5 Reasons Why Living In A Mansion Is Not Worth It | Mansion Living (2024)

We’ve all been there – you’re walking down your street and pass the biggest house in your neighborhood and look at it with envy, or at least awe, of what it might be like to live in such a fabulously large home.

Oh, what you would do with all the extra rooms! A second office, a music recording studio, a home theater, a crafting space, a guest suite… the life of luxury.

So when does a house become a mansion?Definitions vary, but personally, I consider anything over 6,000 square feet to be a mansion. A mansion is a house that falls in the realm of excess, and it’s hard to look at a house that is over 6,000 square feet and confidently say there is no excess in that house. A lot of people dream of mansion living, but there are some serious disadvantages of living in a mansion.

At the time, though, our family of four was living in a normal sized, 4-bedroom house by the beach. With both my husband and I working from home and an au pair living with us, we were bursting at the seams of that house.

We thought our solution was a bigger place, so we started looking. I started to dream about living in a mansion.

Our business was going really well and we found out we could affording renting an epic, modern mansion right on the water. We got a little starstruck by it and after looking at it one day, we signed the lease the next day (we’ve always been just a tad impulsive).

This new home had 7 bedrooms, a home theater with 2 rows of actual movie theater seats, an Olympic size swimming pool, and a whopping 7,500 square feet.

We thought it would be everything we’ve ever dreamed of!

The reality was, we ended up hating it so much that we paid an exorbitant fee (the equivalent of three months rent, and I can’t even bring myself to share how high the rent was) to break our lease, and we only lived there for two months. Here’s why.

I’ve always been drawn to minimalist home design, and yet, with 7,500 square feet to furnish, even with that in mind it still required an incredible amount of sofas, tables, accent chairs, and wall art. The dining room was so big that anything less than a 12-person table would have looked tiny. We bought a 20-foot long sectional sofa to fill the family room, because there was so much space to take up. We had to buy So. Much. Furniture. in order to properly fill and design the rooms.

And because the house was so nice, we only bought furniture from high end designer places. Can’t be bringing Ikea furniture into a mansion, ya know? The lifestyle creep was real. We spent $60,000 furnishing the house from top to bottom. I’m embarrassed writing that.

So many rooms to keep tidy. So many things that could break down. The house had SIX AC units to handle the whole house, and it felt like every other week one of them was breaking down, even though the house was only five years old.

Thankfully we weren’t paying for the repairs (directly) since we were renting, but it was still frustrating that at any given moment, in a house of that size, something was usually broken and waiting to be repaired.

The evolving list of repairs and the effort it took to keep the space tidy was massive. I could never relax, because as soon as I tidied one space, there was another giant space to pick up. With two little kids under the age of 3, stuff was always everywhere.

It was hard to relax with such a mental (and physical) load.

With so many rooms, my toddler and baby easily got out of my eyesight. Not only did this make my life more difficult to keep an eye on them, but it was scary for them too.

Since the kitchen was so far away from the playroom, my very attached one-year-old lost sight of me every time I had to go get a glass of water, or a package of wipes, or anything. Unlike in our normal sized house where the kitchen was right next to our living room/playroom and I could get up and grab a drink without the baby losing sight of me and getting upset.

Not only that, but the home was three monstrous levels with 20 foot ceilings, so going upstairs and downstairs turned into quite the chore. It got to the point where it was a whole ordeal to go back upstairs to get a change of clothes for the baby.

Because the house was so large, I had to take both kids with me if we ever went upstairs or downstairs, because I would be literally so far away from them if I was on one level and they were on another, and wouldn’t be able to get to them quickly enough if someone fell or needed help.

So both kids with me every time I had to go up or down. I certainly got a lot of exercise carrying my baby up and down those stairs several times every day.

Now, maybe all of your friends also live in mansions, and if so, this point won’t apply to you. But our friends are normal people.

I started feeling so uncomfortable with the stark contrast between the way we lived and the way our friends live. Our house was the absolute definition of extravagance and ostentatiousness, and I became acutely aware of it anytime someone new came over who hadn’t been there before.

I have never been one to flaunt my money in front of others, and yet here we were doing just that, day in and day out, by living in a place like that.

I don’t know about you, but I want my friends to feel comfortable when stepping into my home, not overwhelmed because they can’t figure out how to operate the in-home elevator.

The exorbitant cost to live in a mansion was not my primary reason for writing this list, but it deserves a mention for obvious reasons. The amount we were paying in rent to live in this waterfront estate cost more than four of our rental properties’ mortgages combined.

Again, even though we could afford the rent, it was painful to me writing that check every month thinking of what we could have done with the money instead.

Taken an epic vacation. Invested the funds to be able to retire sooner. Donated money to a charitable organization in need. Heck, paid for someone else’s rent who needed the help.

Regardless of the fact that we could afford the high rent, it felt so wrong to be spending so much money on this bloated house when we could made a much bigger impact with it, either in our own lives and in someone else’s life.

With all that being said, I would be remiss not to mention the one thing I liked about living in a mansion. And that was that we could throw epic parties with plenty of parking space for everyone and their mother.

Hospitality has always been a high value for us, and yet, I would rather crowd all of our friends into our cozy, normal-sized house than live in such uncomfortable extravagance just for the occasional extravaganza.

Even though it cost us an arm and a leg (and a heck ton of emotional turmoil) to get out of our lease, I am so glad we were able to move back into our home by the beach. We simplified in other ways (more on that later) to make our home work for us better, and I will never live in another mansion again. I’m officially imposing a max square footage requirement on any future home purchases for us. There are a lot of reasons why living in a small house is better, and that will be a post for another day.

These are the reasons why living in a mansion was not at all worth it for us, and we’ll never do it again. I’d love to hear if there are things you would add to this list, or if you disagree with anything I wrote. What are your pros and cons of living in a mansion? Let me know in the comments!