Homeowners ‘Designing Castles’ In The Boston Area
The Boston Globe reports on furnishing a McMansion. “A couple buys an estate-size home with multiple rooms and lavish amenities. First they’re thrilled, says Sheri Edsall, a Needham interior designer. Then ‘they’re panic-stricken. They can’t deal with that much house.’”
“But many Boston-area residents are learning to deal with it. Whether they are 5,000-square-foot faux Tudors in suburban developments or 10,000-square-foot showplaces on rural cul-de-sacs, supersize homes come with a host of supersized decorating concerns.”
“Not to mention: How do you pay for all this stuff after you’ve broken the bank on the house? ‘Big spaces cost big money,’ says Sandra Bissell, a North Andover interior decorator who has expertise in ‘designing castles.’ ‘You can’t run out to Penney’s and buy standard-length drapes for those windows.’”
“Some of the new homes in suburban Boston are so expansive they have rooms the owners don’t have names for, and they tend to be a tad underused. Carol Mader has one she’s resorted to calling the ‘bonus room’ in the 13-room, 5,500-square-foot Georgian Colonial where she lives with her husband in a suburb north of Boston. Its main piece of furniture is a mahogany pool table, and other than that the room is basically ‘a big empty space,’ she says.”
“‘What usually happens is they space their furniture out, a piece in this room, a piece in that room, and then they run out of furniture. And they’re cash poor. Almost everyone ends up with one or two rooms that are unfinished. They have tumbleweeds rolling through them. The kids end up riding their bikes in them,’ says Edsall.”
“Jennifer O’Brien is moving from a three-bedroom home in Melrose to a nine-room Colonial in Saugus with nearly 5,000 square feet of living space. ‘This house is way over our heads,’ says O’Brien. ‘We have no money for decorators. The furniture we have now would look ridiculous in this house because it’s worn out from use and this is such a gorgeous house.’”
Thanks to the reader who sent this in.
Soon, those extra rooms will be income-producing rental rooms.
Wow, this is playing out EXACTLY like the Great Depression.
OR….
They could earmark it as the “CRYING ROOM”
booohoooohoooo…. what have I done???
Normally they could just leverage their “Home Equity” to furnish their pad- but now that the home is worth $100k less than they paid… those days are over. but, BUT!!
AT LEAST they will have ROOM TO CRY.
George,
Do we know each other from a former life?
The problem with the renting out of rooms is that with more than one household per home on average, it implies the oversupply of houses will turn out even worse than it already looks, and it already looks like we have way more homes than households to occupy them.
So my question is, if this scenario plays out, who will take care of all the empty places? Or will they just get bulldozed, similar to unihabitable areas of post-Katrina NO?
Nah, they won’t be bulldozed.
Remember W’s guest worker program?
They need homes too.
Bulldozing is traditional. My parents remember half-built subdivisions being bulldozed in the early 1990s.
ask the Germans and some rural areas in other parts of Europe; they have plenty of experience with this. Despite all the RE speculation goin on in Spain, there are areas there where immigrants get a house for free if they want to live there with their family. Yes, home values will plummet when there is real oversupply.
besides, I think renting out rooms in a McMansion in the country will not be easy; potential customers will probably have trouble affording the card and gas to get to their work from there.
And that worn out furniture and that pool table will become firewood to keep that sucker heated. I wonder how much does it cost to heat 5,000 sqft during the winter in Boston. I wonder how painful it becomes if your cash poor and your credit is maxed.
Fortuntely, the winter in Boston has been mild this year, but if we had gotten 6 weeks of below zero, day and night, one of those Mc Mansions could cost $3 or 4 an HOUR to heat. (And that’s 24/7.) Even worse, with 8 or 10 baths, there’s plumbing in almost every room, so it’s not like you can abandon a large part of the house to the winter, like we do in a 300 year-old colonial. Of course, 10 baths means 10 families could live their
There’s a repossessed house on my street, that the bank has been “winterized” so it won’t be destroyed by frozen pipes. I’m thinking the companies that do this might be a new growth industry.
A relative’s Toll Brothers “mini-McMansion” - 4,500 sq ft outside Philly cost $600 in electricity (that’s with gas heat)..they’re just now finishing out the 1,900 sq ft basement. They’ll be paying nearly $1K a month soon.
LMAO @ kids riding their bikes in the extra rooms in a mansion! Sounds like something my kids would do.
I never understood who the hell needs 8 bedrooms and 9 bathrooms? Imagine how much it costs to heat & cool all that space.
“This house is way over our heads,’ says O’Brien. ‘We have no money for decorators. The furniture we have now would look ridiculous in this house because it’s worn out from use and this is such a gorgeous house.’”
Who are these brain-dead morons. Is foreseeing this completely beyond their mental abilities???
I’m with you. There is nothing more that gets me about the world than these idiots.
Psst ! The furniture isn’t the only thing that looks ridiculous in that house…..too bad you weren’t smart enough to buy something smaller so you’d have money left for the furniture. I can imagine these houses, Mansion on the outside, Dorm room decorating inside complete with stolen milk cartons !
It’s the American Dream. Maybe they can lease a couple of giant SUV’s for the driveway, leave the lawn sprinklers on at all hours, watering the street, and supersize every meal. Two-thirds of adults are said to be obese, looks like they want their houses to match their growing wastelines.
That gives me an idea: replace the term “McMansion” with “obese house”.
I’ll start telling people I don’t like obese houses. I think they’ll go the way of obese cars. Lately, the new cars I see in our part of town are luxury SUVs, which are much smaller than the American gas guzzlers. Big cars are a past fad. Soon, big houses will be out of style.
For some time I’ve been referring to an overly large SUV as “The USS Lardass”.
Now I’m going to refer to McMansion tracts as “Lardass Acres”.
And here we are getting to the core of stupidity, greed and keep up with the Joneses syndrome. Maybe two Chevy SLOBurbans in the driveway would completed this picture of the typical consumeristic american slob……. pigs…. [shaking head]
Hey, I have an idea! How about making a nostalgic “Memories of My First Apartment” room?
You know, plastic lawn chairs for seating, a cable spool for the coffee table, plywood and cinder blocks for the entertainment center, etc.
When I was little, I was in a huge house. There was even a balcony that extended into a bridge that gave access to a nearby plateau. Anyway, when you have lots of open space, kids will figure out how to utilize it! 1/3rd of the house was play rooms.
Don’t you guys understand? We have to keep buying/building these mansions, and the furniture to fill them, and the SUVs to put in the garages, or else the U.S. economy will grind to a halt and we won’t be able to buy all that stuff from China? Now do you understand?
“Hey, I have an idea! How about making a nostalgic “Memories of My First Apartment” room?”
Ha! We still live like that! You never have to worry about dropping pizza on the fancy couch!
Just like the depression, those McMansions will make great flophouses after the bust.
LMAO @ kids riding their bikes in the extra rooms in a mansion! Sounds like something my kids would do.
A family in my town built a house with a 3,000 square foot wide open basement for their kids to ride their bikes in when it rains. I played outdoors in all kinds of weather when I was a kid.
My wife got a degree in interior design. Once a week they would go on field trips to look nice homes in the area. Twice the professor accidentley booked tours of homes with bare furniture. She figured the mansions were so lavish on the outside, she didn’t realize the owners threw everything they had at the house and coudn’t afford to decorate them.
After the second “OOPS I guess I should have asked if they had decorated first” tour, she gave her students a long lecture on the stupidity of buying a home you can’t even afford to decorate.
McMansions are pitiable. One problem we run into with trying to find a 4-bedroom house is room proportions. We can really use extra sleeping rooms and want to be on the same level with our kids. We don’t need a gigantic master bedroom. They’re usually above the garage and freezing cold. And the downstairs rooms are generally designed poorly. Who uses a formal dining room? Or an extra living room? I’d rather have room for a big kitchen and a pantry with real shelves for storage, or an extra closed-off playroom for the kids so I don’t have to wonder if they’re alive in the basement or attic. (Which are usually never finished in a McMansion anyway).
Does anyone know what this Open MLS is about?
Was doing googling about open RE database and came across the above link. Any idea what that is about?
Good find. What many of us have talked about for a while now. Someone is going to make a lot of money, IMHO. If I didn’t have kids, I would jump on getting an open MLS site started — there is a lot of potential there, IMHO. Maybe you could do it????
sb bubblebeliever says>> OR….
They could earmark it as the “CRYING ROOM”
as compared to a laughing place
ARE WE HAVING FUN YET???
By the looks of these posts… I do believe we are!
Wish it wasn’t at the expense of someone else, but this is trivial stuff compared to what we will be talking about at the end of the year and early 2007:)
As someone once remarked of the decadence preceding a previous crash:
“They’re like pigs at a trough, and you know it can’t last.”
This reminds me a couple of years ago when I used to work for Lucent technologies in South Jersey. Some people(usually Indians or Chinesee) used to spend most of their money on the house and they had empty rooms on their houses where they turned the heat off.
Some cultures seem to place more importance on the house size…some other more on the car size.
Considering that these folks probably grew up in cities with the highest population densities on the planet’s surface, they’re likely conditioned from youth to value the size of their home as the greatest luxury.
“Supersize homes come with a host of supersized decorating concerns. But many Boston-area residents are learning to deal with it.”
La-dee-dah. Things is tough all over.
“This house is way over our heads. We have no money for decorators,” says Jennifer O’Brien.
Then why’d ya buy it, Jen?
A nation filled to the brim with complacent, spoiled people. Easy pickins’ for Mr. Bad Moon A-Comin’.
Buy it is a misnomer here. Rent it from the bank is a more appropriate term.
These people remind me of a mortgage comericial where it shows a couple deeply indebt and the couple saying “we don’t know how it happened”
They don’t call them “sheeple” for nothing!
“But it is a misnomer here. It’s more like rent it for a short time from the bank.
Reminds me of a mortgage commercial where a financialy strapped couple says “we don’t know how it happened..”
They don’t call the sheeple for nothing!
The stories just get better everyday. Are we having fun yet?
One word:
IKEA
Do you mean furnish McMansions with Ikea products or make the most of empty McMansions by turning them into Ikea stores?
“Then why did you but it, Jen?”
“Buy” is a misnomer, more like rent it from the bank for a little while.
Reminds me of a mortgage commercial where it shows a financial strapped couple saying “we don’t know it happened..”
They don’t call them sheeple for nothing!
Well, they won’t be used as flophouses or rooming houses because they are all built in the middle of nowhere.
When I lived in Peachtree City GA in the early 90’s, the McMansion boom was starting. I went on several tours and was astounded. Mind you most of these houses were in the 3-4,000 sf range, small by today’s 5,000 and up. What I learned then is true now - these behemoths houses are builder-designed to add cost. If they were architect-designed, the floor plans would be logical. Instead, the flow of rooms is ridiculous, vast amounts of space are unusable, and the overall effect is unsettling. Contrast a builder-designed 5,000 sf McMansion with a 2000 sf architect-designed home, and the architect’s version will “feel” much better and the 100% of the sf will be usable.
The other issue with most McMansions is that they have space, not quality. Many are built to very low standards, i.e., poor finish work and quality of materials. But, people want them, and to make them “affordable”, quality is sacrificed for quantity. This means that in about 10 years, most of them will look like crap.
For the record, I pay $4300 in property taxes for my 1100 sf house north of Boston. I live in a modest town, too. I understand that the property taxes on the McMansions in the tonier areas run 15-20 K per year. This is “good” for the tax base and why short-sighted town government approves them. However, cluster housing built on the same amount of land would bring in more, but again, they are too stupid to figure it out.
At least the true mansions in Newport, RI have a view…….
I will admit to falling into this trap when I bought my first house. After moving from the San Francisco Bay Area where I rented a one bedroom apartment I relocated to someplace where my mortage was not much more for a 3000 sq foot house with 4 bedrooms, 2 baths, a family room, living room, dining room, eat-in kitchen. I live alone.
4 years later the living room and dining room were empty and other rooms were sparsely furnished. At one point I had a wish list of stuff on a website totalling over 20K.
I sold the place and relocated and downsized to a places less than half the size. I still have all the room I need, but I don’t need another stick of furniture and my new place is paid for.
I’m glad I came to my senses.
OT, but LA Times has some real estate news today:
For some investors, real estate may have lost its rosy glow
All that glitters isn’t golden for state’s real estate agents
Money Talk: It’s Smarter to Rent If You Plan to Move
Nothing new to those who’ve been reading this blog….
Comment by GetStucco
2006-02-11 18:12:32
“So my question is, if this scenario plays out, who will take care of all the empty places? Or will they just get bulldozed, similar to unihabitable areas of post-Katrina NO? ”
***************************************************************************************************************
In the middle 70’s on the North Shore of Massachusetts, a newly established school used seaside mansions that were donated to it or purchased at ridiculously low prices. These were huge buildings on large lots that usually had maintenance issues, high taxes, expensive to heat and cool, etc. No one wanted to buy them even though they were on the coast with beautiful views. But they were perfect for a new school.
Think it will happen again?
walmart has cheap blinds they can install themselves to hide their empty inards…………..such a interesting social phonenomin
OT, but right on the front page of our local newspaper this morning here in Palm Beach County, FL is a story about the boom ending. Love the stat that says inventory has roughly tripled in two years. Some interviews with people who say their homes have just sat on the market for a few months with little buying interest. Don’t have the Jan. stats for our market yet, but I’m real curious to see how they turn out. Keep in mind that down here, this is the heart of the tourist/busy season. So we should be booming in terms of sales.
http://www.palmbeachpost.com/business/content/local_news/epaper/2006/02/12/s1a_HOUSING_0212.html
When oil is $3,$4 or more how are these people going to heat???
This has been the mildest January in history and people here are still complaining about out of control heating costs! Good Luck you are going to need it.
If the money for the last 1000 sf. had instead been used to build double-insulated walls, install low-e windows, etc., they might not even need to pay for heat if the house is oriented properly.
Some days I wonder what I did in my last life to deserve being born in a country with so many morons.
”The overall goal is you want it to look cozy and inviting,” says North Andover designer Bissell — no small task in rooms the size of those in a French chateau. ”You don’t want it to look standoffish. You don’t want to draw an invisible rope around the house and say, ‘Look, don’t touch.’ ”
Spend yourself into a hole buying “Two-story fireplaces. Palatial entryways with formal staircases. Soaring coffered ceilings. Arched floor-to-ceiling windows.” Then spend yourself into another hole trying to make it look “cozy”. Brilliant.
I recently learned that the Roman “vomitorium”, where people went to purge after having stuffed themselves so that they could eat some more, is in fact an urban legend. But what better place to make it a reality than in one of these 10,000 sf houses? Fits in perfectly with the motif of sickeningly spectacular excess and greed.
In Westwood, MA there was a retail outfit called “Design Warehouse” that specialised in enormous furniture and carpets to fill up the McMansions. The furniture was faux-antique (french houses did not have 10 foot tall armours unless they were Versailles) and not, on a pound-for-pound basis, very expensive.
I was astonished a year ago to find it had shut down. Perhaps it was a leading indicator for the failure of the high-end market, in that no-one who needed this overisized stuff could afford it.
The old cities of New England, whether Pittsfield MA, Worcester or Hartford have bighted areas full of lovely vicotorian 8-bedroom or more houses that were split up into apartments in the 1930s and never refurbished. At least these houses, built on the excesses of the 1890s and 1920s, were near urban communities that could support a rental market. In a worse case scenario a lot of the rural mcMansions will get abandoned and taken over by squatters or left for nature to take its course. It will be our Chaco Canyon.
when shopping for a comfy chair a few years ago in the Twin Cities I got really frustrated because all of the stores only had big giant McMansion furniture. Nobody sold little apartment furniture til IKEA opened up. some of the chairs could easily seat two, or one wide-ass, very comfortably, but they were too big to even fit through the door and weighed a few hundred pounds. I gave up looking and made do with my old custom futon, which I still use.