History BigFancyHouse / AnimeAndManga

* ''Anime/KatriGirlOfTheMeadows'' has the titular Katri work in two, the Räikkölä house and the Kuusela house. While the Räikköläs are mean (though good at heart), the Kuuselas are sweet and down to earth, and Lotte Kuusela views Katro as a surrogate daughter.

[[caption-width-right:333:Wait, wait, wait! Tomoyo-chan lives THERE?!]]

%% This list has been alphabetized. Please add your example in the proper place. Thank you!

[[quoteright:333:[[Manga/CardcaptorSakura https://static.tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pub/images/tomoyohousehoeeeeee.jpg]]]]
[[caption-width-right:333:Wait, wait, wait! Tomoyo-chan lives THERE?![[note]]Look at Kero-chan on her back: he's ''lifting'' her so she can see the house beyond the garden.[[/note]]]]

** Sesshoumaru's mother is a very powerful, high-ranking lady who dwells in an appropriately huge, sprawling traditional palace. Location? Floating amongst the clouds. It takes even someone with Sesshoumaru's insanely good nose a good few days of active searching to actually find it and even then his mother has to come to meet him before he can locate it. His mother must be [[IncrediblyLamePun an absolute bitch]] to get in touch with at short notice.

* The residence of Shin Sawada's family in ''Manga/{{Gokusen}}''. In the second live action series of ''Gokusen'', Yankumi tries to track down a chronic absentee student only to find he lives in a ludicrously large house, and his neighbors apparently feel the need to speak about his family in exceedingly obsequious {{Keigo}}.

[[quoteright:333:[[Manga/CardCaptorSakura https://static.tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pub/images/tomoyohousehoeeeeee.jpg]]]]

* Tsuruya's villa in ''LightNovel/HaruhiSuzumiya''. Apparently, there is nothing it doesn't have. Kyon's first line in the anime upon seeing it is wondering what evil he has to commit to be able to live somewhere like that.

* In ''LightNovel/InvadersOfTheRokujyouma'', Sanae's family live in a house with a 500-year old shrine and grounds "as big as a baseball stadium".

* ''LightNovel/MariaWatchesOverUs'':

A family that is extremely traditional will invariably have TheThingThatGoesDoink somewhere in the yard of their BigFancyHouse. It may also be found on MiddleOfNowhereStreet.

* The Saotome Residence in ''Anime/MacrossFrontier'', complete with TheThingThatGoesDoink.

* The Hyuuga and Uchiha households in ''Manga/{{Naruto}}'': Very big, to the point of almost being a town within a town in the Uchihas' case, very traditional, TheThingThatGoesDoink sounding off in the background. Used to convey power and tradition more than loadsacash [[spoiler:We eventually learn there was a reason the Uchiha were kept in one area]].

* ''Anime/PowerpuffGirlsZ'': Bubbles lives a big house that's been in her family for generations. The property includes a nice bit of land, a small pond, and TheThingThatGoesDoink.

It's also worth pointing out that if the work is still set in Japan but not in the Tokyo and Osaka/Kyoto metroplexes, and especially on Hokkaido or Kyushu, then larger houses aren't ''quite'' as completely absurd - Japan is crowded, but not so crowded that it lacks rural areas or smaller cities with somewhat less sky-high land values. ''VisualNovel/HigurashiWhenTheyCry'' is a good example of a work set in such a place, although even there, the huge size of the Sonozaki residence is meant to foreshadow a good deal about their nature. This is also why a number of pieces of media, like the image-header-provider ''Manga/CardCaptorSakura'', are set in technically-made-up cities or townships - they get to ''look'' like the Tokyo metroplex in a lot of ways, but the creators can HandWave away questions about just why everyone has such big houses.

!!Examples

* In ''Anime/EdenOfTheEast'', amnesiac Akira Takizawa is quite surprised to learn that he apparently has a fully stocked ''supermall'' to himself. To be fair, it's assumed that its property values were unusually low thanks to its proximity towards a missile disaster zone, but still - ''fully stocked supermall.''

* One of the arcs of ''Manga/GhostHunt'' is set in what looks like this, owned by the family of a former Prime Minister. However, this house subverts the trope in a handful of ways - unlike most examples, it's out of the way enough that a taxi or bus is needed to reach it from Tokyo if you don't have your own transport [[spoiler: (which becomes a hint that an assistant to one of the summoned psychics is still in the building after they go missing)]], and that it was once a much smaller but still-fancy house that kept having extensions added. Inside, however, the house strongly resembles the Winchester Mansion (referenced by at least one of the characters) and built that way for a very similar reason: [[spoiler: the original Winchester mansion was designed as such to bewilder ghosts of the victims of Winchester rifles from haunting the founder's widow, stopping them getting ''in''. The Ghost Hunt mansion was built like so to stop a vicious old man turned into a monster from centuries of blood magic and sacrifice getting ''out'']].

* The residence of Shin Sawada's family in ''Manga/{{Gokusen}}''.
** In the second live action series of ''Gokusen'', Yankumi tries to track down a chronic absentee student only to find he lives in a ludicrously large house, and his neighbors apparently feel the need to speak about his family in exceedingly obsequious {{Keigo}}.

** Inuyasha's mother is strongly implied to have been [[TheOjou an aristocratic lady]]. As a result, the anime extrapolates that she lived in a human aristocrat's palace. However, WordOfGod imagined her having [[ImpoverishedPatrician a sad background involving a fallen lineage living in poverty]] - which isn't what the anime chose to do, showing Inuyasha's childhood home as a pretty well-kept place.[[note]]Historically, aristocratic poverty would still have meant living in a palace environment... just a heavily dilapidated, run-down, empty palace. This one, however, is just empty.[[/note]]

** This is explained even more later. The shrine has been where is is since Edo was a small fishing village, and the city has grown up around the shrine. The Higurashis are the ancestral caretakers of the shrine, and had the house built so they would not have to sleep in the shrine. The shrine makes a fair bit of money, since it's a tourist attraction and popular wedding spot, but the Higurashis have little disposable income since most of the money they make gets spent on upkeep and maintenance.
** In both manga and anime, the deaths of Sango's family as well as the brainwashing/temporal death of Kohaku ''and'' Sango's almost death happen in the grounds of a local clan's huge traditional castle where Naraku has taken over the body of Hitomi, the prince of the clan - stealing his looks from then on.

* Nozomi Uedo in ''Manga/PrettyFace'' - her family's got a trained team of riot police and a ''fucking Tyrannosaur skeleton''.

** The Kunō estate is ''even bigger'', being almost a medieval Japanese castle -- at least in the anime. It's outwardly more reasonable-sized in the manga, though still quite large and fancy. Both versions of it feature an underground labyrinth, secret passages, and traps for unwelcome guests.

* Midoh in ''Manga/ShrineOfTheMorningMist'' lives in a comically exaggerated Big Fancy House that puts the Palace of Versailles into shame - it has individual rooms whose back walls disappear into the horizon.

* In ''[[Anime/YuGiOhFirstAnimeSeries Yu-Gi-Oh]]'' Season 0, the TrueCompanions get the shock of their lives when they see Kaiba's house, complete with a hedge maze modeled after the Palace at Versailles. Jounouchi/Joey says "His house is HUGE! There must be a law about living in a house that big!".

* In ''Manga/KotouraSan'', Haruka Kotoura's grandfather Zenzan has this. When the ESP Club members went to his house in episode 4 to find Haruka, they have noticed they didn't even see the house from the entrance. This is played UpToEleven in Episode 6 when the ESP Club members went there—turns out it has a private beach, and Zenzou built a theme park just because Haruka brought friends back for the first time...

In Japan, the BigFancyHouse takes a meaning well beyond what it does in the US or UK. Japan is a very densely populated nation -- equivalent to packing half of the USA's population in a space roughly the size of Montana, and with even more mountains -- which results in some of the highest real estate prices in the world. This is doubly the case in Tokyo and other big cities where even the smallest homes can cost 100 million yen ($815,000 US) and up. Consequently, a large home with a lot of space around it is ''fantastically'' expensive, and indicates its owner has more money than the rest of the cast combined.

This doesn't stop many ''manga-ka'' from driving the point home by giving their characters homes opulent beyond Versailles, however.

* In ''Manga/{{Mars}}'', Rei's father lives in a more realistic version of this; Rei and Kira move into it after Kira runs away from her place. It's full of flashback fodder for Rei's childhood, such as the room in which his mother [[spoiler:hanged herself]] and the room still crammed with his dead brother Sei's paintings. Consider then, that [[TheWoobie Rei's dad]] has been living in this huge house ''alone'' with all of these [[TearJerker reminders about his family's tragedies]].

** In both manga and anime, the deaths of Sango's family as well as the brainwashing/temporal death of Kohaku ''and'' Sango's almost death happen in the grounds of a local clan's huge traditional castle where Naraku has taken over the body of Hitomi, the IllBoy prince of the clan - stealing his looks from then on.

* The non-canon ''VideoGame/StreetFighter'' manga ''Sakura Ganbaru!'' depicts the Kanzuki Estate as so large, it doesn't just have its own rivers, mountains, and savannas, it has its own ''climate''. Even though it's in the middle of Tokyo, visitors don't arrive by car, they arrive by chartered plane and land at the private airstrip.

** Kagome Higurashi comes from a shrine family. Her house is a normal two-stores one... but is attached to her (maternal) grandfather's large shrine, placed on huge grounds ''atop of a hill in the middle of Tokyo''. The novels explain that the family lives there ''specifically'' because both house and shrine were too big and lonely for Grandpa Higurashi to handle after his wife died, not helped by how Kagome's father had died in an accident around the same time.

* ''Manga/DetectiveConan'':
** Shinichi Kudo used to take care of his ''massive'' and luxurious home on his own since his parents work abroads, but after got shrunk into Conan and went to live with the Mouris (who live in a two-store duplex whose first floor is outfitted as the detective agency's office), Ran and Sonoko had to drop by once in a while to get it clean. Later, uni student Subaru Okiya (whose apartment was burned down in the case he appeared) was hired by Shinichi's parents to become its landlord [[spoiler: though in reality he is the undercover cop Shuichi Akai under a disguise]].
** Dr. Hiroshi Agasa is not only an old friend of the Kudos, but their next-door neighbor. His house is just as big ''and'' it includes the laboratory where he produces all of the gadgets he makes for Shinichi/Conan. Later, Ai Haibara moves in as Agasa's sort-of adoptive daughter [[spoiler: and hopes that she will be able to use the lab to synthesize an antidote to APTX 4869..]]
** Many cases take place in either just as huge Western mansions or in Japanese traditional complexes, almost always located in the Japanese countryside for obvious reasons. At times, their massive floor plans have rooms that play ''vital'' roles in the cases themselves.