Residential Architecture Firms

Are McMansions Coming Back in Style?

For a while now, new-home buyers have spurned oversize homes with lavish features in favor of smaller, energy-efficient dwellings. It made sense: With the housing market collapsing, homeowners dropped dreams of big plots with celebrity-caliber amenities in lieu of more functionality. Home theaters were out, replaced by home offices.

But the Home Design Trend Survey, released today by the American Institute of Architects , shows a slight change from previous years on home size and buyer sentiment.

The survey, which has been conducted quarterly since 2005, asks a panel of 500 architectural firms that focus on residential properties what customers are asking for in new developments. The percentage reporting that customers wanted smaller houses has seemingly started to drop.

This year, about 52% of firms surveyed reported a decrease in the square footage of the houses they’re designing this year, down from 57% last year. Today’s numbers also show fewer firms reporting decreases in lot size (down to 22 percent from 32 percent) and lot volume (down to 18 percent from 21 percent).

“Overall, home-and-lot sizes showing signs of increasing slightly indicates that the housing market is stabilizing after being in a downward spiral since 2007,” says Kermit Baker, AIA’s chief economist.

Outdoor space is also more sought after: About 60 percent of firms surveyed reported increases in the number of homes with outdoor living space, up from 56 percent last year. “The features that households are looking for are accessibility, a single-floor design and open space – both indoors and outdoors,” Mr. Baker says.

Even if the trend towards smaller homes is slowing, the McMansion isn’t back just yet.

In January, we reported that the average size of a new single-family home shrunk to 2,377 square feet last year, down 3 percent from 2009, according to the National Association of Home Builders.

And it’s not clear that younger buyers will embrace the McMansion in the same way their parents did. Presenters at the annual NAHB convention in Orlando told Developments in January that large, cookie-cutter suburban homes wouldn’t appeal to the younger generation of home buyers.

“It’s not that we’re going to move back to McMansions anytime soon,” Mr. Baker says. “But I think we’ll start to see house sizes start to edge up a bit.”

The glut of existing homes has created a larger price disparity in new versus used homes. So my guess is that is proportionately much less construction going on in the low to moderate price ranges. The new versus used disparity exists at the high end as well but (some of) the higher end consumers are more willing to pay the premium in order to design and build exactly what they want. This may be a case of the statistics being misleading, and not indicative of a larger trend.

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