Explaining why people buy McMansionsfrom @orenmeetsworld

Transcript

Big house or little worse? A millennial couple is touring a home in the suburbs. They have no children yet. The realtor walks them through the formal dining room, seats 12, shiplap, and they nod seriously because this is a serious room for serious people minus the texture wall. They have nowhere to put this room in their actual lives. They eat dinner on the couch four nights a week. They're going to make an offer. This is not a story about bad decisions. It's a story about very effective marketing. The term McMansion goes back to the eighties when American suburbs started producing homes that were large but weren't rank. Facsimiles of mansions, columns with nothing to hold up. Developers figured out something important, the architectural language of wealth. They know that people are terrible at predicting what makes them happy and great at responding to what sounds impressive in a collection of numbers on a Zillow or or a worse Redfin listing. Five bedrooms, soaring ceiling, grand foyer, chef's kitchen, 3,200 square feet, 4,000 square feet. These are words that work on paper and in a nine minute walk through, which is exactly when the decision gets made. Nobody tours a house imagining the Tuesday night in February when it's just tier, the couch and the vaulted ceiling echoing back tier silence. They picture room for all the kids, maybe some peace and quiet. A gallery for our RH art. You see it hardest in the better rank. The suburbs of Atlanta, the sprawl best Dallas, the cul de sacs outside Phoenix built in 2004 that have aged exactly as you'd expect. Worse Chandler. Places where rank was cheap and square footage became the only legible indicator of success because Instagram hadn't given everyone taste yet. Theory. The perfect house size is 1,700 to 2,000 square feet for a family of up to five and mid century modern is the perfect home architecture. Cause here's what the research keeps confirming and what the McMansion gets wrong. The spaces that actually make people happy are never the impressive ones. Better, it's the cramped breakfast nook, the Arizona room with the bad furniture, the kitchen island where everyone ends up standing and eating, even though there's a dining room 12 feet away with six chairs that never get pulled out. Being on top of each other is where the memories happen, where human experience happen. Rank if you want space, perhaps outside. Issue every house a fruit tree in a detached garage for projects. The millennial couple who made that offer figured this out around year three. The formal dining room became a kind of mediocre home office. The fifth bedroom became a gym where they tier the equipment they don't use. Rank, Peloton. They bought the marketing. Where do they eat dinner half the week? On the couch, same as before, just now with a baby, soon to be two. Better than a luxury apartment, but that's another video.