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Perhaps you're into a perfectly preserved midcentury modern home with a sparkling swimming pool in the Palm Springs desert. Or you're fascinated by a sprawling McMansion with cathedral ceilings and a front door you could drive a truck through. Or maybe, let's just pretend, you actually like a vintage 1970s bedroom with a mirrored ceiling and a gold shag carpet. 
Whatever you love in a house, there's a huge world for you beyond endless episodes of and housing sites like and . There's also a dedicated online community passionate about real estate, architecture or both who spend hours finding the most bizarre, incredible and horrifying homes in America and delivering them to their thousands of followers. 

Some, like the social media accounts  and are mostly about domestic window shopping, while others, like the blog , take a deeper and more purposeful tone. But no matter their mission, they rank alongside as an enjoyable corner of an internet dominated by distressing headlines and Twitter-borne sniping. 

This house in the Chicago suburbs is prime fodder for McMansion Hell.

McMansion Hell

For Kate Wagner, a writer and architecture critic who created McMansion Hell in 2016, the desire to see inside a stranger's home comes from both interest and envy. "I think people like to look at real estate listings out of one a sense of voyeurism to see how other people live," she says. "There's also this desire for something that for many people is unattainable. To get angry at the people who truly have and will always have, I think drives McMansion Hell, even if there's lots of other elements to it."

Wagner couldn't have started McMansion Hell at a better time. Though the US real estate market was booming long before COVID-19, the pandemic's onset as buyers took advantage of shuttered offices to relocate. Nationwide home sales in July jumped 23% over the same month in 2020, , sparking and pushing for many. But even rising dent interest in the online sport of viewing and judging houses. McMansion Hell and Zillow Gone Wild approach this pastime from different sides, but both encourage their fans to do the same thing. Go ahead, gawk at the exterior and virtually walk through the rooms and absolutely critique a stranger's taste.

















"I think people like to look at real estate listings out of one a sense of voyeurism to see how other people live."
Kate Wagner



Samir Mezrahi says he started Zillow Gone Wild in December 2020, at the height of the buying frenzy, after realizing he couldn't be the only person browsing when he was bored. Now with almost 180,000 Twitter followers, he admits he got lucky with the timing.

"The account really tapped into the casual person who looks at real estate whether they're looking to move or not," he says. "Peeking into people's homes and people's places, I think there's something interesting and entertaining about it."
What makes a McMansion
There's certainly no shortage of entertainment on McMansion Hell, which Wagner dedicates to skewering the most garish structures of suburbia. Though there's no textbook definition of a McMansion, Wagner listed the of these houses "everyone loves to hate" both on and in a . Picture an oversized (typically more than 3,000 square feet) multilevel home designed in (maybe a Tudor-style roof over a Colonial porch) and with a complete disregard for such basic architectural principles as . Superficial features like , and are meant to show the occupant's wealth, but they can't hide the home's shoddy and mass-produced construction.

"All of these things are combined together to form this thing that's really easy to dislike," she told the Washington Post . "Because it's pretentious."












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Wagner started following McMansions while growing up in North Carolina during the latter half of the McMansion building period, which she says lasted from about 1980 through the Great Recession. She combined her lifelong interest in architecture with serious thought about what the monstrous and often tacky homes represented. 

"If it was only that I hated them, I probably wouldn't be [writing the blog]," she says. "But I think they're fascinating … I've always been interested in the McMansion and how it's changed over the years in aesthetics, interior design and what people saw as desirable in a single family home."

Nothing in a McMansion is safe from Wagner's commentary

McMansion Hell

The blog really took off after went viral. image-driven format was a natural first place for McMansion Hell in an era before Substack, and the platform still brings the majority of her readers. She now counts 100,000 Tumblr followers while also publishing to and and garners support for her work through .

Cates Holderness, the head of editorial at Tumblr, confirmed McMansion Hell is one of the site's more popular blogs. "[Tumblr] tends to be a very highly visual platform, and I think with McMansion Hell specifically, Kate does a really great job of utilizing the tools it offers," she says. "The photos are always high quality and her writing style has a ton of personality. That's why it resonates with her followers and why the blog is so big."
















Punditry with a purpose
Wherever you read it, the blog is instantly engaging. Using photos plucked from real estate listings (the and are fertile McMansion grounds), Wagner adds comments about the home's exterior features and interior design. Hardly anything, from fake stucco walls to grandiose staircases and a gilded Putin-sized dining room table, escapes Wagner's careful eye and sharp wit. Though always snarky, her commentary is never outright nasty, and it all comes grounded in good intentions.

"McMansion Hell is about explaining why these houses are terrible," she says. "It's not just that they are terrible, because they are, but being able to point to why, I think, is very important. That element of pointing out what does and doesn't work was always there."

"McMansion Hell is about explaining why these houses are terrible."
Kate Wagner



Wagner, who writes all of the commentary herself, has even developed her own lingo to describe McMansions. A is a massive entryway often with a drooping chandelier. A is the door on a (typically three-car) garage. A is a 1980s-era bathroom with mirrored walls. And if she can't explain something, like a window that doesn't appear to have a room behind it, she'll simply ask, "?"

She says she's never heard from owners of the homes she's featured, though she occasionally hears from real estate agents who've admitted the properties are difficult to sell. Instead, readers who grew up in McMansions are more likely to get in touch. Beyond finding the blog funny, they identify with the subtle commentary of alienation and rampant consumerism that underlines every post. 

"A lot of the jokes about suburban isolation actually track," she says. "It's all very familiar while using extraordinary houses and bringing them into sort of a broader critique of just the way that we live, especially in America. It's a critique of wealth and a critique of excess."

Know your lawyer foyers.

McMansion Hell

But Wagner hasn't always won fans. In 2017, Zillow she stop using the site's photos while accusing her of copyright infringement and violating federal anti-hacking laws. Though Wagner took down the blog for a couple of days, after the stepped in .

Corynne McSherry, the EFF's legal director, says Zillow's claims were unfounded. By annotating the photos, Wagner was protected under fair use grounds.

"We want to be especially vigilant around abusing intellectual property laws to try to shut down speech that's clearly lawful," McSherry says. "It's really important when people can stand up and fight back. It helps other people know that they have options and they don't have to just cave to a giant company that tried to threaten them." 

















"I hope [readers] will learn about buildings. ... The point is to make architecture accessible for everybody and to make it fun, interesting and clever."
Kate Wagner



Zillow didn't respond to multiple requests for comment.

Though she specialized in architectural acoustics in graduate school and is a published, Wagner isn't a trained architect herself. Still, she further pushes the blog's strong educational component through articles on topics like proper and design and . Her goal is to encourage readers to be more literate in architecture and demystify an often-rarefied world.

"I hope [readers] will learn about buildings. And I hope I encourage people to listen to their inner architecture critic and have the tools to make judgments on the built environment," she says. "The point is to make architecture accessible for everybody and to make it fun, interesting and clever."
Going wild on real estate
Sometimes, though, you just want to look at photos of quirky houses for sale, which is the whole point of Zillow Gone Wild. The homes Mezrahi features on the account don't stick to a specific style. They can be big or small, luxurious or modest, modern or traditional. His goal is to maintain a positive tone regardless.

"I hope I've never been mean to anyone's home," he says. "These are people's spaces with memories and collections, so I stay away from a hoarder house or someone who's had tough times. But for a very rich person who had some bad design decisions, I think it's more like a celebration of what someone's home looks like."


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