Keeping Up With the Jonesing

You want this house. You can feel a dreamy desire bordering on lust for the high faux-adobe walls, the five bedrooms, the four fireplaces, the built-in barbecue on a side patio and the two-story foyer with a retractable skylight. At 6,162 square feet, this is a house in which you and the dog could play Frisbee in the foyer. The arches over many doorways, the ostentatious columns lining the hallway, the broad countertops in whatever expensive material you choose--the architectural details have been on your mind for days. Never mind that it sits side by side with cookie-cutter homes in what essentially is a suburban housing tract, and that critics deride houses like this as "McMansions." That doesn't matter. Its size reaches out to your ego in ways you don't even care to explore. You're jonesing for this house.

Of course, there's the price tag. You worry that you'll have to live like a monk to afford the $2.55 million for this particular floor plan. The down payment alone is the equivalent of a decent house in many places. Still, you linger in this model named, for no apparent reason, the Delcado. It sits in a gated 29-house tract called MonteVerde (green mountain), just below the usually golden Santa Monica Mountains in Tarzana. You can understand why so many buyers, often moving up from comfortable but relatively cramped homes, are cashing in their equity-rich hovels for these mini-castles ranging between 4,800 and 6,600 square feet. You've convinced yourself that all this space is necessary. Even if you can't fill all the cupboards, there's power in having more than you can use.

Excess is just part of the lifestyle in places such as Braemar Estates, Beverly Ridge Estates, Royal Oaks Colony and Lake Sherwood Country Club--tracts where these mega-houses elicit the image of wealth and exclusivity in groupings of between 30 and 350 homes. Tony Truisi, an Encino real estate agent specializing in what he calls "upper high-end" homes, says "there's a big market in this part of L.A.--houses running between $1 million and $3 million--that's a hot market right now. And that's unbelievable to say, huh?"

Actually, yes. But so-called mcmansion communities are rising all over Southern California and elsewhere in the country even as the economy grows less and less certain. According to the California Assn. of Realtors, the number of homes in California that sold for more than $1 million rose 46% between 2001 and 2002.