The McMansion Lives On
No longer a hot trend in real-estate construction, the much-maligned architectural style survives in existing homes that often sell quite well.
The house sits grandly on its corner lot in Englewood Cliffs, its multiple wings facing southeast, east and north like suburban sentinels. Its windows are Palladian; its façade is multicolored brick; its double-height entryway is framed by an ornate concrete arch. Inside, there are 3,600 square feet containing six bedrooms and an equal number of baths, a great room yawning beneath a soaring ceiling and a gleaming “gourmet” kitchen. It is the quintessential McMansion, a style that dominated new builds in America’s suburbs starting in the 1980s and whose demise has regularly been announced for at least the past quarter century.
Merriam-Webster defines “McMansion” as “a very large house built in usually a suburban neighborhood or development, especially one regarded critically as oversized and ostentatious.” Coined sometime in the 1980s, the term is rarely used in any but a pejorative sense; you’re not likely to hear a homeowner brag about “our gorgeous new McMansion.” (A McMansion, after all, is to an actual mansion what a Big Mac is to a ribeye at Peter Luger.) Critics of McMansions listed among their chief flaws poor construction and a lack of architectural coherence, the former a result of maximizing interior space while minimizing cost per square foot. They also bemoaned the concomitant shrinkage of outdoor space to accommodate all that interior square footage. And many simply focused on their size, stating, in essence, that the houses were gratuitously large and put unnecessary stress on the environment with their oversize heating and cooling requirements.
Nevertheless, McMansions proliferated. They certainly did in Bergen County, which has been cited as prime McMansion territory by sources as disparate as CNBC, the digital publication Bored Panda and the website McMansion Hell. They offered what many buyers prioritized: the look of luxury; an airy, open-plan layout; and lots and lots of square footage.
Of all the benefits conferred by the McMansion, that square footage was likely the most desirable, reflecting a booming economy. “The economy as a whole had a much higher level of circulating capital— everybody was making money. And where housing was concerned, bigger was definitely better,” says Taylor Lucyk, founder of the Taylor Lucyk Group in Paramus at Christie’s International Real Estate. The typical American house in 1950 measured 983 square feet. That number steadily climbed and by 1970 had grown to 1,500 square feet. Even as American families were becoming smaller, their need for space was increasing (in part because they owned more stuff than ever before), and McMansions—typically 3,000 to 6,000 square feet— satisfied that need and then some.
To an extent, they’re still doing that—enough so that one wonders if reports of their demise have been, as Mark Twain famously wrote of his own, “greatly exaggerated.” In fact, Melissa Rubenstein, a real estate associate at Corcoran Infinity Properties in Ridgewood, says so-called McMansions are absolutely still selling, sometimes after heated bidding wars, and the most prominent reason for that continues to be space. Many of the news reports proclaiming that McMansions were on the way out cited a trend toward smaller, more energy-efficient homes. But the stats muddle that story: Last year, the website Real Estate News noted that the average square footage of new houses in the U.S., after a slight dip in 2023, actually increased in the last quarter of 2024. Builders may be betting on a decline in interest rates, which could rekindle the lust for larger houses.
The majority of buyers in Bergen County, Rubenstein notes, are still prioritizing space. And Bergen buyers who want 3,000-plus square feet will likely have to pay $2 million or more for new construction, thanks in part to tariffs and inflation; they’ll pay considerably less—say, $599,000 to $1.5 million depending on location and other factors—for older houses such as traditional colonials, ranches and split-levels, built in the ’60s, ’70s or ’80s, but they probably won’t find the square footage they seek. They’re also unlikely to find the open floor plans and double-height entryways Rubenstein says many buyers still want. So those buyers’ best options continue to be McMansions.
“I’m seeing ever y demographic, ever y age,” Rubenstein says of typical buyers, “but I’d say those with young families are probably the most likely to buy them because those are the buyers with the greatest need for space.” Barri Plawker, a Realtor-associate with Howard Hanna Rand Realty in Englewood Cliffs, says most of the McMansions she sells go to multigenerational families, “who see the value in the space.”
Still, for Bergen County buyers who can afford them, new builds are in greater demand than McMansions of any size. “I’m not saying people don’t want large homes—they do,” says Plawker. “But I think they want those homes to fit needs more than they want them to just be big.”
“I’ve actually seen more buyers choose slightly smaller homes with higher-end finishes and features over massive square footage,” says Ralph DiBugnara, a mortgage broker in Fort Lee and president of the real-estate website Home Qualified. According to a recent study by the National Association of Realtors, those features include quartz or engineered stone countertops, Energy Star windows, a walk-in pantry, table space in the kitchen, beamed ceilings, a full bath on the main level and outdoor kitchens.
“People are more thoughtful and intentional about how space is used,” says Plawker, noting as an example that while some buyers still seek grand foyers, others are starting to view them as a poor use of space.
Perhaps the biggest change in new builds is a stylistic one. According to Rubenstein, most newly constructed homes in Bergen are designed in the modern farmhouse style, characterized by clean lines, simple facades and a color scheme that favors white with black, brown with black, gray with black, and occasionally, black with black. While these houses may feature more harmonious exteriors and more intentional features, space is still their main draw—which explains why some architectural critics are referring to them as “McModerns” (a term originally coined to describe sprawling new homes in the sleek midcentury modern style).
But if you search the listings for new construction in Bergen, you’ll find what appears to be a hybrid of the McMansion and the McModern. These houses may include modern farmhouse mainstays like black casement windows, black on white exterior color schemes, and tin roof accents, many they also feature quintessential McMansion touches such as towers, arched Palladian-style windows, and wildly contrasting rooflines; interiors often include great rooms with double-height ceilings. And many of them are big. Really big. Nine bedrooms, 10 bathrooms, four-car garage big. An argument could be made that some of these new builds are really McMansions in McModern clothing.
Clearly, many Bergen buyers continue to want that McMansion combination of imposing exterior and wide, open interior space. Here, a wealthier buyer pool is competing for a limited inventory of houses on the market. Older buyers elsewhere may be downsizing, but in Bergen that doesn’t make economic sense. Rubenstein notes that “so many people here are locked into interest rates below 4 percent, so even if they were to downsize, by the time you factor in a 6 percent mortgage rate and the fact that prices have gone up on average 50 percent since the pandemic, they’re not saving anything.” While townhome developments—usually an attractive option for downsizers—are going up throughout the county, says Rubenstein, “the new townhouses are all well over $1 million, and the homeowner association fees have gone crazy.” The difficulty of downsizing here contributes directly to the tightness of Bergen’s housing market, which, in turn, is helping to boost sales of the county’s stock of McMansions.
It’s not impossible, of course, to imagine a day when buyers tear down their old McMansions to replace them with McModerns—or whatever style of home is ascendant at the time. As DiBugnara observes, “Bigger isn’t dead here. It just has to make sense.” And sense, it appears, remains in the eye of the beholder. Remember that corner-lot McMansion in Englewood Cliffs? It sold last year after just five days on the market—for 13 percent above the asking price.
