glam metal modern but also your contractor is going to jail dawg
Sometimes a house is so ugly, disgust boomerangs back into a form of respect.
This is a rare phenomenon, one which should be treated seriously. I've been looking at ugly houses professionally for almost a decade now and I can say with confidence that there are only a handful of true goose eggs that meet the mark. This house -- this remarkable, revolting house -- located, of all places, in Randolph County, North Carolina, is perhaps the finest goose egg a rogue and most certainly confused contractor could possibly lay.
Yeehaw, man. For the curious, the house is on the market for over 500 grand despite being badly sited and measly 2600 square feet. Most of that is devoted to the lawyer foyer which is not the choice I would personally make, but hey, to each their own.
Most of the houses on McMansion Hell these days are submissions from members of the McMansion Hell Patreon, either in our discord server or on our livestreams. This one, however was a total fluke. I came across it by accident because my brother is looking to move to the area in order to be closer to my folks. (I doubt he'd be interested in something this, uh, unique.)
Now, in all these years, I've never devoted an entire post to the exterior of a house. As they say, there's a first time for everything. There is so much going on with this house, all of it in direct opposition to the concept of taste, it requires a deeper investigation than the initial exterior image usually allows. (Also the entire interior is, as one might expect, entirely dark gray, complete with that awful washed out laminate flooring.)
(here is a sneak peek inside. the rest is not really important nor interesting.)
Anyway, without further ado, let's hit it from the top.
First off, no, I don't know what is inside this house's giant, hammerhead-esque forehead. It's not supported by anything so my assumption is, well, nothing. They put this in there for the sheer aesthetic love of the game.
Second, we have to talk about the siding. It's vinyl, and $500 grand is firmly in Hardie®™© Board territory. You can already start to see it ripple against the cornice, which is probably fine. The cornices are painted black in a cartoony, Roy Lichtenstein fashion, that is, if Roy Lichtenstein was drunk. The can lights are a nice touch. They help highlight important parts of the facade, such as:
The vinyl siding and black trim will continue until morale improves. Also, I zoomed out here to include the forehead (fivehead?) just because the scale is INSANE -- that's like a 50-50 wall-to-fivehead ratio. Honestly, even though things in the world are pretty dire, I wouldn't trust that cantilever with my life.
The window layout on this thing makes me wonder if the people who put it together have eyes that can see and a brain that connects to them. Now, I'm not going to invoke the Greek orders or anything, but I am going to say that every single architectural rule is being brazenly broken here. Total impunity. The window and door don't line up at the top, which is the bare minimum of common decency. Then there's that little guy pulling a Leeroy Jenkins up in the corner. You go dude.
The trim on these masses is starting to look AI generated but it's probably just the HDR every realtor uses. The FaceTune of the field. Anyway, I think it's a bad idea to put what looks like builder grade wood flooring on the outside of a house. It's giving mold. It's giving sunbleaching. It's giving Etsy.
As we can see, another familiar McMansion Hell enemy has also made an appearance: the prairie mullion window. There is no reason to use this window unless it involves building a fake bungalow, but the worst possible place to use it is in this particular situation. It's the only window with white mullions, it looks weird with the siding, and it's not exactly """modern""" or whatever this house is supposed to be.
(Often I wonder if some people believe that modernism is just "doing some stuff with squares" and the more squares there are the more modernist it is. Probably not true, but then again, I'm not the one pulling massive profit on houses that look like doo doo so jokes on me.)
Zooming out again because context still matters even in the most nonsensical situations. The funny thing about this house is that the only normal part of it is the front door and even then... what?? Also, look at that siding-less patch of brick on the right. As though to say: haha! Finally, I love how the stairs lead down into a bunch of rocks. Serves you right!
Thanks to advanced screenshotting technology, we can see that there are also prairie mullions on these other windows, it's just that they're a more reasonable black. Don't worry though, the windows are still offensive. They're two windows stuck together in order to give the impression of a single continuous one. (Remember the inside shot?) Nice try, bucko. Second, why don't the two windows meet where that little band of siding is? Well, we all know the answer to this question. (We don't, in fact, know the answer to this question.)
This is my favorite part of the house. It's almost good, to me, which is why I saved it for last. I have no idea what the hell that glossy composition book siding is but I love it. I've never seen it before. I also like how they're doing a weird entablature-quoin combo thing with it, but only on the right side of the house. There's some great five-cornice action going on but, thanks to the precedents set by truly mid postmodernism, it works.
Unfortunately there are some downsides here. What's the deal with that tiny, skinny stone? brick? veneer? Second, why is the siding just hanging off the edge like that? That whole little section where the three (four?) cladding meet is precipitous. The cheapo off-white developer special garage door with the little trad elements is a nice gesture, one that tells you life has no meaning. Why bother?
Anyway, after all that, if we put it all together again, we get this:
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