Castle on a cul-de-sac: homes like this will always exist. But that doesn’t mean they’ll survive.

It’s rare that I feature two back-to-back articles on the same subject, and even rarer that the subject includes massive, opulent houses.  But these houses—each one a castle, or what we would contemporaneously (and pejoratively) call “McMansions”—are the backdrop for what ultimately is an entirely different focal point.  Over on Geist Reservoir, in the northeastern reaches of suburban Indianapolis, I scrutinized a clever man cave conversion last week, from what used to be a boat garage.  This time I look at a subdivision that rests on what was probably a cornfield a decade ago—a verdant, treeless, flat patch of land just right for building enormous new homes with little community opposition.  It’s a typical scene in exurban America, where the distance from the core city is so great that the land manages to retain almost rural prices, so people less dependent on proximity to a major downtown can enjoy a culture with looser regulations and more square footage.  And, on these exurban lands, new homes continue to break ground, next to the ones that are starting to mature.

It’s an image that could be just about anywhere.  A handful of large homes on reasonably generous lots, but lacking many of the features one might expect in a more urbanized area.  Limited green space.  Few streetlights.  Not really within walking distance of anything.  But, mercy me, people out this way can build themselves basically whatever they want.  Here’s a nearly-complete home adopting the dark-trim motif that seems to be fashionable at present:

Directly across the street are a few more vacant lots.

That featured home in the photo above doesn’t appear to be that huge, but looks can deceive.  Though it appears to be a single story, many of these homes have considerable depth beyond the street appearance.  They go far back.  And most homes in this part of the Midwest have basements, so they claim depth as well.  (In tornado-prone regions, a basement is a safety feature.)  Bearing this in mind, if the dark-trim home above has a finished basement, I’d be surprised if the square footage is much below 3,000.  A perfectly big home.

Meanwhile, other homes in the subdivision offer less subtle demonstrations of their opulence.

While not all homes in this development offer a horseshoe driveway like the one above, I’d posit that most if not all have square footages above the median for homes in the US.  And the US has historically had the greatest median home size in the world.  Continuing down the road to the first cul-de-sac, one encounters more of the housing typology characteristic of exurbs.

But what’s that edifice there in the distance?

The young trees partly obstruct the view, but it looks like quite the domicile.

There it is, in full glory.  The biggest house in the subdivision, so far.  The castle.  And I can safely assert that it will be the biggest one even after all the remaining lots get sold and people construct their dream homes.  This mansion is triple the size of the next largest home.

Triple indeed.  My inside sources indicate that the owner purchased three lots and merged them, and that metric aligns with the geometry.  It wraps around about half of the cul-de-sac.

But, standing at the cul-de-sac in the above photo, I struggled to find an angle that could capture the castle amidst all its conical roofs  I almost needed to use a wide-angle lens or the “panorama” feature.  At any rate, the home is close enough to 100% completion that I don’t see much chance that the builder will be adding any new wings.

From what I can tell, this home offers two full floors, part of a third floor (or at least the capacity to include a mega-room with a few dormer windows), and, I’d safely bet, a full basement.  Bearing this in mind, I’d be hard pressed to believe the home is less than 15,000 square feet; it’s probably over 20,000.  And though the back of the property is hardly a recreation feature at the level of Geist Reservoir, it’s certainly a big pond.

I’m enough of a classical liberal not to begrudge the owners a home of this size.  I know nothing about them: perhaps they have ten kids.  Perhaps it will include four generations.  Maybe it will provide employment to a maid, a butler, a gardener, a chauffeur, and an au pair.  The full cast of a murder mystery.  And I’m not an architecture critic, so while I might personally cavil the lopsided nature created by the vertex just to the left of the driveway opening, at least the opening allows for all the garage doors (presumably a four-car minimum) to remain concealed from the street level.

But this is one monster of a house, a signifier of the future owner’s sense of self, let alone his or her achievements in amassing wealth.  I rarely fault a home for its comparability with the surrounding housing stock, primarily because “non-compatibility” is a popular cudgel that NIMBYs use to try to stop neighbors from making lawful changes/improvements to their own property.  Besides, aesthetic variety nearly always offers greater visual interest that aesthetic uniformity.  (Emphasis on the word “nearly”.)  Still, it’s hard not to sympathize with the immediate neighbors, who have to sit in the shadow of this castle and its ersatz turrets.

They neighbors have big homes, to be sure, but all are still a fraction of the size of this leviathan.  Literally.  A fraction.

Size mismatch notwithstanding, this home seems like a bad real estate decision for the two primary parties: the owner/future resident and the subdivision’s developer (who is possibly also the primary homebuilder for the community).  It’s an enormous home, no doubt, but one that wouldn’t look as out-of-place if it were situated on a ten-acre lot, built several hundred feet from the main road, and behind a giant gate.  On a one-acre lot (if even that large), it just looks like a person trying to squeeze into clothes three sizes too small.  So why did the homebuyer wish to locate on a cul-de-sac filled with homes that do not fit the “estate” or castle typology?  And why did the developer/homebuilder agree to merging three parcels that would allow for a home of this size?  I can’t imagine for a minute that the other neighbors ever expected they would look down the road at a home like this.  Without any other merged-lot scenarios, this will always be The House.  And the odds are tiny that anyone else would want to merge lots in a residential subdivision, especially when five- or ten-acre plats are easily available out here in the exurbs, where a home of this size makes more sense.

In short, this behemoth seems misbegotten because, even if it gives the homeowners many years—or even multiple generations—of great pleasure, at some point the odds are very high that the title holder will want or will need to sell.  As a result, a certain question looms: will this home find a reasonably large pool of buyers?  The answer, not surprisingly, is a resounding no.  It may fit many people’s definition of “luxury”, but how many people will define “luxury” under these exact parameters…and have enough money to buy it where it yields the seller a profit?  Yes, somewhere out there, it’s reasonable to assume there’s another person like our opulent homeowners.  But the odds that such a person shares enough of the tastes, wants to live in this particular Midwest exurb, and has the money for such a thing (let alone wants to may the monthly expenses for heating/cooling and maintenance)—the right combination of those factors among homebuyers results in slim prospects for a sale that benefits the seller.

I’ve been deliberately coy about this home’s location, primarily because I don’t like to call attention to a single privately owned property, particularly when it could make someone else’s viral listlcle of “Ugly Architecture”.  Suffice it to say, the home sits in a suburb of Chicago, which rules it down to a few hundred municipalities.  And it’s a foregone conclusion that, even if a buyer likes the house but has no need to live in Chicagoland, there’s not a chance of pulling this place up by its foundation and relocating it to Boise.  There’s a reason the Spanish call it inmobiliaria.

In many respects, this Chicagoland castle resembles a more famous house in Indianapolis that I covered twice: the notorious dolphin mansion.  I can’t judge which is bigger, but the dolphin mansion measures about 30,000 square feet.  The Illinois home may be comparable.  And while Chicagoland offers a larger population with more deep-pocketed prospective buyers, I remain convinced that this house will elicit a similar blend of amusement and irritation, as characterized the dolphin mansion in Indy.  Both the dolphin mansion and this castle occupy multiple lots that the property owner acquired while circumventing customary practices in subdivision and land development.  And while the Illinois leviathan is getting constructed all at once, the Indy example grew incrementally over many years, converting a conventional 1950s ranch, then building out and absorbing neighboring properties like an architectural phagocyte.  The owner of the Indy dolphin mansion died in 2006, having lived alone and childless in a slowly decaying palace he could no longer afford to keep up.  The dolphin mansion sat mostly unoccupied for seventeen years going amidst a handful of buyers who hoped to repurpose it, even at one point for celebrity game shows like Big Brother Indianapolis.  (No joke.) 

Alas, the subsequent owners couldn’t find the right mix of ideas to propel the dolphin mansion to desirability.  No good investment bore fruit.  Which, of course, meant the value kept plunging.  By 2022, the home sold for $650,000. down from an asking price of $2.2 million a decade earlier.   Barely $20 a square foot and well below the median for Indianapolis, which already is an affordable larger city.

Returning to Illinois, this castle is what greets people driving into this half-finished subdivision.  A home that, if my sources are accurate, broke ground shortly after the pandemic lockdowns.  At least it appears it will get finished, but if any aspect in the financing of this project hits a snag…then what?  No matter how luxurious the interior, a home like this that fails to sell will inevitably drag its neighbors’ values with it.  Fundamentally a person who can afford a castle like this has a right to build it.  A weak regulatory environment and the absence of meddlesome neighbors elevate the likelihood.  But location, location, location is the name of the game in real estate, both residential and commercial.  And a home like this would probably have a lot more staying power if not engulfing a cul-de-sac.  Unless, of course, the back of it faced a millionaire playground like Geist Reservoir.  Maybe Chicago’s next Capone can use it as a weekend retreat.