It's famous enough that it has a website dedicated to it: https://mcmansionhell.com
It's surprisingly "affordable" to have an entirely custom house designed and built, but the only people who bother are people who are certain they'll be in an area for quite awhile. Otherwise you either buy a developer's house (one of five models that they're pumping out, each one designed to be less obnoxious than the previous, so everything is always "beige" to the max) or you buy an existing one, which is usually just a developer house from a decade or more ago.
I mean anyone can order something from https://www.goldeneagleloghomes.com today and it'll have some kind of a style.
But it would look out of place in a modern subdivision.
If you find a decent builder today you can have a high quality home built. But it’s not cheap. It never has been.
Thank you for this. I've had an absolute blast looking at this.
> building $10m houses out of shitty plywood and fake bricks glued on the fascade
A 10m home is probably not build of veneer. High quality construction is still available but you pay for it. Engineered wood is super high quality and expensive, plywood is a find cladding and there are higher end versions (Zip System for example) available as well. A modern, well constructed home today is unbelievable energy efficient and has an air-tight envelope by code. Yes, you can build cheaply too (essentially cardboard cladding in certain areas!) but you don't have to.
> We are simply an unsophisticated culture, with an education system that never exposes people to art or architecture. We're a nation of Nouveau riche pseudo-sophisticated country people who think that money = culture
What an unbelievably ignorant thing to say. Have you driven around a town made of mainly pre-war homes? Are you at all familiar with the various styles of different periods?