Keeping Up With the Jonesing
You want this house. You can feel a dreamy desire bordering on lust for the high faux-adobe walls, the five bedrooms, the four fireplaces, the built-in barbecue on a side patio and the two-story foyer with a retractable skylight. At 6,162 square feet, this is a house in which you and the dog could play Frisbee in the foyer. The arches over many doorways, the ostentatious columns lining the hallway, the broad countertops in whatever expensive material you choose--the architectural details have been on your mind for days. Never mind that it sits side by side with cookie-cutter homes in what essentially is a suburban housing tract, and that critics deride houses like this as “McMansions.” That doesn’t matter. Its size reaches out to your ego in ways you don’t even care to explore. You’re jonesing for this house.
Of course, there’s the price tag. You worry that you’ll have to live like a monk to afford the $2.55 million for this particular floor plan. The down payment alone is the equivalent of a decent house in many places. Still, you linger in this model named, for no apparent reason, the Delcado. It sits in a gated 29-house tract called MonteVerde (green mountain), just below the usually golden Santa Monica Mountains in Tarzana. You can understand why so many buyers, often moving up from comfortable but relatively cramped homes, are cashing in their equity-rich hovels for these mini-castles ranging between 4,800 and 6,600 square feet. You’ve convinced yourself that all this space is necessary. Even if you can’t fill all the cupboards, there’s power in having more than you can use.
Excess is just part of the lifestyle in places such as Braemar Estates, Beverly Ridge Estates, Royal Oaks Colony and Lake Sherwood Country Club--tracts where these mega-houses elicit the image of wealth and exclusivity in groupings of between 30 and 350 homes. Tony Truisi, an Encino real estate agent specializing in what he calls “upper high-end” homes, says “there’s a big market in this part of L.A.--houses running between $1 million and $3 million--that’s a hot market right now. And that’s unbelievable to say, huh?”
Actually, yes. But so-called mcmansion communities are rising all over Southern California and elsewhere in the country even as the economy grows less and less certain. According to the California Assn. of Realtors, the number of homes in California that sold for more than $1 million rose 46% between 2001 and 2002.
While rising property values account for part of that, the proliferation of these massive homes through the 1990s also was fueled by the booming economy, the rise in home equity as real estate prices soared and the persistent equation of square footage with status. According to the National Assn. of Home Builders, the average home in the United States in 1987 was 1,905 square feet. Now it’s up to 2,324 square feet, while 4% of homes on the Pacific Coast are between 4,000 square feet and 5,000 square feet. A corollary trend is equally telling. During that same period, the average lot size shrank from 17,600 square feet to 12,910 square feet.
William Frey, a demographer at the Brookings Institution in Washington, D.C., compares the recent trend toward larger homes to the 1950s migration to post-World War II suburbs. He calls McMansion buyers “kind of the new middle class. It’s the 21st century version of Levittown, which used to be the brass ring of people in the 1950s.”
“If you look back over the last 30 years or so,” says Robert Frank, a Cornell University economics professor, “virtually all the gains and wealth have gone to the people at the top of the income ladder. And as a result of that, those people have been doing what people always do when they get more money--they buy more stuff and bigger stuff. Houses are on the list. So they build bigger, and that seems to shift the frame of reference for people just below the top. If people just above them are building bigger, then they feel they have to build bigger too.”
Having the time and money to build your own home used to be one of the perks of wealth. McMansion buyers, by contrast, are the working wealthy. Many of them labor long hours to pay the massive mortgages on their massive houses. For them, it’s more practical to buy a previously designed place that projects an aura of wealth, prestige and personal achievement--off-the-rack opulence, if you will--rather than create a unique architectural symbol of high culture and refinement. If you want individuality, you can always sink some bucks into unique landscaping or remodel that useless formal dining room into a private pool hall.
With a ready-to-build tract mansion, some of which even come furnished, Truisi says, “you can put a deposit on a house, the builder will have the house done within six months, and you’re moving in with your suitcases and that’s it. Very easy.”
This hasn’t made custom builders happy. Their typical customers are being siphoned away by the siren song of McMansions. “It used to be that my phone would be ringing all the time from people who at least wanted to entertain the idea of building their home,” says designer and general contractor Chris Barnes, who works in Temecula, one of the state’s fastest-growing cities. “There are now fewer and fewer calls.”
To some, McMansion tracts are a pox on the landscape. Perusing the Internet for references to McMansions brings up hundreds of nasty reflections on their size and design. One memorable entry likens the houses to “expensive whores: they promise instant gratification for a bloated, invariably male ego.” Others feel that the grandiose houses are examples of what rich people have always done--display their good fortune to the envious and less fortunate. Some communities are getting proactive, including Denver and other cities that are considering rezoning residential areas to restrict housing size. Mountain Lakes, a New Jersey borough, already restricts the floor space of new homes to between 12% and 17% of the lot size.
Beyond building codes, there’s another backlash in the works--a quiet, sensible notion that a monster house has few of the qualities one expects in a sanctuary. Beauty isn’t found in a bloated house, this movement’s proponents suggest. Twenty-five-foot-high ceilings do not necessarily make you happy.
Then again, if you’ve lived in a 1,500-square-foot townhouse, the idea of tripling your living space is hard to resist. “The majority of the buyers in our market are more the move-up buyers,” says Truisi. “They’re people who have lived in the community and decided, ‘I want to stay here.’ They sell their house in Tarzana or Encino and go on to the gated community.” With the logic of someone who deals with the well-heeled, Truisi notes that his clients want a home that includes an office, a gym and a maid’s room. “Now, if you’re buying a six-bedroom house, that basically leaves three bedrooms. Two [for the] kids, plus mom and dad.”
Monteverde’s builder, Larry Delpit Jr., clearly loves the houses rising from an abandoned nursery on a slope adjacent to the Edgar Rice Burroughs estate in Tarzana. He has built them all in the same Spanish style for what he calls a “village feel.” As he leads a tour, he can’t help running his fingers over the newly installed countertops in the kitchen, reminding you that it’s imported Italian marble, or gushing about the $30,000 hand-distressed wood beams in one model. He points out, several times, the 25 or so $150 wrought-iron registers sprinkled throughout the houses. You peek into the Delcado’s media room, with its industrial-size popcorn maker, and imagine relaxing to a movie on a 50-inch plasma television.
Delpit doesn’t mind that he has to negotiate all the sweeping staircases on the stiff, artificial knee he earned from playing football in school. He visits the construction site as much for the pleasure of creation as to monitor its progress. At 48, he’s found his niche. In his glasses and short-cropped hair, Delpit looks like the shoe salesman he once was. He put himself through business school at San Diego State by peddling footwear for Florsheim, and liked it so much that he ended up owning 10 stores. Then his father, who owns Kern Oil Co., persuaded him to sell the stores and join the company.
Delpit in turn persuaded his father to diversify into real estate. He tried his hand at condos, but he found that building and selling these huge homes was a far more attractive investment. His Manhattan Holding Co. also is working on a 300-home McMansion community in Palm Beach, Fla., and recently finished another, the 28-home Riviera Beach Colony in Redondo Beach. “Before we got in here, Tarzana wasn’t known as an upscale neighborhood,” he says. “And that’s what Riviera Beach is known as now. We transformed these into their own little gated communities and we made them upscale.”
Ironically, Delpit says his buyers will probably make more money on their houses than he does. “I’ll be happy if we make 20%,” Delpit says. After you point out that this means a tidy $400,000 per home, he allows that it’s probably much less, maybe $150,000 per home after all the building expenses.
With a barely disguised enmity toward tract homes, some custom builders believe a few developers make a lot more profit than that by scrimping on materials and workmanship: “You can get a very nice custom home, I think, for the same kind of money--if people have the time to do it,” says Tim Brennan, owner of Action Builders, a custom home builder in Encino. “I look in a tract house and see nails popping on drywall, see the poor quality of construction. The finish trim--the joints are opening up and the paint job is terrible. People don’t know.”
Delpit says that his houses are different, with greater attention to quality than most developments. But the typical buyer, he concedes, “doesn’t care as much about details, or understand them. Our guy is a little more sophisticated.”
You would like to think that you’re among this cultured few as you eye the his-and-her walk-in closets with MonteVerde’s architect, John Andrews. He describes each room in the Delcado with such a quiet, modest voice, you wonder if he’s the exception to the stereotype of an arrogant architect.
He regularly strokes his dark goatee as he points out details that the eventual owners may never consciously notice--how he leads your eye through doorways as if each rounded corner is a photographic composition, how each bedroom has a small foyer to “embrace” you or the way he uses low hallway ceilings to first compress space and then--surprise!--you walk into a living room that feels like an airplane hangar. He’s so proud, you feel funny even mentioning that you covet this house because it might sound as if you want to steal his child.
Andrews, who as a kid rode his bike in the lot where MonteVerde now stands, refers to the Spanish Revival style as “romantic” and says it “elicits great emotion.” You call it a McMansion, and he mildly rebukes you: His design isn’t the same thing. He sees a true McMansion as pretending to be grand by using “huge elements” whether or not they’re in scale with the rest of the house. They’re “elements that you might find in castles and government structures,” he says derisively.
Nevertheless, as the tour continues, you feel bewildered by the many rooms and the daunting idea of furnishing the place. Traversing the hallways is tedious. When status is measured by, well, a tape measure, social climbing can become a rather petty exercise.
“I had a [client],” says Chris Barnes, “and every time I turned around, she goes, ‘Well, I went to a friend’s house and I measured their living room, and it’s much bigger than this. I want this at least that big--oh, make it two feet bigger.’ ”
You immediately think of North Carolina architect Sarah Susanka, who advocates that size is no substitute for homeyness. With three books, the first called, appropriately, “The Not So Big House,” dozens of articles and speaking engagements, Susanka has become the guru behind the idea that massive homes are the next architectural dinosaurs, slowly succumbing to smaller, happier homes.
“Larger volume spaces look impressive,” she says, “but unless you’ve got 30 people there, it’s very difficult to settle down.” (McMansion dwellers often say they need extra space for entertaining, and that 30 people gathering in their living room is considered an intimate group.) Susanka contends that there’s a direct relationship between comfort and a home’s scale. Details such as beautiful light fixtures, she says, are ultimately more impressive than vaulted ceilings. Alcoves are cozier than massive formal living rooms. “We look up, marveling at ceiling height,” she writes, “instead of appreciating what the room has to offer at eye level.”
Home size is cyclical, Susanka says, and popular opinion--or perhaps our struggling economy--may stem the public’s appetite for these homes. The Victorian period had its own McMansion trend. Back then, “if you could afford more square footage, you bought more square footage because it told people that you’d arrived,” she says of a trend that eventually waned. “There was a desire to make a statement, and that statement became something that was just about square footage and quantity. It was very little about quality or character.”
Tony Truisi has never heard of sarah susanka or her quaint notions about size. Coziness? That’s the interior designer’s job. Truisi loves McMansions not only for the income they’ve brought him--he’s sold more than 10 in the past year--but also because he lives in one, a slightly smaller 4,000-square-foot French number in 190-home Mulholland Park, which looks down on Tarzana and the San Fernando Valley near the crest of the Santa Monica Mountains.
Truisi takes you to visit his neighbors, whose 5,500-square-foot Italian-style home he recently sold for nearly twice what they paid five years ago. “The owners, an English couple, are moving laterally,” he says, “to Beverly Hills.”
The drive through Mulholland Park is surreal. You look down a lifeless street. The houses are so close together that from most angles they look connected. It’s as if you’re in a canyon. You notice your cell phone has no signal.
The house’s foyer has a high ceiling, of course. Below it, a curved staircase rises to the second floor landing that overlooks the front door. The living room’s ceiling is so high (“soaring” as Truisi’s glossy color flier puts it) that Susanka’s admonition comes to mind: You definitely notice the 25 feet of empty space above before you notice anything else. The master suite has a majestic bathroom, cavernous walk-in closet and adjacent study. The similarity of its design to all the other houses you’ve seen so far is jarring.
And, apparently, that’s fine with Truisi’s clients. Five years ago, he relates, “People would say, ‘I’m not going to spend a million dollars for a tract home.’ You know what? Now they’re in line to [buy] these tract homes.”
Mike and Marilyn D’Egidio were ahead of that trend. They bought their 6,200-square-foot home in a tract called Mountain View Estates in Calabasas about 13 years ago, paying $875,000. Mike, a dentist, figures his investment has doubled. Still, as he takes you on a tour, starting at yet another long, curved staircase--leading off a foyer so large that the kids use it for balloon volleyball games on rainy days--you sense a little ambivalence on his part, especially when you ask about maintenance.
“Oh, God. Painting!” Mike says. “Painting constantly. The interior--we just got a bid for $7,000.” Electricity bills hit about $500 a month, and the summer water bills run up to keep the pool filled and the landscaping on the half-acre lot tended. Property taxes are high. “It’s just that there’s a lot more things when it’s so big,” he says.
Marilyn estimates that their four kids easily could have fit in something 2,000 square feet smaller, but, she says, “The reason I wanted this house is I have a huge family. I wanted my kids at my house. I wanted a huge area where my kids could feel free to hang out with parents around.”
Back at Monteverde, Delpit steps over construction debris in the Allegra model just as the buyer, a slender middle-aged woman, drops by in her gym clothes. “I stopped wearing nice clothes when I come here,” she says, pointing to the sawdust on Delpit’s pants. She and her husband are one of the “moving-up” buyers that Truisi talks about, coming from a Studio City Tudor-style home they lived in for 24 years. She visits here daily to check progress on the construction that’s due to be finished by July.
Delpit is pointing out the wires running through the wall studs, ready for optional computer-driven smart-house gizmos, when she calls from the master suite, “The reading lights were moved instead of the [recessed lighting] cans.” Delpit dials his cell phone before she asks him to get the project manager. “I’m calling him now,” he says.
With her grown-up son and daughter only coming by for short stays, the buyer says later that her husband plans on working about 40% of the time in his office just off the master suite. “We can be totally self-contained. I’ll have a refrigerator in the bedroom. We can close the door and never have to leave.”
You quickly imagine this 5,000-square-foot house finished but dark except for those reading lights in the bedroom. The crack of a soda can pop-top echoes off the high ceilings while the couple who worked so hard to achieve this apex of the American Dream settle in. Like you, they wanted this house, seduced by the size and amenities. The only difference is they bought it. With some satisfaction, you imagine them hunkering down for their golden years--cozy, secure and self-contained--in a portion of the house no larger than a cave.