Metricon's Monarch display home in Balwyn. Photo: Anglea Wylie
I GAVE up counting downlights when I reached 55 - and that was just upstairs. I was touring the Monarch, Metricon's ''five-star'' display home, and I felt almost queenly as I surveyed five bedrooms, each with en suite.
The Monarch looms over a suburban block like a tall, dark sentinel. It's a long, brown, two-storey house that feels like a Balinese holiday resort inside. Cream-coloured floors sweep you past the guest room and home theatre to the massive kitchen/family/dining zone and ''outdoor room''. The bedrooms are large and luxurious. So are the bathrooms.
As I examined the ovens (two), the laundry (bigger than my one bathroom) and the walk-in wine cellar, I half-listened to a marketing spiel that seemed to emanate from one of the giant TVs dotted around the place. ''Huge laundry!'' I heard. ''Huge wrap-around outdoor entertainment room!'' Almost everything here was huge - except for the skimpy garden.
Australians have always admired big things: we're a ''big country''; BHP was the ''Big Australian''. Now we're getting bigger - and so are our houses. In Victoria, new house sizes grew by 16.3 per cent over the decade to 2009, compared with an Australian average increase of 9 per cent. The average Victorian new house is now 252 square metres.
With a floor area of 456 square metres, the Monarch is all about rewarding yourself with excess. When I first read of it, I glibly assumed it was in a newly built fringe suburb, where the lack of public transport and amenities might give you a reason to stay indoors and bathroom hop. But it's in Balwyn, in Melbourne's wealthy inner-east. Lots of upmarket McMansions are being built in old established suburbs, too.
Even if you're appalled by a house with such royal dimensions, it's hard not to be embroiled in the culture of Big. Consumer capitalism is built around the idea of frequent upgrades. The average TV screen is now more than a metre wide. Fridges and stove-tops are also expanding - even as we're cooking less.
And super-sizing happens by stealth. I recently ordered a regular coffee at an airport cafe, assuming it was a standard cup size. But what I saw as standard was now ''small''. Their ''regular'' was my idea of large and their ''large'' was the size of a milk-shake.
The same marketing principle probably helped shape the Monarch's proportions. No one needs five bathrooms. Imagine cleaning them. But after touring the Monarch, a three-bathroom home might begin to seem normal. This week, Victorian Building Commissioner Tony Arnel expressed his concern that consumers were being ''up-sold to home theatres, additional bathrooms and media rooms'' as a marketing tool.
Intriguingly, this culture of super-sizing coexists with another trend: the rise of connoisseurship and the shrinking of our electronic gadgets. So on the one hand you can get a towering latte at Gloria Jean's; on the other, you can buy a double ristretto made with house beans at a trendy cafe. And when not watching a giant plasma TV, you might be peering at a tiny screen on a phone. Small and boutique is a way of contrasting yourself with Big.
Of course, value for money is Big's chief selling point. A Subway ''$7 Foot Long'' sandwich? Bargain. But Big has hidden costs. Hungry Jack's hefty Ultimate Double Angus burger, for instance, will reward you with 3532 extra kilojoules.
Bigger houses generally have a bigger carbon footprint and cost more to run. I spotted eight solar panels on the Monarch's roof - but how much power would its galaxy of downlights churn through? How much water would be wasted in those bathrooms? And when a house devours its backyard, the environment suffers.
Vegetation around homes absorbs rainwater, helps cool the building and contributes to local biodiversity, says Professor Tony Hall, author of The Life and Death of the Australian Backyard. But people no longer see gardens as important. ''What's important is the size of the house,'' he told me. It's not that block sizes are getting smaller, he points out. ''It's the houses getting bigger.''
Planning laws have enabled this shift, but lifestyles are changing, too. People are working longer hours to service big debts, and children have little time for free play. Houses are seen as ''an investment'', Hall says, and people are being told that they need a home theatre or a certain number of bathrooms to protect that investment. Australians now have the biggest houses in the world.
In the predictably huge brochure I collected at the Monarch, I read that the house had been designed ''with deliberate, thoughtful intent to create seamless lifestyle areas, exuding global sophistication''. I reckon Australia's love affair with Big has more to do with our isolation than global sophistication.
Though the internet has partly bridged the tyranny of distance, we're still a really long way from Tokyo or Amsterdam or London, so we don't often see the everyday spaces in which people of other nations live.
Mostly, we just see our friends and neighbours' houses (plus those in Hollywood movies) and it's hard not to compare yourself with them. In the Netherlands, the average new house size is 115 square metres. In Britain, it's just 76.
Suzy Freeman-Greene is a senior writer.
Follow the National Times on Twitter:@NationalTimesAU
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