There’s a New Menace Stalking Suburbia. Meet the McBasement.

When Sterling McDavid’s parents bought a roughly 9,000-square-foot home on Aspen’s Red Mountain, the 33-year-old interior designer directed the architect and contractors to start digging.

Limited by zoning above ground, Ms. McDavid, who led the renovation, envisioned an expansive basement with a world-class gym, guest suites and hotel-caliber spa for her parents, former college track star Stacie McDavid, and David McDavid, a former owner of the Dallas Mavericks and car-dealership mogul.

“I love a basement,” says Ms. McDavid, who ultimately blew out her parents’ basement to more than double its size. “When you walk into a home, if all the magic is just within the first few steps, that’s no fun.”

Wealthy Londoners have long built basements reaching two, three, and even four stories below ground. Now, there is a cellars market in the U.S. among property owners facing restrictions on mansion sizes above ground. The McBasements of today have bars, bowling alleys, pools, climbing walls and whiskey-tasting rooms. To sidestep subterranean gloom, builders usher in natural light via grand staircases or skylights cut into the ground above.

“Down is the new up,” says Randy Correll, partner at Robert A.M. Stern Architects, who designs basements with luxe finishes. “Twenty years ago, basements were the ‘B word.’”

Ms. McDavid says the excavation for her parent’s 4,000-square-foot Aspen basement added about a year to the three-year renovation, since workers dug underneath the home and into a mountainside. The resulting basement has guest suites, a gym with white oak floors, a 12-person hot tub and an “absurdly large” steam room, she says. “You feel like you’re in a luxury cave.”

She says the prior owner, by contrast, had done little to maximise the basement, which was “absolutely heinous.” (“It had wine storage, not to be confused with a wine cellar,” she says.)

Still, some towns have cracked down on the chic crypts, worried about unsettling topography and having truckloads of excavated dirt roll through residential streets. In Aspen, a resident sued the city for permitting a neighbour’s two-story basement, alleging excessive noise and dust. Aspen now limits basements to one level. And the Beverly Hills Planning Commission is now mired in a down-and-dirty basement brouhaha.

The island of Nantucket, just 14 miles long and 3.5 miles wide, limits home sizes with more than 20 zoning districts. Some areas allow a footprint covering only 2 percent of the property.

One solution? Go low. “The possibilities are endless,” says Stephen Cheney, owner of Cheney Custom Homes, who is currently constructing a roughly 16,000-square-foot home and guest home with a 5,600-square-foot “bunker” below for a bowling alley, 3-D golf simulator, and spa.

Basements can dwarf homes above. Designer Andrew Kotchen, a principal at Workshop/APD, is working on a 5,000-square-foot Nantucket abode that will have a 10,000-square-foot basement with a basketball court, garage, bedrooms and a wellness space.

In beach towns, architects are deploying extreme waterproofing measures.

For the 10,000-square-foot grotto, workers are using the same waterproofing technique as Boston’s Big Dig highway project, Mr. Kotchen says. An emergency pump system and thick concrete slab underneath will prevent the foundation from floating up should water levels rise, he says.

In Aspen, a 5,000-square-foot basement at the confluence of two rivers required “dewatering,” says Ryan Walterscheid, a partner at architecture firm Forum Phi. Workers drilled wells around the site and pumped out almost a billion gallons of water before pouring the foundation. (The water was poured back into the river.)

Architect Charles Cunniffe, who designed the McDavids’ remodel, also did a basement with a tennis court. “You can’t hit big lob shots,” he says, “but you can play a decent game of tennis.”

Interior designer Bryan Graybill says a large basement at his home in East Hampton, N.Y., was the only way to fit all the amenities he and his husband desired in their 4,100-square-foot house. For frequent hosting, their 1,800-square-foot lower level has full guest quarters, a laundry room with three sets of washers and dryers, and a catering pantry with extra stemware and service for 48. “It’s like an instant party,” he says.

Beverly Hills residents are also keeping up, and down, with the neighbours.

Architect Paul McClean crafted a house there with 7,400 square feet above ground and another 12,000 below, including a 3,000-square-foot garage. The firm also designed developer Nile Niami’s roughly 105,000-square-foot Los Angeles megamansion “The One,” where about half the home sat below grade. First listed at $500 million, the property fetched $126 million at auction this year. (A relative bargain-basement deal.)

Beverly Hills leaders passed ordinances in recent years in response to what Craig Corman, former Planning Commission chairman, called a “pernicious” trend of mammoth dwellings with wedding cake-style retaining walls and massive basements. “They can be quite offensive,” he said during a recent commission meeting. Now, property owners in the Hillside area cannot remove more than 3,000 cubic yards of earth without special permits.

This has hampered real-estate investor David Taban, who is trying to build a 23,144-square-foot house, of which 9,829 would be a basement. (He wants to dig down to appease neighbours who worried his home would hurt their views.) But getting a basement of that size required removing 5,346 cubic yards of dirt, which one city planner said would amount to 594 truckloads.

“Violence to the land,” Planning Commission Chair Myra Demeter dubbed it at an August meeting.

Asked to revise, Mr. Taban’s team is set to return to the commission Thursday. As of late September, plans called for removing just 3,276 cubic yards of soil, according to attorney Ronald Richards, a representative for Mr. Taban, who also argued the project should be permitted since the proposal predates some restrictive rules.

“It’s not even that crazy of a project in our mind,” says Russell Linch, another Taban representative.

Spec developers know the more liveable space, the bigger the price tag, says Brett Loehmann, a project manager at McClean Design. “If you don’t have great amenities, you’re not going to be the coolest person on the block.”

I wish to protest the current ugliness. I see it as a continuing trend, “the uglification of everything.” It is coming out of our culture with picked-up speed, and from many media silos, and I don’t like it.

You remember the 1999 movie “The Talented Mr. Ripley,” from the Patricia Highsmith novel. It was fabulous—mysteries, murders, a sociopath scheming his way among high-class expats on the Italian Riviera. The laid-back glamour of Jude Law, the Grace Kelly-ness of Gwyneth Paltrow, who looks like a Vogue magazine cover decided to take a stroll through the streets of 1950s Venice, the truly brilliant acting of Matt Damon, who is so well-liked by audiences I’m not sure we notice anymore what a great actor he is. The director, Anthony Minghella, deliberately showed you pretty shiny things while taking you on a journey to a heart of darkness.

There’s a new version, a streaming series from Netflix, called “Ripley.” I turned to it eagerly and watched with puzzlement. It is unrelievedly ugly. Grimy, gloomy, grim. Tom Ripley is now charmless, a pale and watchful slug slithering through ancient rooms. He isn’t bright, eager, endearing, only predatory. No one would want to know him! Which makes the story make no sense. Again, Ripley is a sociopath, but few could tell because he seemed so sweet and easy. In the original movie, Philip Seymour Hoffman has an unforgettable turn as a jazz-loving, prep-schooled, in-crowd snob. In this version that character is mirthless, genderless, hidden. No one would want to know him either. Marge, the Paltrow role in the movie, is ponderous and plain, like a lost 1970s hippie, which undercuts a small part of the tragedy: Why is the lovely woman so in love with a careless idler who loves no one?

The ugliness seemed a deliberate artistic decision, as did the air of constant menace, as if we all know life is never nice.

I go to the No. 1 program on Netflix this week, “Baby Reindeer.” People speak highly of it. It’s about a stalker and is based on a true story, but she’s stalking a comic so this might be fun. Oh dear, no. It is again unrelievedly bleak. Life is low, plain and homely. No one is ever nice or kind; all human conversation is opaque and halting; work colleagues are cruel and loud. Everyone is emotionally incapable and dumb. No one laughs except for the morbidly obese stalker, who cackles madly. The only attractive person is the transgender girlfriend, who has a pretty smile and smiles a lot, but cries a lot too and is vengeful.

Good drama always makes you think. I thought: Do I want to continue living?

I go to the Daily Mail website, once my guilty pleasure. High jinks of the rich and famous, randy royals, fast cars and movie stars, models and rock stars caught in the drug bust. It was great! But it seems to have taken a turn and is more about crime, grime, human sadness and degradation—child abuse, mothers drowning their babies, “Man murders family, self.” It is less a portal into life’s mindless, undeserved beauty, than a testimony to its horrors.

I go to the new “Cabaret.” Who doesn’t love “Cabaret”? It is dark, witty, painful, glamorous. The music and lyrics have stood the test of time. The story’s backdrop: The soft decadence of Weimar is being replaced by the hard decadence of Nazism.

It is Kander and Ebb’s masterpiece, revived again and again. And this revival is hideous. It is ugly, bizarre, inartistic, fundamentally stupid. Also obscene but in a purposeless way, without meaning.

I had the distinct feeling the producers take their audience to be distracted dopamine addicts with fractured attention spans and no ability to follow a story. They also seemed to have no faith in the story itself, so they went with endless pyrotechnics. This is “Cabaret” for the empty-headed. Everyone screams. The songs are slowed, because you might need a moment to take it in. Almost everyone on stage is weirdly hunched, like a gargoyle, everyone overacts, and all of it is without art.

On the way in, staffers put stickers on the cameras of your phone, “to protect our intellectual property,” as one said.

It isn’t an easy job to make the widely admired Eddie Redmayne unappealing, but by God they did it. As he’s a producer I guess he did it, too. He takes the stage as the Emcee in a purple leather skirt with a small green cone on his head and appears further on as a clown with a machine gun and a weird goth devil. It is all so childish, so plonkingly empty.

Here is something sad about modern artists: They are held back by a lack of limits.

Bob Fosse, the director of the classic 1972 movie version, got to push against society’s limits and Broadway’s and Hollywood’s prohibitions. He pushed hard against what was pushing him, which caused friction; in the heat of that came art. Directors and writers now have nothing to push against because there are no rules or cultural prohibitions, so there’s no friction, everything is left cold, and the art turns in on itself and becomes merely weird.

Fosse famously loved women. No one loves women in this show. When we meet Sally Bowles, in the kind of dress a little girl might put on a doll, with heavy leather boots and harsh, garish makeup, the character doesn’t flirt, doesn’t seduce or charm. She barks and screams, angrily.

Really it is harrowing. At one point Mr. Redmayne dances with a toilet plunger, and a loaf of Italian bread is inserted and removed from his anal cavity. I mentioned this to my friend, who asked if I saw the dancer in the corner masturbating with a copy of what appeared to be “Mein Kampf.”

That’s what I call intellectual property!

In previous iterations the Kit Kat Club was a hypocrisy-free zone, a place of no boundaries, until the bad guys came and it wasn’t. I’m sure the director and producers met in the planning stage and used words like “breakthrough” and “a ‘Cabaret’ for today,” and “we don’t hide the coming cruelty.” But they do hide it by making everything, beginning to end, lifeless and grotesque. No innocence is traduced because no innocence exists.

How could a show be so frantic and outlandish and still be so tedious? It’s almost an achievement.

And for all that there is something smug about it, as if they’re looking down from some great, unearned height.

I left thinking, as I often do now on seeing something made ugly: This is what purgatory is going to be like. And then, no, this is what hell is going to be like—the cackling stalker, the pale sociopath, Eddie Redmayne dancing with a plunger.

Why does it all bother me?

Because even though it isn’t new, uglification is rising and spreading as an artistic attitude, and it can’t be good for us. Because it speaks of self-hatred, and a society that hates itself, and hates life, won’t last. Because it gives those who are young nothing to love and feel soft about. Because we need beauty to keep our morale up.

Because life isn’t merde, in spite of what our entertainment geniuses say.

There’s a New Menace Stalking Suburbia. Meet the McBasement.

Limits on above-ground mansion sizes lead to mammoth grottos with tennis courts and whiskey-tasting rooms. Beverly Hills pushes back: `Violence against the land’

Artistic culture has taken a repulsive turn. It speaks of a society that hates itself, and hates life.