. But I'm overall a pretty positive person, I think! And, fwiw, I'm 47, and hopefully developing those laugh lines. :)

It is possible to just think the site is funny without being personally lacking in kindness. Just as it is completely reasonable for it to just not be to one's taste. As was wisely said, no one is bound by anything to read it.

Thinking about this particular article, again... I am also reminded how social media -- and this site, Pinterest, the various shelter blogs, etc are all forms of social media -- gives us a peek into each others' houses that just wasn't possible in the past. And of course, many of those social media outlets include enticing links so you can buy what you're looking at....

When I was growing up, my parents had a handful of dinner parties. I invited friends for sleepovers. That was essentially the main way you could see the inside of someone's house -- a party, or you were friends with one of the kids in the house. And I think most parents weren't socialites, having parties every weekend. Mom definitely wasn't decorating to please those occasional guests, and my friends weren't going around critiquing the decor.

Now, of course, you can see lots of homes and it definitely can prompt a desire to keep up with the Joneses. I have to fight that impulse in myself. Though it can be amusing - I used to subscribe to Domino magazine (I LOVED that mag) and I remember seeing a home with a "For Like Ever" poster over a mantel. At the time, I thought that was the most charming little poster, and so unique! Now, ask me how many times I've seen that poster pop up again, and again, and again. (Confession, I still think it's cute)

Thanks for sharing this article, saypoint. I found it very...reassuring. A reminder to relax about my decor aspirations and appreciate the sturdy roof over my head. I also enjoyed the "Airspace" essay, writersblock. Wish the essay explored more the "why" of what's globally adopted rather than the "how". Lots of great insights in this thread.

(I pinkmountain: Lime green velvet dining room chairs sound absolutely fabulous to me!)

Great article.

So the writer is telling everyone that their house is fine in the article, but in the blog, it seems to me she is making fun of people for living with what they have instead chucking something that is perfectly solid and functional for something newer and trendier. There is definitely some bad architecture out there, but she even makes fun of the blanket on a child's bed for being popular in 1994. I like the posted article, but the blog is a little too mean-spirited and bullying for me.

I don't think people live in the present anymore.

Or privately. So many seem to live very public lives for show.

This is one area where I disagree with Wagner's premise. She writes about the "more sinister change that occurred during the housing bubble leading up to the Great Recession: Average Americans began thinking of their homes as monetary objects to be bought, sold, invested in — consumed — rather than places to be experienced, places in which our complex lives as human beings unfold." I think the more sinister change is that view of the house as a monetary object in conjunction with the equally new concept of experiencing one's home for very public consumption and documenting every single moment of that experiencing. And then there are those who through blogs at first, then Instagram, Snapchat, Pinterest, etc. have monetized the concept of home as monetary object and as a place to be experienced (often with clickable links so you too can get the look).

But I think a lot of people buy McMansions and that neo-Eclectic style of house regardless of their appearance, they don't care enough to think about whether it's ugly or not...and it looks like everything else in the neighborhood.

I think many also don't know enough to think about whether it's ugly or not. There's no visual or historic training any more, consciously or unconsciously. Similar to what you wrote on the What Do You Think of the House in this Article? thread in the Building a Home forum, about Federal/Greek Revival and later Colonial Revival, "Architects and builders understood proportion and scale at that time--innately, it seems".

And I agree with what others have written above, about so many houses, and the kitchens in the Kitchen forum, being built by checklist, with no understanding or sense that that house, or room, as a whole needs to be considered. I was looking through the book "Bunny Williams' Point of View" the other day (inspired by the recent BW thread), and was struck by the passage about the drawing lessons she began at age 15: "By the end of the summer, I had learned how to see. I began to see relationships between forms, to pay attention to proportions, and to view a whole as the sum of its part. To this day, I never look at a room, a piece of furniture, or a garden without mentally making a note of the relationship among the components."

Thanks for posting the article, saypoint. And also writersblock; I've read that Airbnb aesthetic piece before and it's still current almost two years on. And I disagree with the comment that "It’s not like you’re at a Holiday Inn that’s the exact same everywhere" -- it's very much like that, and the similarities around the globe, the Airspace/Kinfolk aesthetic, are all the more striking because the consistency isn't mandated by any corporate HQ and yet there it is.

While I also don't find a number of the 'jokes' on mcmansionhell.com very funny, I do appreciate her sensibility. And I'm not sure if some of the critics read her disclaimer [emphasis added by me]:

"For all the joking on this blog about contractor errors and heinously tacky decor, part of the reason I only use houses that are for sale is because the majority of these houses are staged to sell, and (with the exception of maybe a few family photos) are relatively distanced from the lives of the individuals who live there. This makes them ripe for cultural or social criticism, because staged houses are an excellent presentation of what aspects of a home are explicitly culturally desirable, commodified, and consumed, across several decades.

If anything, the McMansion is the ultimate form of the type of house-fussery I discuss in the article. They are houses designed to impress others, to serve as material, architectural signifiers of the American aesthetic ideal of financial security and social success. They accomplish this at the expense of creating architectures of isolation (every space is demarcated and communal spaces are for once-a-year “entertainment” rather than day-to-day familial existence), anti-social sentiments (distance from city/town centers/neighbors, gated communities, hostile HOAs), and waste (the power bill, suburban sprawl, interior space wasted on empty architectural gestures, e.g. the great room or the lawyer foyer). "

As a friend of mine likes to say, "some people's taste is all in their mouth", which is not to say that I deplore such a state of being, I just notice it, and sometimes regret it, as when a perfectly good older home is bought as a teardown and replaced by a mcmansion.

I find it appalling that guests at a housewarming party would be trying to convince their hostess that her new home was "outdated" and "needed" to be remodeled. What happened to manners?

I did enjoy the article and I thought it was a great reminder to not bend to the social pressures to remodel. Not every house has to conform to the current style and trends. Most of us cannot afford to buy the "perfect" house and have to make compromises somewhere. That's ok. We don't all have to live inside an HGTV episode.

For you Suzmtl. I did have aspirations of recovering them but heck, I may keep them because, who knows, they may become hip again in an ironic sort of way.

About the McMansions and M. Hell, I used to enjoy the humor of that and similar blogs/articles, but I've tired of mean spirited commentary/criticism especially re: furnishings and decor as I believe that is exactly what contributes to the atmosphere of fear and homogenization especially by those who lack confidence and creativity.

Thank you for sharing, I pinkmountain. They look more olive than lime on my monitor. Those chairs though are classic!

Bad lighting and fading over the years. The color is now "washed lime. As far as the home snark goes, it's one thing for someone to be laughing WITH you because they too live in a somewhat cobbled together house with tacky remnants of eras gone by because that is what they can afford, and the flip side is just snobbery. Fine line I guess.

I caught that hypocrisy too, Em11. I'm pretty uncomfortable with making fun of people for entertainment anyhow.

We just had a huge amount of work done on our 1912 house. On the main floors, we left most walls alone, but after living with lots of tiny rooms for 15 years, it was time to add some openness. As the main cook in the family, I was tired of being isolated in the kitchen, especially when we had company. I love have the kitchen open to the family room. part of me feels guilty for "doing what everyone else is doing," but there's a reason for it. And we still have plenty of tiny rooms left.

There also comes a time when houses need updating. 100-year-old kitchens, plumbing and fixtures aren't always adequate or even safe. Flooding damage, aging HVAC, deteriorating tile, bouncy floors, all of these things can prompt renovation. I have a hard time faulting people for it.

We found a millwork company willing to match our wood doors and trim, and even our narrow board wood floors, but I can definitely understand why people aren't always able to do that.