NYT: Are McMansions Going Out of Style?

The New York Times
October 2, 2005

Are McMansions Going Out of Style?
By FRED A. BERNSTEIN


Photo:

Caption:
Joyce Dopkeen/The New York Times
CHANGING STYLES A McMansion being built in 1998 in Irvington, N.Y.


LAST year, McDonald's phased out its "supersize" French fries and soft
drinks. Portions, it seems, had gone about as far as they could go.

Could the same be true of the supersized houses known as McMansions?

After more than 30 years of steady increase, the size of the typical
American house appears to be leveling off, according to statistics
gathered by the Census Bureau.

"The Generation X-ers who are becoming home buyers right now want more
amenities - and they are willing to trade away space to get them," said
Jerry Howard, vice president and chief executive of the National
Association of Home Builders.

Sandy Kennedy, a real estate agent, said the house she and her husband,
John, are building in Cheshire, Conn., will be around 3,500 square
feet, which is larger than the national average but smaller than many
homes in the area. "We could afford more, but we want to limit
ourselves to spaces we'll really use," she said. "We're looking more at
quality than quantity of space."

A few years ago, she might not have felt that way. The size of the
average American house rose from about 1,500 square feet in 1970 to
more than 2,300 square feet in 2001, with a particularly big growth
spurt in the late 1990's.

But from 2001 to 2004, the growth practically halted. "That suggests
that the size of the average house is stabilizing," said Gopal
Ahluwalia, a statistician with the home builders' association. For the
second quarter of 2005, the average new detached house measured 2,400
square feet, according to the Census Bureau.

Mr. Howard says consumers are thinking less about space and more about
"bells and whistles," including professional-style appliances and
exotic woods with names like ipe and wenge.

Ms. Kennedy's house will have high ceilings, a Sub-Zero refrigerator
and radiant heating embedded in the floor of a glass-walled
"conservatory." And there will be lots of architectural moldings, her
architect, Melanie Taylor of New Haven, said.

In a 2004 nationwide survey, the association asked homeowners: "For the
same amount of money, which of the following would you choose: a bigger
house with fewer amenities, or a smaller house with high quality
products and amenities?" Only 37 percent of the 2,900 randomly selected
respondents wanted the bigger house. Sixty-three percent said they
would prefer the smaller house with more amenities.

In 2000, when the association asked the same question, the results were
sharply different. Back then, 51 percent said they wanted the bigger
house; 49 percent opted for the smaller-but-better house, Mr. Ahluwalia
said. He added that he believes that even more will choose "the smaller
house" when the association asks the same question in its next survey,
in 2006.

Across the country, developers say they are seeing signs of that shift.
"More and more people who come in are willing to talk about less
space," said Catherine Horsey, a vice president of Urban Edge
Developers in Dallas. She said new houses at the company's Urban
Reserve development will average 2,500 square feet.

That, she said, is small for Dallas.

Of course, megahouses that outrage neighbors - and keep armies of
contractors employed - are still going up in affluent areas. And
companies like Toll Brothers that build thousands of homes each year
say that some of their biggest models are also among their biggest
sellers.

But even at the high end, where master bedrooms suites the size of
tennis courts are common, there are signs that the trend toward bigness
has abated.

Richard Warren, a planning consultant on the East End of Long Island,
helps clients obtain zoning approval for new houses. In the last few
years, he said, the number of people looking to build the largest
permissible house has declined. "There will always be people who want
big houses, but we're not seeing the grossness we'd been seeing," he
said. "People are thinking twice about why they need all that space."

There are many reasons the appeal of bigger houses may be waning,
including the high cost of maintaining them. "In a city where
$1,000-a-month air-conditioning bills are not uncommon," said Ms.
Horsey of Dallas, "people are beginning to say, 'Maybe I can have less
space, and spend the money on a trip to Europe.' " Increasing fuel
prices are likely to make large houses even less appealing, Mr.
Ahluwalia and others said.

Rising interest rates and land prices also make large houses harder to
afford. And an aging population increasingly includes empty-nesters who
are looking to downsize, said Ms. Taylor, the designer of Ms. Kennedy's
house in Cheshire.

Then there is the cost of furnishing the houses in a style appropriate
to their dimensions. Robert A. M. Stern, the dean of the Yale School of
Architecture, said he believes many McMansions are actually empty
nests. "You walk in the door, and there's not a stick of furniture -
certainly not furniture large enough to justify the spaces," he said.

But it may also be that Americans have simply attained all the space
they need. The home builders' association, in its polls, asks consumers
how big a house they would like to have. The average response in the
2004 poll was 2,426 square feet - barely bigger than the average house
built this year. Mr. Ahluwalia, who has worked for the association for
29 years, said the gap between how big houses are - and how big people
would like them to be - has never been so slight.

Mr. Stern, himself the designer of many large houses, agreed. "I think
we've reached a size that satisfies most people's ambitions," he said.

George Suyama, a Seattle architect, has designed more than 100 houses
in the Pacific Northwest. During the 1990's - the peak years of the
dot-com boom - he was designing houses so large that he declines to
give their dimensions. But now, he says, the houses he is being asked
to design are far more modest.

"At least in Seattle, the people who can afford to do really huge
houses have already done them," Mr. Suyama said.

Mr. Warren, the planning consultant on Long Island, said that several
clients had "built large homes, and after they were finished they
decided they were too big and they sold them to move to smaller
houses."

Ron Jones, the owner of Sierra Custom Builders in Placitas, N.M., near
Albuquerque said, "There's been a shift in the culture: More and more,
people are realizing that it's not just the square footage. They're
thinking more about issues like durability, and they're open to the
idea of flexible spaces."

The public perception of big houses may help explain the shift. Owners
of oversized homes are routinely portrayed as architectural yahoos
whose "plywood palazzos" leave neighboring buildings in shadow. Some
also associate the big houses with greed. In the corporate scandals of
recent years, "a persistent motif was the grotesquely large houses of
the perpetrators," said James Gauer, author of "The New American Dream:
Living Well in Small Homes" (Monacelli, 2004).

At a recent zoning board meeting in New Canaan, Conn., speaker after
speaker described new megahouses as intrusive. Residents demanded
measures to reduce the so-called loom factor, or the degree to which
new houses overpower their neighbors.

In less populous areas, builders of large houses are derided for
despoiling the natural environment. Arthur Spiegel, who is retired from
the import-export business, is building a 10,000-square-foot house in
Lake Placid, N.Y., in the Adirondacks. The hilltop house has brought
protests from the Residents' Committee to Protect the Adirondacks, and
construction has been halted by local building authorities.

Mr. Spiegel said that the house "is only 6,500 square feet, unless you
count the basement," and that it's the right size for his extended
family to gather in for ski vacations.

It may also be that, in the way skirts get shorter and ties narrower,
housing styles change. For decades, houses with historical details -
often rendered in a kind of fake stucco - have been in fashion.
Ornaments reminiscent of Versailles or Buckingham Palace require
extensive facades.

But those looks appear to be losing some ground to a style that harks
back only to the mid-20th century, with flat roofs, generous overhangs
and large glass walls.

Modernist houses stress connections between indoors and outdoors.
Well-designed terraces, architects say, expand livable space, without
requiring heating or air-conditioning.

While magazines like Architectural Digest regularly feature
chateau-sized houses, upstarts like Dwell show modernist homes as small
as 1,200 square feet.

Many architects are happy to see the tide turn away from big houses.
Ms. Taylor of New Haven began her career 25 years ago designing
600-square-foot houses in Seaside, Fla. But in the 80's and 90's, she
said, it became harder and harder to find people who wanted smaller
houses, and her projects crept up as high as 11,000 square feet.

"I worked on houses, especially for developers, where you just had to
fill the space because it was there," Ms. Taylor said. "It just seemed
ridiculous. You just keep wondering what people are going to do with
all those rooms."

Mr. Ahluwalia of the home builders' association can't hide his relief
that houses aren't continuing their rapid increase in size. He called
the new statistics "a ray of hope."

But aren't members of his association hoping houses will keep getting
bigger? "If the consumer doesn't buy it, the builder is stuck with it,"
he said. His job, he said, is to tell builders what people want in a
new home.

Added Mr. Howard, the association's chief executive, "What builders
build is entirely market-driven. And the market appears to be
changing."