DEMISE OF THE McMANSION?

Two faithful readers have alerted me to recent stories on gluttonous homes and the possible demise of the McMansion. One, in today’s Wall Street Journal, talks about a 31 percent drop in home sales in zip code 75206. You bet I will be on the phone tomorrow getting to the bottom of this… and another reader from Tulsa alerted me to this month’s Vanity Fair, which, aside from the usual “Bush bashing” from its Canadian-born editor, Graydon Carter, I adore. The piece is on the homes–no, I cannot call them homes–the monuments being built in Greenwich, Conn.

I recall having these nice (but, alas, hoity-toity) friends in college from Greenwich. (Everyone was named Muffy or Reggie or Cookie, and they all drove BMWs and wore Dr. Scholls. Such is my novel on life at an Eastern women’s college in the late 1970s. Wait till I tell you what they did at night.) The first time I saw Greenwich, I was amazed by the properties, all huge, impressive, what I thought of as mansions upon mansion. It was a larger, greener version of Lake Forest, Ill. Now those mansions are the servant’s quarters for 30,000-square-foot homes. They make our Dallas mansions seem reasonable. Inconsequential even. The VF article is fabulous.