Commenters mock photos of unsold mansion with baffling design features: 'This house is a series of unfortunate events'

As we wonder why this brand-new McMansion never found a happy buyer, Redditors in the "r/McMansionHell" subreddit have some ideas.

"Nobody bought this when it hit the market in 2018, and [it was] pulled off market after 4 years," wrote the original poster.

The photos show a massive home with a few puzzling aspects. Grand, tall windows cut in half by short ceilings, a regal, deep bathtub installed jarringly off-center in its nook, odd crawl spaces that look accidental — or, as one commenter said, "someone didn't measure before they built."

"You don't like 14' windows in rooms with 9' ceilings?" another asked sarcastically.

Said another: "'Look, I'm telling you, we gotta drop the ceiling to minimize the beauty of the Palladian windows. It'll create a sense of attic claustrophia that has always been missing in the villas of Tuscany!'"

The Reddit community's confusion was unanimous: "Why did they do that???"

One of the commenters found what appears to be an active listing for the property on Apartments.com in Andover, Massachusetts, listed for the low low price of $9,500 per month. It lists over 10,000 square feet of living space and nine bathrooms — figures that are hard to imagine a single family requiring, meaning that anyone buying or renting is paying in excess for excess unless they have an unusual arrangement.

And as the house's history has shown, that kind of excess can often lead to an empty, unused building that is ostensibly racking up large property tax bills for years on end.

Besides being eyeroll-worthy bait for the McMansion subreddit, builds like this also represent a massive failure in the housing industry. While rent is at an all-time high (and available affordable housing is at an all-time low), it is disheartening to see years of construction efforts, millions of dollars, and countless materials go into a functionally useless mega-mansion. As the OP said, the house was never sold. One commenter suggested why: "For that money, you want your poor choices, not someone else's poor choices."

Besides being seen as gaudy, large homes like this have a more sinister consequence. Large spaces, extremely high ceilings, and a high square-footage-to-inhabitant ratio are incredibly wasteful of money and resources like land, heat, and electricity.

Of course, this isn't to say that everyone has to give up their mansions and live in a tiny home (although they can be stunningly beautiful, modernly designed, and even luxurious). One practical way to offset the wastefulness of oversized homes is to maximize the space with solar panels. Solar can reduce your energy bill to $0 and even generate income. EnergySage provides a free service that makes it easy to compare quotes from vetted local installers and save up to $10,000 on solar installation.

But for this McMansion, the Reddit community has very little hope for this disastrous project. "This house is a series of unfortunate events," said one commenter.

Would you live in a house made of fungus? Heck yes 👍 No way 🙅‍♀️ Maybe 🤷 Only if you paid me 💰 Click your choice to see results and speak your mind.

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