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For years, the house next door to ours was condemned. The retired federal employee who owned it lived elsewhere and seemed mostly to use the property to store a whole bunch of his junk. I would sometimes see him puttering around the library in our part of Arlington, Virginia. Though I would have preferred a neighbor who was friendly and present, I was grateful that for some unfathomable reason he never sold the place—because the moment he did, I knew exactly what would happen to that ranch house, built, like ours, in 1955.
Last winter, we started seeing men pulling up in very nice SUVs and walking around the lot’s cluttered backyard, taking pictures with their phones. Because this was a change from the house’s usual foot traffic—teens daring other teens, late at night, to sneak inside—we suspected the property had finally gone on the market. In February, arborists arrived to cut down half a dozen trees. Then, one day in March, a guy driving an excavator knocked the house down, leaving a pile of rubble. It was a windy afternoon, and our yard was soon littered with old Penthouses and business correspondence from the 1980s. A construction crew spent the spring and summer building a new house, which, like all new houses in our suburban neighborhood, dwarfed our own. Indeed, the house is quite similar to nearly every other new house built in our neighborhood over the past few years, built in a style I think of as the Giant White House.
Giant White Houses are white, with jet-black accents: the shutters, the gutters, the rooves. They are giant—Hulk houses—swollen to the very limits of the legally allowed property setback, and unnaturally tall. They feature a mishmash of architectural features, combining, say, the peaked roof of a farmhouse with squared-off sections reminiscent of city townhomes. They mix horizontal siding, vertical paneling, and painted brick willy-nilly.
Like the giant White House just down the road from us in Washington, D.C., the Giant White House may be occupied by a Republican or a Democrat, but whoever they are, they are rich. Once the house next door was finished, it went on the market for $2.5 million. The house has five bedrooms and six baths and is 5,600 square feet. According to the listing, it has top-end appliances and European Oak Select Grade hardwood and heated floors in the en suite bath and a wet bar in the basement.
As I’ve visited other cities in recent years, I’ve noticed that Arlington is far from alone. This style is becoming the dominant mode in well-off neighborhoods everywhere, from Atlanta to Nashville to Austin to Boulder. If you drive through the Arlington of wherever you live, you’ll surely see Giant White Houses sprouting on every cleared lot. As one went up next door, I wondered: Why are the houses so giant? Why are the houses so white? Why are the houses like this now?
After speaking to realtors, architects, critics, and the guy who built the house next door, I’ve learned that the answer is more complicated than I’d imagined. It has to do with Chip and Joanna Gaines, Zillow, the housing crunch, the slim margins of the spec-home industry, and the evolution of minimalism. It has to do, most of all, with what a certain class of homebuyer even believes a house to be—whether they realize it or not.
1. Giant
American houses haven’t actually gotten much bigger over the past 25 years or so. The average new single-family home built in America in 2024 was 2,366 square feet, just slightly up from 2,223 square feet in 1999.
But of course the Giant White House is not average. Built in an affluent suburb and meant for the wealthy, the GWH is far bigger. Houses over 4,000 square feet, like the one next door to us, make up 14 percent of the homes now built in the Northeast, up from 5 percent in 1999.
James McMullin owns MRE Homes, a Northern Virginia developer that builds six or seven new homes a year. “It’s a pet peeve with many people,” he told me. “ ‘Why do builders build large? Why do they keep building McMansions?’ ”
It’s simply economics, he said. “Rightly or wrongly, the market rewards square footage.”
What are those economics? Let’s follow the money at the GWH next door. Last year, a real estate agent named Jon DeHart, who runs a company called Homes From DeHart, approached the owner’s children. “They lived elsewhere, and they didn’t really know what to do,” he told me. “They were grateful to have someone take the lead.” DeHart collected bids from several builders, and the owner accepted an offer of $880,000 from MRE Homes. That’s a decent price, if a little lower than typical for the neighborhood. (We live on a busy street; teardowns on cul-de-sacs typically sell for more.)
The lot, just over 10,000 square feet, was an attractive canvas for a big house. Arlington zoning allows setbacks of as little as 8 feet from the property line, and the design created by McMullin’s contract architect goes right up to the edge. The house’s footprint doesn’t take up the absolute maximum space—there’s still a decent-sized backyard—and that’s by design, DeHart said. “They were able to use a large portion of the lot and then still afford to offer enough green space for future outdoor improvements.”
To construct a house like this in Arlington these days, McMullin said, you’ve got to spend over $1 million. Once realtors take their commissions, county fees get paid, and all the other ancillary costs are factored in, the developer’s profit was more modest than I expected. “All in, just on a cash basis, these projects are making anywhere from 8 to 15 percent,” he said. “Heck, you could take that money and just buy a bond. Land costs are so high, construction costs, the administrative burden—that all just increases every year.” The result: If a developer doesn’t absolutely maximize the square footage of the house he builds in this market, he might not make any money at all.
The Giant White House, though, is not only giant in its floorplan—it’s giant vertically. It’s a trend that comes not from the suburbs but from the city. In recent decades, the loft—the converted warehouse, with its open spaces and high industrial ceilings—became popular in American cities, said Paul Preissner, an architect and professor at the University of Illinois–Chicago. “Those kinds of preferences trickled out to homeowners, and now everyone wants a cathedral-like ceiling.”
Twenty-first-century builds are framed in the same way that houses have been framed for 100-plus years, Preissner said. But just as the popularization of the nail gun—patented by a couple of World War II vets who adapted machine-gun technology for construction use—made building those wood frames easier, modern technological developments like glulam lumber and stronger steel make it cheap and easy to build everything just a little bit bigger. “Drywall comes in 8-foot-by-4-foot sheets,” Preissner said, an explanation for the typical 8-foot ceiling in a midcentury house like ours. “But now they just cut drywall to custom size.” The GWH next to us features 10-foot ceilings on the first floor, and 9-foot ceilings upstairs and in the basement.
The result? The house next door towers over ours. Through my dining room windows, I’m staring at the GWH’s above-grade basement. Through the windows of the GWH’s dining room, our roof serves as a kind of horizon line. From the second floor, you’re looking down on the neighborhood through the upper branches of the lot’s few remaining trees.
Preissner told me that this kind of total disconnection from one’s neighbors is not a bug but a feature of this kind of house. “People want their second floor much higher up, to be removed from the street, for more privacy,” he said. He compared this “escalating preference” to cars getting bigger and bigger, because it makes drivers feel insecure to be at the wheel of a sedan when everyone else has SUVs. People buying GWHs, Preissner said, “want to be higher up so they’re not looked down upon.”
The metastatic growth of the upper-middle-class house has led to a familiar term of art: the McMansion. Is the GWH a McMansion? I’d never really thought of it that way. I’m a frequent reader of McMansion Hell, the critic Kate Wagner’s caustic architecture blog, and while GWHs are McMansion-sized, they don’t sport a lot of the fripperies—the cornices, the colonnades—that the ’90s monstrosities on Wagner’s site do.
When I called Wagner to ask about this, she urged me to think of the McMansion not as a style of house but as a type of house, encompassing many possible styles. “What is communicated architecturally changes from era to era,” she said, but all McMansions share a very specific logic: “the house as consumer product, subject to a continuous series of upgrades,” growing bigger and bigger the more money you throw into it.
“It’s best understood as a house that is designed from the inside out, in order to achieve specific social functions,” she said. Enormous entertainment suites for movie-watching, “great rooms” for gathering the family, and restaurant-scaled kitchens all serve the same purpose, Wagner said: “They interiorize amenities that you would once have had in social settings.” As the height of the McMansion offers a barrier against the community around you, the McMansion’s sprawling layout renders the community unnecessary. Even its windows are not designed for cross-breezes—no one expects you’ll ever open them. (“Seriously, they’re like these weird coolers,” Preissner said. “They’re meant to be sealed.”) Even if it doesn’t feature turrets, a man’s Giant White House is his castle.
2. White
You’d be forgiven, driving through my part of Arlington, if you thought you had stumbled into a monochromatic alternate reality—Pleasantville, before the color arrives. The houses really are all black and white. The facades are blinding, like the freshly capped teeth of a Hollywood star. The accents are depthless, burnished black: black railings enclosing white porches, black drainpipes crawling down white walls, black trim delineating white window frames. The windows themselves are so reflective they, too, read as black in the blank white face of the house. The house numbers: black, and sans serif.
“Everybody paints everything white now,” sighed Paul Preissner when I sent him a photo of the Giant White House next door. “As if we’re too sensitive, we’re gonna lose our mind if there’s red or orange or something.”
“We’ve tested different color schemes and whatnot, and it seems like white has been a fan favorite,” said Jon DeHart. “We’re delivering a property that’s gonna appeal to the most people.” Given that the vast majority of houses in America are built on spec by developers, Kate Wagner told me, home design naturally trends toward “a commonly agreed-upon design ideology that is the least offensive possible.” Or, as Preissner put it, “You never would make a house yellow, because you’d lose the three buyers who don’t like yellow.”
Many of the design choices on GWHs—the white color scheme, the vertical board-and-batten siding, the tin roof—can be traced to the modern farmhouse trend and, basically, to Chip and Joanna Gaines, whose Fixer Upper TV show popularized the style among wealthy homeowners a decade ago. “HGTV, the Gaineses down in Texas—all these people heavily influence the market that we’re dealing with,” said James McMullin, the Northern Virginia contractor. “Maybe a different market is influenced by the New Yorker or something.”
But the current GWH has moved just slightly beyond a pure modern farmhouse—its style is more complicated, and ever-evolving. The whiteness of the home doesn’t only speak to the traditional white-painted rural farmhouse; it speaks to minimalism, a style that has crept from the elite into the vernacular over recent years. “The real social language of this color is cleanliness,” Preissner pointed out, and the house’s lines—the sharp distinctions between white and black—give off an air of crisp, purposeful clarity. Wagner said, “It started out as a kind of farmhouse look, and now it’s a weird hodgepodge of minimalist things that are borrowed from farmhouse style, but pared down.”
That these structures—which are, when you think about it, about as maximalist as houses can be—should cop aspects of minimalist design is aesthetically confusing, but it’s not culturally confusing. “Minimalism is a signifier of class,” Wagner said. “In the 2010s, minimalism was CEOs, and people who had architect-designed houses, and Apple. It implies sophistication.” These days, Wagner sees a lot of what she calls “normie minimalism” in home design.
Are we stuck forever with the white house? Eli Tucker, a D.C.-area real estate agent, said that he’s seeing interiors—which once featured nothing but shiplap and hardwood—get a touch more homey and retro: “You might hang wallpaper in, say, the powder room,” he mused.
For exteriors, though, “White is the formula, until the market says it’s not.”
McMullin agreed. “Our whites are not as bright anymore,” he said. “You may not detect that.” (I do not.) “We have tried to bring in more earth tones, on a marginal basis. We’re seeing a return of brick and stone accents. But all that said, every time we vary too far from that formula of white and black …” He’d seen other developers take big aesthetic risks—an Eichler-style midcentury modern in a neighborhood full of bigger houses, for example—and watched as those properties sat on the market for months.
“Everybody’s scared to make a mistake,” said Tucker. When each new build is a seven-figure risk, “Nobody wants to be the idiot who built the wrong thing and nobody likes it.”
3. Houses
Eli Tucker thinks a lot about what real estate would look like if no one knew anything: “If a buyer showed up to a house, had no idea what the house next door sold for. If I didn’t know that either. If it was just a negotiation in a vacuum, about how much you’re willing to pay, and how much you’re willing to accept.”
Of course, that’s not how real estate works. Sellers and brokers and builders and buyers have access to reams of data, and that data influences every step of the complicated series of transactions that result in a new house. That new house, itself, is also data. Indeed, I wonder sometimes if the house next door is even a house at all.
In part that’s because something about a Giant White House’s design suggests the agglomeration of houselike details without actually adding up to an identifiable home. “You used to be able to identify houses with some kind of language—Tudor, four-square, bungalow, whatever,” Paul Preissner said. When I showed him a photo of the house next door, he said, “This just takes parts of all of it.”
The left side of this GWH has a pitched roof and vertical siding; the middle is an entryway and porch set atop red brick stairs; the right side is a squared-off box, calling to mind the cheap, rectilinear 5-over-2 apartment construction filling city blocks. “When I was a kid,” Preissner said, “we used to have these flipbooks split into three parts. You could put Boba Fett’s head on C3PO’s waist, with R2-D2’s legs, and then flip them around. For a builder doing architecture for residential clients, that’s just what happens.”
Jon DeHart, who sold the house, said the same thing, though he was far more upbeat.
“The trend right now is a blend,” he said. “Farmhouse is still in, and there’s a strong contingent of people who love modern, and love contemporary. So by building a house that at least has the appearance of all those, it speaks to all those interests.” When he saw the house’s design, he said, he found it “very sellable.”
Kate Wagner of McMansion Hell argued that this architectural incoherence stems, in fact, from the modern homebuyer’s saturation in Zillow and Redfin. “Design magazines, HGTV, even Instagram—those are really media empires of the past,” she said. “Overwhelmingly, by sheer monthly users, the way people interact with architecture now is through real estate listings. We’re always Zillow browsing.”
And what do you see on Zillow? If you’re one of the lucky Americans who can afford to buy your first home, and you want to live in a neighborhood like our part of Arlington, you may find that the “starter house,” as you once knew it, is awfully hard to find. Because land is worth so much and old houses, comparatively, are worth so little, when families sell small houses here, they sell them to developers, not to other families. And those developers, driven by fear and money, knock the small houses down to build GWHs. The more GWHs they build, the more the neighborhood is made up of GWHs. The more you scan Zillow, the more it starts to make sense: Like nearly a million Americans a year, you’re better off just buying a brand-new house, too.
After all, in an era when a home purchase is likely the most secure, lucrative investment you will ever make, a house really no longer is a house. It is no longer simply the place where you live. It is your future in building form. It is the way you’ll pay for college, the way you might afford retirement. “I don’t think we think of the dream home anymore,” Wagner said. “We now see houses primarily as vehicles for investment. The best way to do that is if everything looks the same.”
In the autumn, a sign appeared on the tiny front lawn of the place next door, advertising an open house. That Sunday morning, I walked over and knocked on the door. Though the Ring doorbell registered my presence, no one answered; the open house hadn’t yet begun. I let myself in and slipped blue cotton booties over my shoes.
The house’s interior, I had to admit, was beautiful. As my footsteps echoed in its cavernous rooms, I felt as though I was starring in an advertisement for the good life. The broker had staged the house with attractive furniture in taupes and grays. The walk-in pantry had its own sink and a second dishwasher. Upstairs, the bedrooms looked ready for an influencer’s photo shoot. From the GWH’s third-nicest bedroom, I looked down upon my own house, dollhouse-sized from here:
It’s not like our house is so great, I thought, staring down at it. It too was a product of the consumer trends of its time. Developers opened up this part of Arlington in the 1950s, building ranches and colonials, working from the same three or four floor plans across a dozen square miles. When we bought it, 16 years ago, most of those original homes still stood, dotted here and there with just a few McMansion-y new builds. Our house didn’t connote individuality any more than a GHW does; if anything, it connoted that we fit in—that we lived in the same kind of house as lots of our neighbors.
Or at least, that’s what it used to mean. These days our ranch has come to look like a stubborn outlier, expressing in some small way an individualism it never did when we bought it. As the housing crisis grows, as money floods into Arlington, with the “missing middle” zoning plan meant to ease the county’s housing crunch defeated in court, every remaining little house in our part of Arlington is now a Giant White House waiting to happen.
Neighborhoods grow and change, of course. They should. But what do they change into? Across America, in neighborhoods just like ours, the ubiquity of the Giant White House signifies a neighborhood evolving from one for the middle class to one for the sort of rich to one for the very rich. We’ll do our part: Someday relatively soon we’ll sell our little house. I hope some young family will want to buy it and live in it just as it is; more likely, the offers will come from developers. (Every week we get mail from them.) This perfectly good house, where we raised two children and built a life, will be gone in a day. The wind will scatter whatever it is that’s crammed into our basement—obsolete phone-charging cables, probably—across our neighbors’ minuscule yards. And another Giant White House will rise.
