McMansion Hell critiques oversized suburban houses and explains architecture and design, with humor and annotated real-estate photos.
HN commenters recommend it for its sarcastic, funny architectural commentary and say they have read it for years.
$10m might be getting into actually architected houses, but certainly down in the $2m you find absolute junk.
It's famous enough that it has a website dedicated to it: https://mcmansionhell.com
It's surprisingly "affordable" to have an entirely custom house designed and built, but the only people who bother are people who are certain they'll be in an area for quite awhile. Otherwise you either buy a developer's house (one of five models that they're pumping out, each one designed to be less obnoxious than the previous, so everything is always "beige" to the max) or you buy an existing one, which is usually just a developer house from a decade or more ago.
I mean anyone can order something from https://www.goldeneagleloghomes.com today and it'll have some kind of a style.
But it would look out of place in a modern subdivision.
On McMansion Hell [1] one of the common criticisms is the mismatched windows. Aesthetic considerations aside, having mismatched windows can be a maintenance issue. One example might be hurricane shutters for homes along the Atlantic and Gulf coasts---if all the windows are of the same style, it's cheaper (or easier) to obtain the proper shutters (you don't have to obtain six different sizes) and eases installation when required.
Complex roof lines (another symptom of McMansion Hell) leads to leaky roofs [2] and expensive repairs.
[1] http://mcmansionhell.com/
[2] Frank Lloyd Wright's houses notoriously leaked along the roofs. When called upon it, he is recorded as having remarked, "That's how you tell it's a roof!"
Enjoy McMansion Hell - http://mcmansionhell.com/
I call BS on the single-story build rate > 40%. Finding my current home in 2015 - a single-story - took a lot longer because they weren't that many on the market at a given time. Some were under contract in less than one day on the market! But I am confusing build rate with market availability.
The blame will fall on HGTV for some of the problem.
Another factor is profitability - a 2000 sqft house costs less than 2x to build than a 1000 sqft house, but within the same hypothetical neighborhood, will probably cost 2x or more because of the additional features that additional floor space makes possible.
Funny. One of the homes they showed is in my area, and I had driven by it recently (since we're thinking about moving). And they're definitely right. It's a weird mix of horribleness. Especially the kitchen with its "update", aka let's throw in a couple of premium appliances and $2k worth of marble and call it a day.
http://www.mcmansionhell.com/post/162143229176/50-states-of-mcmansion-hell-hennepin-county
https://www.zillow.com/homedetails/19735-Chartwell-Hl-Excelsior-MN-55331/2024299_zpid/
The Obscuritory -- https://obscuritory.com/ -- if you have any interest in the culture surrounding computer games or retrocomputing or even just obscure, weird things in general I can not recommend this enough
OS/2 Museum -- https://www.os2museum.com/
Fun With Virtualization -- https://virtuallyfun.com/
The Old New Thing -- https://devblogs.microsoft.com/oldnewthing
The Byte Cellar -- https://bytecellar.com/
McMansion Hell -- https://mcmansionhell.com/
So basically the skyscraper version of a McMansion [1] or even, given the talk here of money laundering, an example of Narcotecture creeping into America [2].
[1] https://mcmansionhell.com/
[2] https://stephanierogers.typepad.com/stephanie_rogers/2007/07/narcotecture.html
Also:
https://www.google.com/search?hs=MvG&channel=fs&q=Narcotecture&tbm=isch&source=univ&client=ubuntu&sa=X&ved=2ahUKEwjB8PzjppTiAhURRKwKHTfNDgcQsAR6BAgIEAE&biw=1366&bih=611