Always thought it must be something with my taste but every time I see houses by 'the (super) rich' I think; why didn't you hire an actual talented architect?
Kitchen out of date? Gut the kitchen module and replace the parts. Home theaters are out, and home gyms are in? Gut the theater module and reconfigure it into a gym. Sticks-and-drywall construction can be demolished and rebuilt in practically a day. Room "pods" can be torn down, merged, or separated at will, with little impact on the livability of the rest of the house. There's a lot more (ostensible) flexibility in an amorphous blob of room modules than there is in attempting to maintain a coherent, symmetrical, balanced architecture. The traditional house is a fixture; the McMansion is a living, changing, multicellular organism.
McMansion developers aren't selling houses; they're selling services. All of this runs parallel to, and feeds off of, the macro-social trend favoring interiors over exteriors. People care more about kitchen appliances and countertop surfaces than they do about architecture. It's crass, tasteless, and economically silly. But it's the prevailing culture. And it's designed to keep selling things.
McMansions are an exercise in echoing certain features of the latter on the cheap, but they are primarily an embodiment of social positioning within the upper middle class.
For example, I bet you'd rarely see actual Venetian plaster in a McMansion, but you'd see a "faux finish" version of it. McMansions are movie sets and the owners are playing a "role" of a "successful" person/family.
Ah, I love that. Applies to so many people I know. Well, at least, it DID apply to them before they lost their McMansion and, in some cases, went bankrupt.
As I posted elsewhere: http://www.pewresearch.org/fact-tank/2015/07/16/are-you-in-t...
$80,000 USD / 4 people in America is the lower bound of high income.
That pew study is income relative to worldwide range, which is fairly pointless in this context. Nobody is talking about upper/middle class boundaries in these terms, and McMansions are largely a US (North American?) phenomena.
Any family in the US with a very low six figure household income (or even a very high five figure) can choose to finance a McMansion. They are not rich by US standards.
Here come the roof ridges!!
Form follows function when you're a fifth column.
Money does not buy style if you see all those new houses by the way...