Roofline Overfit
How diverse training data creates a distaste for McMansions that looks like snobbery
McMansions are easy to make fun of. Try to explain exactly why one is ugly and one of two things happen. First, unless you’re Kate Wagner, your vocabulary for the disharmony will be oddly lacking. Second, you’ll get an elitist thrill when your shotgun-riding companion shrugs, or worse, finds grandeur in the monstrosity. It’s easy to stop looking for the real explanation when dissecting what makes us different may reduce our classist edge to boring correlates.
Architecture is an unusual art. You have to embed it in another medium. If you hang a Degas in a dentist’s office, it’s still a Degas. A house has to look like it belongs on that slope, under that sky, in that climate, at that scale of street. Even a great interior plan can feel wrong if the exterior looks like it was pasted from a different realm. I can’t get lost in a fairy‑tale bookstore if I know, just beyond the double doors, it’s part of a lifeless suburban strip mall.
A lot of what we call style is romanticized climate solutions. Mediterranean tile and stucco work well in that region because they’re shedding heat and reflecting glare. Take that terracotta roof to the American South’s wet springs and it becomes a moss terrarium. Transplant a Florida-plan great room with its two‑story volume and sun-friendly wall of glass to a Northern state and you’ve built a cathedral for your furnace. Put a flat-roof modernist box where snow collects and you’ll find out how much refrozen ice weighs in January. A New England Cape with tiny windows and low ceilings in Phoenix is cute until you realize you’ve made a wood oven. Ceramic tile floors in a place with real winters will remind your bare feet why certain regions chose wood.
If a home is to fit its environment, it has to almost “grow” out of its land as an extension of it. Don’t believe me? Look at how jarring it is when a house is missing its surrounding shrubs. Did a shipping container drop this here yesterday? It’s almost indecent seeing brick emerge directly from a verdant field. Your eyes want to slide away from the seam, like you caught an upskirt glimpse of something that was never supposed to be visible.
Even when modern technology can brute‑force comfort in the wrong place, your eye still knows when a house was built for another region. Homes look planted because they share the local palette. They’re pale where the ground is limestone, cedar where forests are cedar, adobe where everything is dust and the sunsets are the same color as the wall. A Pueblo looks like it emerged from the earth in Santa Fe, but that same design in New England might as well be a movie set for The Flintstones. Shake shingles belong with salt air and low horizons, not a treeless subdivision. Taste becomes congruence. The building borrows the place’s materials, light, and vegetation so the boundary between them blurs.
That mismatch may be a clue about where we get our aesthetic sense. Are homes supposed to read as extensions of the landscape? The circuitry that finds a landscape beautiful might be willing to accept architectural features as an intensification of its recognized ancestral forms. Columns as idealized trunks. Arches as paths through canopy. Gables as sharpened tents. The bushes around a home might be doing more than softening edges. They might be completing the illusion of rooting, assuring you the thing that “grew” from there is securely planted by way of a healthy trunk flare.
McMansion Hell keeps circling a small set of words: massing, symmetry, balance. Those sound like taste, but they’re also physics. If this were made of stone and timber, would it still stand? Does the weight look like it has somewhere to go? Old buildings had to answer those questions honestly because they were audited by gravity. Thick walls, short spans, repetitive openings, a clear base and a clear roof.
Then we invented ways to cheat. Nail plates, balloon framing, hidden steel, and shear walls are miracles that decouple appearance from structure. Now, a column doesn’t need to be load-bearing. Secondary masses don’t need to be smaller than the main to borrow structural support. Symmetry isn’t required to keep the whole from tipping over. You can hang a temple pediment on a foam box, float a turret over a garage, and stack three roof pitches and a dead‑end dormer without it collapsing. The house is fine, but the ancient “will this stay up” heuristic starts throwing errors, and we read that valence as “ugliness.”
That’s one source of the McMansion hate. It looks like it’s lying. A column the width of a broomstick holding up a portico the size of a pontoon. “Stone” that turns out to be veneer that stops at the corner like wallpaper. A garage mouth bigger than the front door, with the entry tucked into a shadowy notch. Windows that seem scattershot because they were placed from inside, not composed from outside. Rooflines that imply rooms that are only drywall voids. You don’t have to be a structural engineer to fear an unbraced lintel from sight alone.
Still, why the split reaction? Why do some people see travesty where others see grandeur? The gap is less about innate refinement than it is training data. Taste is a compression model. If you’ve only seen a few houses, most of them live in one big undifferentiated category called House. Brick, shingle, stucco, gable, hip—whatever. It’s shelter‑shaped, so it’s fine. The only axis you reliably read is size, so McMansions win by default.
See enough buildings and that blob splits into islands. Tudor isn’t “a house with a pointy roof.” It’s steep gables, off‑center entries, tall chimneys, grouped casements, half‑timber used as pattern. Georgian is calm symmetry: centered door, balanced windows, restrained cornice, chimneys that bookend. French Provincial carries a hipped roof and tall narrow windows like a tailored coat. Once those clusters harden, sloppy crossovers between styles enter an uncanny valley.
That feeling is hard to explain for the same reason accents are hard to explain. A native speaker hears one vowel shift and knows the speaker grew up three counties over. Ask them to describe why and they’ll draw a blank. Typography is the same. Spend enough time choosing fonts on Canva and the diner menu mixing Comic Sans with Papyrus becomes nails on a chalkboard. What we interpret as moral is actually pattern recognition noticing something doesn’t land cleanly anywhere it recognizes.
The new style that has an absolute chokehold on Nashville right now is a perfect example. It starts with Georgian posture—dead-centered entry, massing symmetry, that estate-from-the-road posture—then grafts on Tudor-revival gables, except doubled and mirrored like they’re part of the Georgian deal. The side volumes end in hips, pushing it toward the vague “manor” silhouette. Wrap it all in smooth stucco and black trim, then blow a two-story glass wound through one of the gables, made commonplace only recently. It’s Georgian grammar spoken with a Tudor mouth, wearing a manor hat, with a modernist curtain-wall cut.
It’s like watching someone wear a tuxedo jacket with gym shorts and a bolo tie. Each item could be good. No one component is ugly. The ugliness is the absence of a world where those choices coexist. If your brain has strong clusters, the outfit lands between them, in a place where nothing else lives. You can’t locate it, so you can’t relax. If your latent space is still a blob, it lands safely inside the blob, and you call it eclectic.
McMansions fail in the same way. They behave like a model that learned features without learning composition. You recognize the elements—arched window, stone base, Palladian center, bracketed eaves, a turret, a Juliet balcony—and each one is a little “luxury” sticker. But the stickers don’t agree on a language. A couple can be charming. A dozen turn the facade into a pasted-together mood board.
You’ve seen the same overfitting in restaurants that can’t serve a good burger. It has to be wagyu, truffle aioli, brioche, candied bacon, an egg, onion rings, and a drizzle of balsamic reduction. Every “premium” cue is present, and the result tastes like nothing in particular because the whole has been sacrificed to the checklist. One or two SAT words can be precise. Too many telegraph panic.
There’s another failure mode that’s uglier in a different way. Not confused dialect, but feature amplification. The Deep Dream McMansion has cascading gables, dormers stacked behind dormers, rooflines multiplying like rabbits, and a turret that doesn’t know what it’s attached to. It isn’t trying to be Tudor or Georgian or French or any combination thereof. It’s trying to be “house‑shaped luxury” by turning every cue up to 11.
In early neural nets you could watch the model crank a feature until it hallucinated the whole image into eyes and dog snouts. In subdivisions you can watch the same impulse turn into gables and fake stone. It works because a lot of buyers are grading on recognizability. The house doesn’t have to be coherent. It just has to read as expensive from the road and in a listing thumbnail.
There’s an economic reason the hallucination wins. Composition is expensive. Restraint is expensive. The cheapest way to signal money is to add parts, not refine a whole. A coherent Shingle Style house is one material and one gesture done perfectly. A coherent Prairie house is horizontal control and disciplined windows. Those require someone saying no, and no doesn’t photograph well on a listing. The tract market wants value‑per‑dollar.
That’s also why McMansions can read as aspirational. Size is legible. Height is legible. A two‑story foyer is legible. So are granite counters and a constellation of pot lights in every room. Style grammar isn’t legible unless you’ve been trained on it. When you can’t parse syntax, you evaluate nouns: square footage, ceiling height, stone, arched, custom. The house becomes a large vocabulary that can’t form a sentence.
Maybe the fix isn’t to memorize styles like Pokémon. It’s to feed your eyes better data and let your brain do what it already does everywhere else. Walk a street where the houses were built before vinyl and recessed lighting. Notice how few moves it takes to make something coherent. Watch how often restraint reads richer than novelty. Then go back to the feature‑soup subdivision and see how loud it is. Once you can hear the grammar, the aspirational spell weakens on its own.
Next, when taste becomes universal, invention can start to look more like discovery.