the weirdest lil house in denton county, tx (Patreon)

Sometimes a house comes along that's, well, perplexing. I won't say this house is good or bad per se, but rather just strange and worth talking about. The house I'm about to show you is not a McMansion, as it stands at only around 1300 square feet (priced at ~$360,000) which is squarely in "normal house" territory. However, it does follow a McMansion's internal logic. This is fairly obvious from the exterior:

Where to start here? Well, the thing about McMansions is they look the way they do (giant foyers, bloated nub roofs, janky massing) for a reason. That reason is that they have a specific internal logic, which is a piecemeal, room-by-room, amenity by amenity logic that when assimilated forms an incongruous whole. 

Tall ceilings in some rooms (considered desirable, a symbol of wealth) inherently displace the ability to build normal sized rooms on the second story. Rooms are clustered together wherever they fit, and different ceiling heights (cathedral ceilings in the master bedroom for example) manifest themselves in chaotic rooflines. 

Add in elements like dormers, balconies, skylights, and lazy routing of services like plumbing and electricity in order to serve or enhance these individual rooms and all their acquired signifiers, and what you end up with is a nubby, lawyer foyered, mismatched McMansion. This is perhaps easiest to see using this house which is not a McMansion but falls pray to the same instincts: to inflate or enhance certain architectural signifiers (entryway, hearth) to the detriment of others (everything else). 

The house in question (built in 1992) is actually a modified split level. I say modified because the traditional split-level form opens directly into a landing that "splits" two stories: an upper story directly above the lower story. While this house does have a "landing" it does not do quite that. It's not "split" in a traditional way but rather a way that accommodates a specific aesthetic preference in the 90s, which was for a great room, aka a common room with double height ceilings centered around a large hearth:

The typical McMansion has a floorplan where a 2-story entryway proceeds directly into a 2-story great room, flanked on either side by either a dining or sitting room, or a home office. Often the grand staircase leads to a second landing that is supported by grandiose columns -- this breaks up the visual space between two double-height rooms. Because in this example, there is only one double-height space (for whatever reason -- probably money), the rest of the house requires a completely closed second story, which expectedly compresses the rest of the first floor, which is actually just the kitchen:

As you can see in the listing, the kitchen and the bedrooms are all relatively normal vernacular fair. The people who wanted this house built completely oriented it around this one great room. This is also evidenced by the rear exterior, which is much more routine than the front:

From the rear, the house can be read easily as a standard split-level. However, the cutaway foyer looks particularly weird because there is no attempt to continue the arch to the side facade, which is where the beveled front door is oriented towards. Truly I can't explain why they made that choice, and it's not a good one. 

Finally, the second story plan clarifies the internal logic of the house:

Why did the owners make these kinds of architectural choices? As for why there is only one window per bedroom, I truly have no idea. But I do have a theory on the modified split-level choice. First, the house is certainly smaller than its neighbors, so any attempt to inflate it a little bit fit makes contextual sense. Second, by the early 1990s, the split level was thoroughly out of style. 

A preference for two-story houses emerged in the 1980s, loosely connected to a) the economy improving and b) a resurgence of Colonial Revival architecture that became popular after the 1976 American Bicentennial. Also, this was when house size began to grow at an even higher rate. First, the Regan era liberalized housing financing and in general people were just going hogwild after the economic mess of the 1970s. In design, the shift from modernism to postmodernism also played a role and aesthetics got more traditional and conservative overall. 

By the 90s, the split-level was seen as a dated leftover from the 1970s, and people who had come of age as consumers really didn't want to buy or build the houses their parents built. Hence, it makes cultural sense to want to disguise your split level house as a two-story one even if the end result doesn't make architectural sense.