In Design Rewind, AD looks back at the people, places, and things that defined 2025, from the new McMansion to the best place to build a home (hint: it’s not on a lot). Here’s what we saw in the year’s rearview mirror.
You know it when you see it: the supersized suburban home that sits on a disproportionately small lawn, its incongruous roofline jumps from gable to dormer to conical, then back to gable again. There are probably ill-placed and mismatched windows, and the façade is finished in a medley of vinyl, brick, and stone. Inside, specialty spaces—from a movie theater to an at-home gym—fill every homeowner’s residential desire. It’s garish! It’s aspirational! It’s the McMansion.
In the last 40 years, these types of mega-homes have tapped a variety of architectural inspirations: the Tuscan villa, the Colonial Revival, the modern farmhouse. The typical decorative attributes of each style are loosely incorporated—their sizes maximized, their scales randomized. But in 2025, the mass produced expression of the American dream is taking on a whole new look. Welcome to the age of the McModern.
What is the McModern?
“Throughout architectural history, if you get really rich, you build something that is both a testament to your success and a form of extreme self-expression,” explains Kate Wagner, an architecture critic and creator of the blog McMansion Hell. Today, McMansions capitalize on this desire. Drawing superficial inspiration from historic manse styles, their designs allude to the upper echelon, but are often built quickly with inexpensive materials to squeeze the most living space out of a lot size.
The McModern, a term Wagner coined, is the latest iteration of the McMansion. It’s a sprawling, hyper-streamlined house with a flat roof, perpendicular white walls, large expanses of glass, and cantilevered platforms, often overlooking a vista. But like its predecessor, it often lacks the careful intentionality of its source material.
“The principles of midcentury California modernism show up in these homes but in jumbo-sized ways,” explains architecture critic Mimi Zeiger. “Indoor-outdoor living equals multiple oversized patios, courtyards, and terraces; honest expression of materials means ipe [wood] screens in triplicate; simple geometries translate to boxy stucco expanses.”
Neutrality is its power
There are clear reasons McModerns came to be the mansion style du jour, nearly inescapable in 2025. The first: resale value. The rise of Zillow and other real estate aggregators now easily reveal the value of your and any neighbors’ homes, and as such, design mindsets have changed. “In the last 15 years, the house has become an asset that must be protected from any kind of devaluation,” Wagner continues. To help safeguard it, builders are paring back its look to create more universal appeal.
Though many designers report that neutral interiors are becoming a thing of the past, they are ubiquitous in McModerns. “Neutrality is a realtor’s logic,” argues Wagner. It’s easier for buyers to imagine putting their own stamp on a white box home rather than one kitted out to another’s taste. For homeowners, trending toward it is often “subconscious,” she opines, “but the behavior is very much the same.”
You also have to consider the buyers: young adults. They are, after all, the fastest-growing group of homeowners in the United States. “These modern houses are very influenced by the millennial midcentury-modern revival,” says Wagner. When buying and investing in custom luxury houses, they are turning away from the ornamented styles favored by their parents’ generation and toward a vernacular ruled by clean lines and whiteness. Pantone’s 2026 color of the year, Cloud Dancer, supports the trend.
As for the origin of their taste, Zeiger offers two theories. “As the real modernist homes became collectable objects and status symbols, folks both aspired for these homes, but found the quirks of preservation and relative scarcity an issue. It is easier to build ‘in the style of’ than meticulously restore,” she says. “Second is the ‘Calabasas Modern’ theory—this goes back a few years to Kim and Kanye’s LA home, which mainstreamed minimalism for the masses.”
Inside, amenity-maxing gets personal
To Troy Dean Ippolito, founder of Troy Dean Home, a developer turned design builder in Broward County, Florida, this architectural look represents the serenity and ease that his high-net-worth clients are seeking at home. A sweeping view is a must, “but it has to seem effortless,” he says, and function must be at one’s fingertips. For interior finishes, he uses natural materials in lighter colors, which can be easier to maintain, and “if there are any ornamentations in the house, we like those to be the same.”
Personality often comes through the amalgamation of luxury amenities. Wine cellars, movie theaters, cigar rooms, home gyms, and spas still reign, says Ippolito, but he also regularly designs display spaces for client collections, from coins to motorcycles. One homeowner desired to hang a $3 million car from the living room ceiling; Ippolito delivered. What has changed about amenities since Ippolito began his company in 2001 are their sheer numbers and how seamlessly they integrate into the home’s open floor plan and overall look.
To host all these specialty spaces, McModerns go big. The average size of a single-family home in the US is 2,264 square feet. Bill Caleo, cofounder of the Brooklyn Home Company, a development and interior architecture firm in New York and Jackson Hole, Wyoming, notes that luxury homes he builds in the latter typically run from 4,000 to 10,000 square feet, “constrained mainly by local building code requirements and lot sizes.” In South Florida, 15,000 to 20,000 square feet is Ippolito’s usual. The McModerns on the Los Angeles market in popular Netflix series Selling Sunset can run from 4,500 to 21,000 square feet.
A home 2 to 10 times the country’s average is certainly large enough to host all the amenities a high-net-worth client wants. However, a totally custom set might defer resale. For clients with multiple homes, it’s certainly taken into consideration. “Everyone wants to ensure their home maintains its value,” says Caleo. “The resale perspective can often serve as a helpful tiebreaker when choosing between different space planning options during the design process.”
Interior drives the exterior
Whatever does make the cut determines the building’s massing. “If you look at McMansions, the form follows the function, and the function is the accumulation of amenities,” says Wagner. “It’s the interiorization of the city into a single building.” Amenity proliferation represents a more extreme definition of contemporary luxury living, she adds. “The mindset of the rich in America is that they have no obligation to social life,” Wagner says. In other words, they want to create a space where everything is at their fingertips and there’s no need for them to mix with the outside world.
This “castle doctrine,” Wagner calls it, finds its roots further back in history, as does the showiness of the mass, scale, amenities, and views offered by McModerns. At the front, these homes are screened for privacy with plants or behind gates. “After a maze of gardens or pathways, when you finally step into the entrance and foyer, you want the money shot,” says Ippolito. Once inside, “you want to design glimpses of it through all the windows as you pass the house.”
To Wagner, design that shields itself entirely from the street is “a very paranoid way of looking at architecture.” Ultimately, it can lend itself to an architectural form that is “modern-looking but not cohesive,” a jumble of outcropped rooms and boxy additions to maximize vistas.
Picking and choosing elements of midcentury style offers homeowners a taste of the prestige, without any of the true historical context. Much like a high-end hotel, McModern houses tap into fantasy, a very American version: fast, easy, and convenient.
