TV: 60 minutes does McMansions

[heuristics]

Transcript: The Castle
February 26, 2006
Reporter: Peter Harvey Producer: Hugh Nailon


New home

Introduction:
Once upon a time, the kings had the castles and the poor old peasants were lucky if they had a hut to call their own. How things have changed. These days, the great Australian dream isn't a mere cottage on a quarter-acre block. It's bigger, much bigger. Just look at the statistics. In the last 20 years, the average house size has increased by 40 percent. That means the old family home is out. Huge "McMansions" are in — five bedrooms and more, with everything that opens and shuts. And, what's more, they're being snapped up by average, everyday Aussies. But, as Peter Harvey found, one family's suburban dream can be another's nightmare.

Story:
PETER HARVEY: Another piece of the great Australian dream crumbles into dust. A perfectly good three-bedroom house, a family home that in its day had everything anyone ever needed.

ALAN: The old place was good. It had three bedrooms, a lounge room, dining room, kitchen, toilets and a nice patio out the back.

PETER HARVEY: This was the house Alan built more than half a century ago. Today, in less than half an hour, his house, in a street in Toongabbie, is a pile of rubble. Replacing it, at twice the size, will be this. Two storeys with four bedrooms, a study, three bathrooms, and something the builders call 'a great room'. Alan will move back in and share the new digs with daughter and son-in-law. His wife is now in a nursing home. Understandably, it is a day of mixed emotion.

ALAN: I'm a bit emotional, but I'm quite happy, quite pleased with it. And I'm looking forward to it.

PETER HARVEY: It's always been the great Australian dream — owning your own home, a roof over your head, and a backyard as big as you could possibly get. Today that, once-upon-a-time, pretty simple dream has turned into something more like a fantastic flight of fancy — and why not? Good morning. What a terrific entrance way. I feel like I'm about to be knighted or something coming up here.




ALEX HUBBARD: Sir Peter.

PETER HARVEY: Mortgage broker Alex Hubbard, wife Patricia, three young children and pussycat Rastas, live in this house in Sydney's Hills district. It's huge. Not only do the kids get their own bedroom, they've each got their own ensuite and there is a billiard room and a gymnasium and, as Kath and Kim would say, there's also the good room.

ALEX HUBBARD: I guess it's a feature part of the home, but we get to use it once or twice a year — special occasions, Christmas. Sat on the chairs the other day and it was great. First time in two years. Certainly essential part of the home.

PETER HARVEY: How many squares are we here?

ALEX HUBBARD: This is 75 squares.

PETER HARVEY: This is almost three times your average home?

ALEX HUBBARD: Yeah.

PETER HARVEY: What would you go to — four times, five times?

ALEX HUBBARD: Maybe 100 squares would be a nice round number, yeah.

PETER HARVEY: It seems the only thing bigger than these houses is the mountain of debt we owe on them — $718 billion. Our houses might be twice the size, but according to the Reserve Bank, since 1992 the average new loan has also doubled. But none of these home truths are getting in the way of the boom. Is this a big house by your estimation now?

SAM KASSIS: No. This is today's market's pretty average. This is what people are asking for. This is what they want, yeah.

PETER HARVEY: People are looking for big?

SAM KASSIS: People love big. At the end of the day, big is beautiful.

PETER HARVEY: For builder Sam Kassis, size matters. When he started out 15 years ago, he never planned to build these suburban giants. But now he builds them and the customers come. They know what they want.

SAM KASSIS: Now they're expecting five bedrooms at least. They're expecting the home theatre. Most definitely the four-car garage. I remember it used to be just the double garage, and then it moved up to triple, and now, all of a sudden, everybody wants four.

PETER HARVEY: And an ensuite with every bedroom?

SAM KASSIS: Every bedroom, yeah.

PETER HARVEY: And it's not just new homes in new suburbs, it's new homes in old suburbs driving the boom. Not to put too fine a point on it, we're a nation of knockers — down, that is. But we're also rebuilders. It's living right next door to one that can be the problem. I mean, anybody could see this is a pretty nice area. But tell me what is it about it that you like so much?

JEAN: If you just look above you now, and you see this beautiful tree, and the breeze is blowing and we're in the shade — it's just beautiful.

PETER HARVEY: It's as though we're coming into a different world here, isn't it? All of a sudden the trees go, the old houses go, and what have we got?

JEAN: Well, we've got a concrete jungle. It's like a desert of roofs.

PETER HARVEY: You could call them old-fashioned, but, really, Jean and Diana are just concerned.

JEAN: I've just been going through all my folder on awful houses.

PETER HARVEY: These two unlikely vigilantes have been diligently taking photographs of their Kuring-gai neighbourhood, keeping a visual record of the leafy suburb that once was.

JEAN: Look at this place. This wonderful staircase. Where did they think? Did they think they were in Gone With the Wind or something? All five bedrooms have their own private balconies and bathrooms. Pool with waterfall. Well is that a house or is it a resort? Let's call it the "White House", a private home with "resort" written all over it. It's very stylish and it's very big. But for this woman, it's merely a rung on the ladder. So tell me the truth — is this your dream home, or have you got something else in mind?

RESIDENT: My dream home is a little bit bigger for my husband.

PETER HARVEY: These are the plans for some of it?

RESIDENT: Yeah.

PETER HARVEY: With everything that opens and shuts, including not one, but two kitchens. A kitchen and a special frying room.

RESIDENT: Special for messy cooking. I would like to add a cool room, cigar bar, snooker room for the kids.

PETER HARVEY: I'm still getting my head around what has happened to the Australian home. This is where I grew up, in this block of flats, in a tiny two-bedroom unit — my mother, myself, my aunt, a cousin, my grandmother and a lodger, all of us together. From Bondi back out into the new world, where things are very different.

ELIZABETH FARRELLY: And it's very in-your-face, isn't it? Very kind of "look at me". Lots of kind of attention getting.

PETER HARVEY: Elizabeth Farrelly keeps an expert eye on architecture and urban style. She is far from happy with homes that use almost every inch of the block. Elbow to elbow and going on forever. And sometimes it seems that all the life and living takes place inside all those walls.

ELIZABETH FARRELLY: The more confusing and difficult and frightening modern life gets and the outside world seems to feel to people, the more they want to withdraw and enter their castle. That whole castle thing comes into play.

PETER HARVEY: We're going back into the cave?

ELIZABETH FARRELLY: Yeah. Taking up the drawbridge. And everyone just wants to get home, shut the door and watch TV, and it feels safe.

PETER HARVEY: Even the dictionary now calls them 'McMansions'. In the last decade, 60 percent of new homes have been like this and there's one more very significant reason why we're building such big houses.

ELIZABETH FARRELLY: It's about, "I've got the money, I've got the right. I can do it, so I'm going to."

PETER HARVEY: Of course, that ain't necessarily so.

JOHN ILHAN: I don't do it to show off. We just do it because we can. We've worked hard. We're not ashamed of being successful, and our kids have a good lifestyle.

PETER HARVEY: Fair enough. In Melbourne, mobile phone magnate "Crazy John" Ilhan and wife Patricia live in a stunning house that, at first glance, seems to fill half the Port Philip Bay shoreline. Some conservative critics have called it ostentatious. They call it home.

PATRICIA ILHAN: My brief to the architects originally was "I want you to build a spectacular home, a home that is a monument to John's success." It's a credit to him that, in a way, it's a reminder to all of us of how hard he has worked, and where he has come from, and the fact that he started from nothing.

PETER HARVEY: But this new Australian homescape is not just the domain of the very well-to-do. Far from it, in fact. Hi.

LEN: G'day Peter. How are you? Welcome to our house.

PETER HARVEY: Concreter Len paved a lot of roads to get here. Now in their 60s, he and wife Dawn are having the time of their hard-working lives.

LEN: You dial up what you want. If you want lights, we've got a night mood an outdoor mood, a vacation mood.

PETER HARVEY: Len and Dawn epitomise the seismic shift in the Australian suburban landscape. Their four children were brought up, happy enough, in this comfortable brick veneer house in western Sydney.

DAWN: Everyone did it in those days. They all lived the same.

PETER HARVEY: That's very true.

DAWN: One bathroom, four kids, and you manage. You do what you have to do in life, don't you?

PETER HARVEY: Now with an empty nest, they are living in a house three times the size of the old place.

DAWN: I was quite overwhelmed with it for the first few days I was here. I just couldn't believe this was mine after all this time.

PETER HARVEY: Of course, it's simply not possible to do a story about big homes in Australia, without coming here to the Gold Coast, specifically to Sovereign Island, where every one of these homes is built for a king or a queen, or a cab driver.

CHRIS: We had some local cabs on the Coast here. That was our first business together.

PETER HARVEY: So you didn't inherit a heap of money?

CHRIS: No, just hard work. And all that hard work's led to this — "Baltimore".

PETER HARVEY: By the time ex-cabbie Chris and Michelle finish, it will have nine bathrooms, seven bedrooms and a fridge in every walk-in wardrobe. It does get hot up here.

MICHELLE: Our first home was 12 squares.

PETER HARVEY: How big is this one, Michelle?

MICHELLE: Ah, 260 — so we've come a fair way.

PETER HARVEY: The Gold Coast has redefined an awful lot in the way Australians live. Up here, for instance, "big" is low on the scale of sizes. Things only get serious at 'gigantic'. But don't give up hope. People who are watching this, people out there who are cab drivers and hairdressers and reporters like myself, what do you say to them? Can people aspire to this sort of lifestyle?

MICHELLE: Certainly.

CHRIS: Yes. I think so. I think you just have to be prepared to have a go.

PETER HARVEY: So how much is this worth? What are we talking about?

CHRIS: 16.5, hopefully.

PETER HARVEY: 16.5 what?

CHRIS: Million.

PETER HARVEY: Good, isn't it.

CHRIS: Yes.

PETER HARVEY: It's not just money that has made this possible, building technology has changed too. Builders such as Andrew and Melanie Stott can and will do anything you can pay for.

MELANIE STOTT: We can build bigger homes now. We can build homes that don't have beams. We can have entire expanses that we never used to have to have. We can have ceiling heights that are twice and three times the height that they were 20, 30 years ago.

PETER HARVEY: Whatever happened to the house with the dunny down the backyard?

MELANIE STOTT: I think we are just doing better than we ever have before. It doesn't mean that we don't love our families any less. It just means we're more successful as a country, and many of us are not afraid to show it.

PETER HARVEY: I wonder if there really is any end to all of this, or will it just go on forever? Nothing seems likely to stop it — not dearer mortgages, not loan foreclosures, and certainly not agony over the environment.

ELIZABETH FARRELLY: To have houses like this essentially requires air conditioning. There's no eave, no shade. So it's just going to go on polluting the air by needing to be air-conditioned. It's madness.

SAM KASSIS, BUILDER: I can't see how it's having an impact on the environment at all. Apart from trees and things like that that you have to get rid of to build the big houses, but, like I always say — people are always in love with the tree next door.

PATRICIA ILHAN: There's nothing that makes me happier than to see the children play in the spa, come out of the spa, go and have a hit of tennis on the tennis court, go and watch a movie in the theatre. Nothing beats that. I'm sure I speak on behalf of any mother, you know, to see their children have such a good...

JOHN ILHAN: See mate? Happy wife, happy life.

PETER HARVEY: Well, mate, absolutely. I couldn't agree more with that. So there you have it. The great Australian dreamers. They've worked hard for it. In most cases, very hard for it. And now they've got it, and there's absolutely nothing wrong with that. Everybody's dream is different, and it's a pretty nice state of affairs when there's room for everybody's dream. It all depends on your point of view and where you've come from.

[Mungbeans]

Thank you for printing this. I missed it and was kicking myself.

My husband's parents moved for an 'ordinary' house into a McMansion down the coast. We can't understand why. Two adults with two dogs and almost no yard. We call their sub-division "Porpoise Spit" - two kilometers of McMansions nuzzled eave to eave on three boundaries, built on what used to be good dairy country.

You can't buy a house with a good backyard in Sydney anymore. You get outbid by developers wanting to tear the house down and replace it with a block of units or a McMansion.

Cat Stevens had it right - where do the children play?

Leonie

[heuristics]

The bit I “loved” most about this transcript is the bit where they say the McMansion has to be air-conditioned.
Followed by the bit where the builder/developer says he “cant see how” these sort of houses hurt the environment.

[Mungbeans]

I am disappointed they didn't go into the environmental aspects of it in more detail.

[Peter Clements]

Allow me to be the devil's advocate for a moment:
The McMansion debate is very interesting since it exposes the subtle class distinctions held in the debater's attitudes. Notice how these double storey houses are equated with McDonalds'- fastfood consumed uncritically by the masses. However, you don't see contemporary architect designed houses being labelled McMansions, even though they are often the same size or even larger- these are the houses of our best and fairest, not the lower classes. So we're not really talking about size at all- actually it's a class issue.

[heuristics]

Like you mean, the hidden snobbishness is that it's OK for doctors, lawyers, (architects!!) and the "professional classes" to own a super-size home – but not OK for people from the trades (plumbers, cab drivers, concretors?).
And that the “trades” buy “project home” McMansions, (which are 'naff'), while the professional classes at least engage an architect? (and therefore stuff up the environment in a classy way!)
?!
(not having a shot at you Peter - we know you're on the side of the angels, desiging sustainable buildings - as much as your clients will let you)

[Mungbeans]

I don't doubt that there is a degree of sneering involved in the McMansion label.

Large houses, regardless of the builder, tend to be hard to heat or cool. This wasn't a traditionally a huge problem environmentally because they tended to be few in number.

Its the sheer number of them now that is the problem. You have entire Sydney suburbs consisting of these monstrosities. The problem is compounded by the fact that the newer suburbs tend to be poorly serviced with public transport. So you have thousands who need a car just to go to work and school. What little area is left around the house is taken by either a pool or paved bbq area.

The working class areas (outer suburbia) where I grew up always had large yards. There were vege gardens, fruit trees and chooks. This is almost unheard of now.

[Mike_E_from_NZ]

Kinda funny really. As it gets worse (environmentally), we are moving faster and faster to the precipice. You'd think there would be some kind of slowing down.

My wife and I will be building shortly. I am excited that it is going to be tiny. I've seen, and lived in, big. It appeals to my basest desires. But then when I look at the real cost - to me and to others - it just looks ugly.

Mike

[SueinWA]

Reading this, I was thinking what incredibly boring lives these people must live. Really.

Ostentatious. Keep up with the Jones. My house is bigger than your house. We have eleven room, how many do YOU have? I make more money than you do. I am better than you.

Pathetic, really. Mostly empty homes, mostly empty lives.

Sue

[ecodharmamark]

G'day heuristics, everyone :)

Hmm...not much has changed at the old sixty minutes, it seems. Still spewing out the same old 'socially-aware, investigative journalism' kind of stuff. Oh well...

However, thanks for posting it, heuristics. It's been a while since I've read a transcript from a commercial television program, and even longer since I watched one!

I did manage to get almost half-way through reading the transcript before being overcome with a great wave of compassion for the people who (dearly) 'pay' to build and live in these houses. At this point I was so affected that I was unable to read any further, and it was only after I was able to compose myself that I was able to get to the end.

Why do people build these homes?

I'm sure we all can make assumptions as to why a person would build to this degree. Some have already posted their beliefs here. Please allow my to add my own:

I see (and I'm sure I'm not alone in my observation) a great yawning void in the lives of these poor, long-suffering people. Are they ever going to be able to sate their desires? Are they ever going to be able to finally realise happiness does not come out of material posessions?

Honestly, can anyone give me just one example of someone they know (it may evn be your self?) who have suddenly become fully satisfied in life soley because of the home they have recently aquired?

I'm sure many folk do realise happiness at the point of moving in, but for how long? How long before the next overwhelming desire to fill that great need when when realises that material posessions do not alone bring lasting happiness and peace.

Bricks and morter (or mud and straw, for that matter) alone do not give us a sense of peace. It is how we relate to those around us, and more importantly, how we see ourselves that gives us the ultimate peace and satisfaction that we all desire.

Life is hard! But building a new house is not going to make it any easier. It's our state of mind that is the only thing capable of making us feel ultimately happy and at peace.

Ask a Mongolian-plains dweller what makes him happy. I'm sure his response will not be his Ger. Likewise, I'm equally sure that he will not be looking at his neighbour's Ger with envoy and hoping that by building a bigger Ger himself all of his troubles in life will be over. Most likely his response will be that primarily it is his sense of 'self', coupled with that of his sense of 'family', and joined once again by the wider sense of 'community' that makes him feel happy. He will tell you his life is 'complete'. We can all learn a lot from someone who lives in a Ger.

I am truly happy for those that do move into their home and feel a great sense of peace and satisfaction. Regardless of whether, as in the words of Peter Harvey, "...they've worked hard for it" (and none would work any harder - in my opinion - than the self-builder who has lovingly placed each individual bale, or rammed each individual shovel full of dirt), or whether they have just been lucky in life. These people deserve the happiness that they are experiencing. However, let us not be deluded any longer. These people found happiness long before they moved into their homes, and this happiness did not (totally) come out of mud that was once in the ground, nor a pile of timber, bricks and morter off the back of a truck. Their happiness comes from one place, and one place only - their mind!

Thank you for allowing me to express my personal opinion. My apologies to anyone I may have hurt by expressing them. Finally, a genuine wish for all of us sentient beings to find eternal peace and happiness.

Cheerio,

Mark.

[ho-hum]

Heur,

Thanks for posting that, it was an interesting read.

I look upon urban sprawl with a fair bit of sadness, not that I visit cities much. I wish to try and make a point about debt & divorce. My wife is my childhood/class sweetheart, we are 46 now. Fourteen years ago we attended a class reunion [about 40 of us turned up].

I was shocked to hear of a huge divorce rate, up around 75%. When I was aksed why we were still together I can remember saying, jokingly, that we had been saving up for a divorce but hadnt been able to afford one. When I spoke to a number of them, they had married early, like we did, bought a new'ish house and had huge mortgages. Along came kids and life got tough but all of them had experienced massive capital gains. It came to a point whereby it was easier to sell the house, split the gains and 'start out new'. Nearly all of them had factored this in, in some ways.

My wife and I had not had such good financial fortune. I say this uncomplainingly.

I have often pondered this point about the impact of debt on marriage, especially, if there is a pot of 'capital gains' gold within fairly easy reach.

I am not trying to generalise marriage at all but the early 80s when this occurred was the first time that huge capital gains happened and greed became good.

FYI.... They say that opposites attract, well, my wife is tolerant, patient, kind, good-looking, humble, generous,sincere etc etc.... and she is my opposite. One day they will saint her for putting up with me...... :D :D

Cheers... Floot