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You know what this neighbourhood looks like, even though you’ve never been here, even though the rich coastal climate means that the gardens look wild and ancient next to these new houses. They are so new they almost steam in the cool fall air. They are like soufflés – puffed and risen and somehow temporary-looking. But of course they aren’t meant to be temporary, and aren’t meant to represent temporariness to their owners, despite the widespread criticism of this style of construction. The owners may not envision handing down these houses parent to child to grandchild, but they expect the house to outlive their own long tenure. But no one expects these houses to stand for a thousand years.

You know these single family detached homes as McMansions, or perhaps faux chateaux. When they began to replace postwar bungalows in the 1980s, they were also called monster homes, a term that in Vancouver crackled with electric anxiety about race and class. At the time, they were usually the houses of rich immigrants from Hong Kong, in neighbourhoods unused to conspicuous displays of wealth.

Although much new housing in the urban core continues to be designed to appeal to particular ethnic groups (including that favourite of upscale white folks, the reproduction craftsman), the suburban McMansion is more democratic. As long as you can buy – and sustained low interest rates and a mania for ownership at all costs have encouraged people to buy as much house as they can – you are welcome. It helps that certain jobs have increased in status. Restaurant owners and interior designers might even feel superior to the doctors and lawyers and business executives that Malvina Reynolds sang about in Little Boxes in 1962, and they might have the paycheques to match. Still, it’s a pleasant surprise to learn how much variety in background, ethnicity, and stage of life there is behind those double doors.

However, it cannot have escaped the notice of the owners that their large houses are constantly criticized. The McMansion, along with the SUV and fast food, is an example of everything that is supposed to be wrong about contemporary life. The very term McMansion derides not only the crass efficiency of their assembly-line construction, but that they are supersized. Four thousand square feet, six thousand, nine thousand – how much space do people need? Susan Susanka tapped this vein of discontent in her very successful 1999 book, The Not So Big House. The title means just what it says – the houses she designs are not small houses, nor are they inexpensive. But they are houses that take into account how we really use space. Better to have a big kitchen, for instance, than a 450 square foot bedroom. The interior furnishings of the not-so-big houses, presumably all chosen by the owners independently of the architect, are as consistent as any Ikea showroom – bookshelves and woven rugs and representations of third-world authenticity. You can’t quite see the stacks of old Utne Readers, but you know they’re there.

The Not So Big House is a popular architecture book, but its implicit critique of typical suburban living is part of a long tradition. As long as there have been suburbs, there have been intellectuals criticizing them. The life of the mind is more often lived in the city. (Well, sure. Thinking and writing don’t take up much space, but they are activities that demand frequent trips to bookstores, cafés, and pubs. And on the money I’ll be making writing this, I can count on renting small apartments in iffy neighbourhoods for the rest of my life.) Our entire understanding of North American suburbanization has been shaped by this critique, rather than by lived experience. Chances are, you think of the suburb you grew up in as dull and repressive, a place where alcoholic housewives had empty affairs in between waxing the floors and ironing the shirts. Why? A thousand magazine articles, novels, and films have told you it’s this way. It’s Only Temporary (1950). The Man in The Gray Flannel Suit (novel, 1955; movie, 1956). The Crack in the Picture Window (1956). John Cheever’s “The Housebreaker of Shady Hill” (1958). The fifties were full of this stuff; it was suburbia’s finest hour. The Feminine Mystique (1963). It got a little cartoonish as time wore on: The Stepford Wives (1975), Valley Girl (1983). Asphalt Nation (1997) was a call-to-arms against the suburbs. And then things got bleak: The Ice Storm (1997), American Beauty (1999), Columbine High School (1999). And we’re now back to camp with the series Desperate Housewives.

But those who can afford them have not rejected McMansions or the suburbs, at least not in sufficient numbers that they show any signs of disappearing from the landscape. Citigroup Smith Barney recently recommended Toll Brothers, a publicly-traded American company notorious for its sprawling houses on small suburban lots, as a recession-proof buy for those looking to pick up some stock. Never mind that residential real estate looks like it’s peaked in the U.S., that plenty of people are shorting the hell out of Toll’s stock, and ignore the possibility that high energy prices make these places expensive to heat and commute from. The people will not be swayed from their desire for five bedrooms, six and a half bathrooms (handy if there’s an outbreak of food poisoning), and a half-dozen recreational rooms.

The McMansion may be criticized mainly for its size, but it is in the complaints about its construction that things get interesting. Toll Brothers builds its houses to code, but that might be about it, according to a 2001 article in Phillymag. The article makes the irresistible comparison to William Levitt, who successfully applied the lessons of mass production to house the parents of the baby boomers. And while they may have been only a fraction of the size of today’s suburban house, much of the criticism directed at Levitt’s developments (cookie-cutter houses lacking craftsmanship) was the same. At the heart of the matter is the vexed question of taste. While McMansions may have every luxurious finishing, from oversized walk-in showers to the inevitable granite countertops, it is their sameness and predictability that offends their critics. Luxury is often a little clownish when it is taken up by the masses, from the automotive fins of the 1950s to today’s SUV.

This does not bode well for today’s antisuburban dwelling, the urban loft. Lofts may have begun as a reclamation of industrial space, but they have become nothing more than small apartments with high ceilings and not enough walls. A new loft development in Vancouver smugly proclaims, “No white picket fences. No PTA meetings.” This might as well say, “No kids,” but that alone wouldn’t capture the strength of the antisuburban ethos of the young hipsters who are supposed to be buying these things. In their search for urban difference, hipsters want many of the same features that characterize the McMansion: granite countertops and cavernous ceilings. And suburban taste has in turn borrowed from the urban industrial aesthetic, to the point where every mainstream furniture store carries a full line of stainless steel appliances.

Since the loft no longer conveys authenticity, the restless must move on. Dwell magazine, now five years old, has consistently sung the virtues of prefab and modular houses. They look very different from Levitt’s Cape Cods and Toll’s chateaux. These are the mid-century mod squad, all glass and wood, and they appeal to a different and increasingly popular aesthetic. As mass-produced architect-designed houses, they are part of an explosion of low-priced design that has propelled stores like Ikea and (more recently) Target to prominence. Prefab takes what is objectionable about the McMansion – that part signified by the prefix “Mc” – and makes it a virtue. The design cognoscenti are interested in these houses because of their manufacturing process. They aren’t just mid-century modern houses; they are shorthand for the wonders of contemporary sourcing, production, transport, and democratization. It seems likely that if they take off in a big way (apparently Ikea is getting into them), prefab will be next to feel the acid sting of criticism.

Each succeeding generation of intellectuals and wannabe bohemians has discovered and rejected the suburbs not so much because they have thoroughly examined the quality of its built life, but because we distinguish ourselves by displays of taste. New housing developments make that difficult, although they lose their homogeneity as time goes on. Meanwhile, since everyone has granite countertops, they signify not rocky permanence, only sameness. Or worse, striving to display good taste.

But they are durable, and I don’t know what we’ll do with all the granite that is doomed to be ripped out of dated kitchens in thirty years’ time. Landscape with it? If you put granite up against that other common symbol of durability and achievement, the diamond engagement ring, the countertops win. As reported in Rocks and Minerals magazine: “Granite may be, however, unforgiving on your diamond if you happen to accidentally knock the stone in your ring against the countertop; even if it is not granite but one of the dozens of other countertop stones, your diamond may not survive.” What a richly dramatic passage that is! The kitchens of the McMansions may be reviled, but they will outlast all your dreams of suburban wedded bliss.

Posted by Katharine on Friday, November 11th, 2005 at 4:54 pm.