First of all, it won't be the largest home in america which is still Biltmore at 175,000 sq ft which is lovely to boot. This home is just ugly on the outside....no idea yet on the inside, though garish comes to mind...stripper pole in the closet???? But the fact that they are even trying to build such a place suggests that our income inequality has returned to what it was during the era of the robber barons. Most likely, they pay a lower marginal tax rate than I do. How they can see this as not wasteful is beyond me. Somehow I struggle to feel sorry for them that they had to stop building because of the crash....I hope they realize that many people had to stop working, stop living in their own home, or stop eating because of the crash!

So if we were to do a 1.5 story with the master on the main level, where would you put that, behind the garage then? My thought process would be to first determine priority of room placement in the most ideal location for the use of the room and then if conflicts between room placement develop then rank by how much time is spent and how time is used for each room as well as the importance of that use compared to the importance of the uses for the other rooms. If watching the sunrise from your bed pays off with more enjoyment than having the sunrise and morning sun striking your kitchen, then plan accordingly. For instance, do you plan on using your master suite as a parental get-away from the kids, using it during the day or will your non-sleeping uses be restricted to evenings only, meaning that any views from the rooms would be lost to the darkness of the night? If the views are not important, I'd bury the master suite near the garage in the above sketch. If however, views and day time use are important, then I'd move the master to the east/south/west walls, perhaps right off the entry or in the back off of the kitchen. I'm not necessarily saying to put the master off the entry or off the kitchen, though you could, I'm just using these as examples that reference the above sketch. The way I'm designing my own home is to use a very self-reflective process which tries to understand how I actually live my life rather than trying to contort my lifestyle into architectural trends which presuppose how people SHOULD live their lives. So, to continue on the questioning, why exactly do you appreciate a main-floor master? Is it so that you can avoid stairs? Is it so that you can hear the comings and goings of the kids at night as they try to leave the house, is it because you don't want the kids too near your bedroom, is it because you don't want noise transmission from the master to be easily heard by the kids, and so on? Once you can articulate to yourself why you want something then you can find the best solution for your plan, rather than adopting a cookie-cutter approach. For instance, what I found amusing in some plans was a main floor master with a child's bedroom directly over it on the 2nd. Now, to me, if the goal was to reduce noise transmission from either the child's room to the parent's room or vice versa, the separation by floor, while having intuitive appeal, would fail to achieve the mission. The example I used in an earlier comment was to have a master suite separated by a stairway corridor AND a children's hallway which together create a 7'-8' dead zone, possibly with some walls other than the master and child's bedroom walls also added in between. There are no common walls shared, there is a huge dead zone in between and the goal of reducing noise transmission is, I believe, better served than a downstairs master with an upstairs child's bedroom directly over top, sharing common ceiling/floor as well as sound transmission paths down the walls. Of course, if sound transmission has nothing to do with the appeal of a downstairs master suite, then what I've sketched out is a solution to a problem which doesn't exist, or doesn't matter. I was thinking the master/office space on one side and then the kitchen, dining, great room on the other. That makes sense to me. Would you move the great room from the center of the house below to the front where the dining study is and move the study to where the great room is? Lots of configurations can make sense, but they must make sense in relation to how you envision yourself using the space and the particulars of your lifestyle and preferences. I'd say grab some graph paper, or even blank paper, and just block out the rooms and see how they interplay with each other, note how you foresee traffic patterns within and throughout the space, imagine daily routines taking place within the space. Once you have an idea of how you live, or how you want to live in the new space, then get the graph paper and try to get a better handle on size and furniture placement, and traffic patterns and by the end of this process you should have a very good understanding of how you want the space to be configured. I did the same for my house and this has resulted in me doing away with a formal living room from the now traditional LR/FR combo pack and reallocating the space elsewhere in the home, such as combining the entry with the LR space in order to create a larger sense of space/volume, has led me to create a larger kitchen than would be warranted in relation to the size of the informal living room, has led me to other design changes that likely violate what trained architects use as benchmarks for how homes should be designed. Thank you for the garage tip also - I thought 24x24 was rather large? We will be getting an oversize door for sure. I'd say measure your cars, block out a 24 x 24 space on your lawn, use cardboard boxes or something else to fill the space of your cars, then throw in the other junk you're likely to store alongside the walls of the garage, and see how much space you actually need. Try to get out of your car and see if the door bangs the wall or the other car. A 24 x 24 garage is actually pretty good considering that many designed give a 20 x 23 or something similarly ridiculous.

In Los Angeles we went through the overbuilt cycle a number of years ago and the problem was that while the new homeowners could afford the house they were not prepared for the maintenance costs. So my guess is that in several years McMansion will mean suburban blight. When you are a homeowner and realize that maintenance is charged based on square footage having a large house, especially if you are only using a part of it, is very costly. Poor insulation leads to higher utility costs. All the decorative roof peaks and valleys that might leak…and those post tension foundations where a plumbing repair that could be quickly and easily handled on a raised foundation may end up costing thousands...

NL - is she sure? I mean that is always the thought with the open living concept but consider that just because the hubby is in the living room that is completely open to the kitchen does not at all mean that you are 'together' or having a conversation. We built what you are considering and I really don't care for it at all. I like to hang in the kitchen too but I also maybe want the radio on, maybe I want to start cooking/dishwasher whatever and the pots and pans and the commotion is loud. All that does is make for dueling noises - TV vs the kitchen vs the radio? What radio. No way do I want radio plus tv plus cooking. So maybe she will love it but I'd really think on it. I call it all for 1 living. You'd better all be wanting to listen to watch the same things or else it just doesn't work. Besides that there is just no privacy and I only hang out in the bedroom when it's time to sleep! If I were to do it again I'd want it open but sort of an L shape so the kitchen is the short end then it's open to the dining room but you have to peak to really see the living room. Does that make sense? Open but not the same room (for goodness sakes - oops sorry I really just really do NOT like it). I realize now how much I like the kitchen to be a KITCHEN and not an extension of the living room. I'd stick with your original - for ME. At least with the dining room there you have some sort of semblance of a separate space. By the way we built a 1.5 story (as you described it and that is what I call ours too - maybe regional?) in Michigan on a wooded lot. :) Our home faces West. We have a similar-ish layout and those 'dead' rooms in the front really shield us from heat. I'd try to figure out how to get more southern light into the house. North is darker and the woods - darker yet. But the woods themselves are awesome - love it.