Postwar Styles: Cape Cod, Colonial and Ranch

J. M. Edgar, CRC

The end of the Second World War brought a sea change to American housing. Prior to that war most Americans were urban-dwelling renters. By the end of the postwar era in the mid-1960s, most Americans were suburban-dwelling landowners. From a nation of tenants to a nation of homeowners in just two decades. There has been nothing like it before — and probably never will be again.

Cape Cod house The classic 1-1/2 story Cape Cod on Worthington in south Lincoln. The attic has been finished and doghouse dormers added for more space and light on the second floor. On narrow standard city lots there was no room for a garage at the side of the house, so most were built in the back connected by a long drive — for your snow-shoveling pleasure. The single stall garage is typical. The brick is not. Wood siding is more common. The demand for housing had been growing for years. The Great Depression of the 1930s depressed, among other things, home building. Houses were built, but not nearly enough of them. Decent housing of any kind was getting scarce. By 1940 rents reached an all-time high, prompting the very first Federal rent controls. Then came the World War. All of the "strategic" materials needed to build housing went to war with our armed forces and built barracks, airfields and officer's clubs from Burma to Murmansk. By the end of the war housing demand had been steadily outstripping supply for nearly 20 years.

But in 1946 the war was over. Americans had money in their pockets for the first time in a long time. Lives that had been on hold since Pearl Harbor were resumed. There were a record number or marriages in 1946 and 1947, and a record number of births — the beginning of the Baby Boom generation. But there was just no housing to be had. Young couples with children were living above garages, in spare rooms, in tiny apartments with their parents; returning veterans were forced to live in their cars. The government erected temporary veterans shelters to ease the problem in particularly overcrowded areas. But what people wanted was housing: good, affordable housing ... to rent.

In 1946, we were overwhelmingly a nation of renters. The ideal of actually owning a house was distant dream to the average working American. It took years and years to save enough for the hefty down payment on even the most modest pre-war home. Many people simply could never do it. So all that most young families asked for was just something clean and decent to rent. They considered home-ownership something completely out of reach until much later in life, if at all.

But for once Congress was far ahead of the American people. Starting as a modest provision of the Servicemen's Readjustment Act of 1944 (popularly known as the "GI Bill of Rights"), the government gave each veteran the ability not just to rent, but actually purchase a modest first home by guaranteeing part, and later all, of his mortgage. For the first time ever, the average working guy — the policeman, the electrician, the bus driver, the assembly line worker — could own his own home; and a solid, well built, home, that could not, by government regulation, cost more than $10,000.

With the stroke of a pen millions of people who never even dreamed of being homeowners suddenly became potential homebuyers.

Housing demand, already huge, simply exploded.

The American Dream House...All in a Row...

With a keen 20/20 hindsight some 60+ years later, we can clearly see the many problems caused by the mass postwar migration to suburbia: the sprawl, the highway congestion, the pollution, our growing dependence on foreign oil, the row upon row of almost Row after row — just as far as the eye can see...

A small army of trucks rumbles over newly paved streets. Every 60 feet they stop in front of a just-cured 800-square-foot slab of concrete and drop identical bundles of lumber, pipes, siding, bricks, shingles, tile and rolls of electrical wire. Construction crews arrive in small groups and go immediately to work; raising walls, framing roofs, hanging Sheetrock®; siding, roofing, bricklaying and painting. Each crew does its own particular job, then rushes over to the next site and does it all over again.

Under this furious assault of men and machinery, new houses rise at an astounding rate: one new home finished every 16 minutes. The houses sell for $7,990.00; zero down and $57.00 a month — a mere 20% of a working man's income. As many as 350 of them are sold in a single day.

Levittown, Pennsylvania
Courtesy the Levitt Corporation.
Levittown Sidewalks border grassy lawns and wide, clean streets leading to community parks, swiming pools, and ball diamonds. Backyard fences are prohibited to foster neighborliness. There are no four-way road intersections to promote accidents, and "no child walking to school has to cross a main street to get there". Alfred Levitt designed his houses with an eye to mass production, and William Levitt, based on his experience in the Seabees building pre-fab structures for the Navy and Marines, broke down the building of a house into 26 discrete steps.

Subcontractors, paid by the piece, not by the hour, did the actual building using precut lumber and staircases already assembled in a central warehouse. Doing exactly the same job over and over and over again, crews quickly developed blazing speed and incredible efficiency (See: "A Carpenter Remembers", below).

President Harry Truman's administration was determined to use its mortgage guarantee leverage to ensure that houses for returning war veterans were substantial, but still did not cost over $10,000. In an era in which building codes were rare, the VA's detailed regulations for GI Bill housing became the de facto building code. Every house was inspected. Every house had to pass.

To beat the $10,000 limit, garages and basements had to go. Levitt houses were built on slabs, parking was at the curb. But these were solid, well-built houses, not cracker boxes. All had underfloor radiant heat and Thermopane® windows (30 years before anyone else). Venetian blinds were installed on every window. Kitchens were decked out in enameled steel cabinets with Formica's amazing new countertops — hygenic and durable (See: "The Levittown Kitchen", below). Every house came complete with a Bendix automatic clothes washing machine, a General Electric range and refrigerator, a built-in bookcase and flower boxes beneath the front window sills — all included in the price of the house. A staircase led up to the unfinished attic that could be turned into more bedrooms as the family grew.

There were no extras, there were no options. You got, with minor variations in color, trim and exterior finish, the exact same house as everyone else.

And it was a wonderful house. It was the American dream house — all in a row, row after row — just as far as the eye could see. indistinguishable tract houses.

What we seem to have completely forgotten, however, is that in the immediate post-war years a tiny suburban house with its own little parcel of green lawn, some scrawny rose bushes, and two gangly saplings in the front yard was a dream come true for Depression-dazed, war-weary American families.

American cities were tired, run down and dirty. There had been little new building for two generations. And no money for repairs. City treasuries during the Depression were mostly bare. City streets were indeed mean: poorly lit and crumbling. There was yet no word for smog, but there was plenty of it — coal was the primary home heating fuel. Rents were high and apartments were small, old, and squalid. Many had no hot water and only limited electricity. The shared bathroom was down the hall. There was no parking for the new cars nearly everyone could now afford. Photo: U.S. State Department Moving day Move-in day at a newly completed sub-division, 1953.

People just wanted out. They wanted something nicer, cleaner, and newer, with air you could breath. And for $20 in closing costs and a mortgage payment of $57 a month they could have it — a brand new Cape Cod with its own yard, a modern kitchen with built-in cabinets and appliances, heated tile floors, and central hot water; curbside parking on wide new streets, and abundant privacy ensured by a goodly expanse of green lawn between your house and your neighbor's.

The name of this glorious place where dreams came true was...

Levittown

William J. Levitt will always be one of the most "Just Look How Wonderful It Is."

"They [had] just paved [the street], but it was covered with mud. And I said, 'Oh, that's our house right there.' Downhill [Lane] 33, there it is.'"

"We walk up and there's this slab in the ground, and believe it or not, we're looking at it, and I said, 'Well, let's see: The bathroom's over here; there's where the bedroom is. And I laid down right on it. The wet slab. She said, 'Get up, you fool.' I said, 'Nah, just look how wonderful it is.'"

David and Mildred Glaser
One of the first Levittown couples.
Courtesy the Levitt Corporation. controversial figures in American life. He taught the world how to mass produce high-quality, affordable houses (see sidebar), and built more of them than anyone else in history, but never owned a house himself, and hated the suburbs. He rented a 5th Avenue apartment in New York City.

He is one of Time Magazine's 100 most important people of the 20th century, in good company with the likes of Franklin Roosevelt and Robert Goddard of NASA fame. But he died almost broke in 1994, unable to pay his bill at the hospital to which he had donated millions of dollars.

But, like it or not, William J. Levitt changed our world forever. His ideas literally rebuilt America. By 1950 every major metropolitan area in the United States was in midst of a housing boom — only a little slowed by the United Nations "Police Action" in Korean. William Levitt's mass production processes enveloped the nation. Between 1945 and 1965, 28 million new homes were built — an average of nearly 5,000 houses completed every single working day.

Mass production techniques helped ensure that A Carpenter Remembers.
"One Carpenter's Life", Fine Homebuilding #177, March, 2006)

[T]he demand for new houses was so enormous that it required revolutionary thinking about how to build them. We didn't have time to build one house at a time. We needed to find ways to build 500 houses at once...

To compete you had to specialize. As specialists we got pretty fast. When I started out as a carpenter, I was expected to hang eight doors a day. With a helper and the advantage of production tools, my friends Al and Royal Schieffer could hang nearly that many in an hour....

[W]hat was lost in the massive building boom was not quality. What was left behind was all the hend-crafted details that take time to create. We weren't building California bungalows or Victorian gingerbread houses. We were building solid tract houses that working-class families could afford to buy. And you know what? More than 50 years later, despite frequent earthquakes, those houses are still there. Hundreds of thousands of them."

Larry Hahn, a post-war framing contractor in Southern California. houses stayed affordable. Through the 1950s and early 1960s, the cost per square foot of a new home barely budged. Although selling prices were rising about 5% per year, the average house was at the same time getting bigger and more luxurious: 40% bigger by 1965 with central air conditioning, better insulation, more appliances, improved design and extensive landscaping. In 1950 the typical new house was a one-story two-bedroom Cape Cod that cost $8,000. A generation later it was a climate controlled two-story three-bedroom colonial that cost just $20,000.

It was an amazing time and it will never, ever happen again.

The Postwar Cape Cod

Enlarged Cape Cod Adding a wing to a classic Cape Cod was a simple and relatively inexpensive way to get more space. Many floor plans were designed with provisions for future expansion. The Levitts did not invent the Cape Cod style. It was a traditional Colonial Era architectural style: boxy, low to the ground with a sharply pitched roof and narrow eaves. Beginning in the 1920s, the style was re-popularized by Royal Barry Wills, a Boston architect whose writings began a revival the early Colonial styles, primarily in New England. The Levitt brothers, however, successfully adopted the Cape Cod to their mass production techniques; and both the style and the techniques were adopted widely during the postwar housing boom.

Enlarged Cape Cod Change the roof line and add a front gable and a classic Cape Cod becomes a Cape Cottage or just Cottage. This excellent example is in the Irvingdale area near Van Dorn and 27th Streets. The revived Cape Cod differed from its Colonial ancestor. It was not as squat and unlike the early Cape with 2 rooms downstairs heated by a central fireplace, and a sleeping loft above, the Levitt Cape had 4-1/2 rooms: living room and kitchen across the front, two bedrooms at the rear and a bath tucked in behind the kitchen. But it kept the boxy rectangular shape, high pitched roof and narrow eaves characteristic of the earlier style. The plan was soon revamped so that the kitchen was at the back of the house, for reasons of better privacy and to make it easier to watch the children in the back yard.

Enlarged Cape Cod Can you spot the Cape Cod? Finding the original Cape Cod under all the additions can sometimes be a real challenge. While the classic Cape Cod was the style most often built. Many variations were tried. One of the most common was to extend the front of the house a few feet under a front gable. This wide-spread variation was often termed a Cape Cottage, or just Cottage style. A lot of them were built in Lincoln between 37th and 56th, A to South streets.

But relatively few pristine postwar Capes still exist. Improving your tract house became something of a nationwide obsession in the 1960s, spawning a whole new "do-it-yourself" industry. Almost as soon as the paint was dry on the original house, Americans turned to making it bigger and better. Finished basements, new gardens, garages, porches, decks and, for the very ambitious, bedrooms in the attic or whole new additions. In Nebraska a lot of Cape Cods were built as one-story homes with relatively low hip rather than gable roofs, reducing the opportunity to expand easily to a second floor. But this did not prevent owners from expanding them: out the back, out the side, or remove the roof and add a story. Some expansions are so extensive that it is had to tell that there was once a Cape Cod under all those additions.

The Postwar Colonial

The Colonial style of house has been around in one form or another since before the Revolution. There was a revival of the Colonial styles after 1870 that lasted into the first two decades of the next century. The Colonial Revival is often seen as a Early Postwar Colonial House An early postwar Colonial house. Take away the second story and the fancy front portico, and you can get a glimpse the true ancestor of this style, a simple Cape Cod house. In fact, another name for this style is the "Colonial Cape". Note the typical Georgian trim detail at the peak of the dormers and around the front door. stylistic backlash against the excess of Victorian housing styles and a a yearning to return to the country's "more wholesome" agrarian past. This sentiment helped trigger the Arts and Crafts movement that gave rise to the various architectural styles that had swallowed the Colonial Revival by the 1930s.

During the postwar housing boom, the Colonial style arose once again to serve the need for a larger house that could be mass produced in very large numbers. The Cape Cod was just not enough house for many postwar homebuyers. They wanted three bedrooms rather than two and a little more space. Builders, already familiar with the humble Cape Cod, merely added a second story. The additional story allowed the bedrooms and main bath to be moved upstairs. This, in turn, permitted a full formal dining room as well as a larger kitchen and living room with a guest bath just off the entry hall. And thus was born the mid-century Colonial house.

Dutch Colonial A Dutch Colonial style house with its gambrel roof on Worthington Street, Irvingdale area of Lincoln. Like the Cape Cod, easily added to, Colonials soon sported wings, decks, porches and attached garages. As time went by, fewer and fewer of the smaller Cape Cods were sold and the larger Colonial in its many variations, particularly the split-level, became the dominant tract house style by the mid-1960s.

Modern Colonial House A late post-war split-level version of the Colonial with integrated garage. The house is now far removed from its Cape Cod roots and not a hint of the Georgian detailing remains. But it now has the obligatory bay window, purely decorative, non-functioning shutters, an integral garage and unfinished "rec room" in the basement. In many ways a more functional house, it has, however, lost a lot of its charm. Many variations on the original postwar Colonial soon appeared. The second story was made larger by cantilevering it over the ground floor. The larger space allowed for a small additional bathroom attached to the "master bedroom" — a term just coming into use. Variations in roof styles and detailing emerged. Adding a gambrel roof turned the structure into a Dutch Colonial. Split foyer colonials inspired split-level colonials with the obligatory unfinished "recreation" room in the basement. These allowed as much living space as ranch style houses (see below) without the large lots required for ranch houses. Integrated one and two-stall garages became indispensable in the late 1960s.

But by that time the style has lost many of the elements that had originally defined it. The early Georgian detailing such as the entry cornice and detailed eaves was gone as was the two-story rectangular shape. Split-level and split-foyer variations had so diluted the style that it was almost unrecognizable. In fact, whether a split level house is termed a Colonial or a Raised Ranch is now often a matter of which label will most quickly sell the house. The Colonial had become a "left-over" style. Any two story house that did not fall easily into another style classification automatically became a "colonial".

The Ranch House

The Ranch Style became become one of the dominant home styles during the middle decades of the century and passed the Colonial in popularity by the 1970s. The Ranch was geared to casual indoor-outdoor living with its open floor plan, semi-enclosed patios nestled between the wings of the house and extensive use of glass doors and large picture windows to bring the outdoors in. In 1977, 77% of the single-family houses built in the U.S. were single story Ranches and Cape Cods.

Photo: Lancaster County Register of Deeds Ranch A Ranch style house on Fall Creek Road. The Prairie influence is very evident in this house. As this example shows, the Ranch Style which is often considered relatively bland can have a great deal of character and charm. The Ranch was born in the sprawling southwest. Architect Cliff May is credited with having built the first Ranch style home in San Diego in 1932. Its main features were greatly influenced by low-roofed Spanish-adobe houses on which thick walls, broad overhanging eaves and tile roofs were intended to keep the house cool in blistering desert summers. The complete absence of blistering desert summers did not keep the style from quickly migrating north and east into the suburban landscape.

This was due to a unique confluence of events. First, a casual, west coast style of living promised by the one story open Ranch design struck a chord with American homebuyers. Second, relatively inexpensive land in the suburbs meant that even the modestly affluent could afford the wide lots required for a rambling Ranch style. Third, and possibly most important, central home heating had become inexpensive and convenient. In the days when a wood-burning fireplace or coal stove was the main heat source, heating a house took a lot of work cutting wood or shoveling coal. Building up rather than out made the most efficient use of heat rising from the first floor to also warm the second (and possibly third). But in the 1950s, reliable, cheap central heat was available just by turning up the furnace thermostat. It made Ranch houses possible in cold climates. Without central heating and later air-conditioning, the Ranch style would probably be nothing more than an interesting Southwest regional curiosity.

Ranch The promise of casual indoor-outdoor living: Large windows and glass doors open onto a secluded patio nestled between the wings of the house. As the house style migrated north it lost much of its characteristic southwest flavor and began showing more Prairie style influences — at least in more affluent neighborhoods. In its tract house version, builders seemed to make a special effort to make it as bland and characterless as possible. In fact the Ranch style is often described as the "complete absence of style" — which is absolute nonsense. A well-styled Ranch has as much character as any other house type. It's just that there are not that many of them. The defining characteristics of the style were also muffled when the variations started such as the "Raised Ranch". Today the Ranch is largely a "left-over" style like the Colonial. Any one story house with a low roof that is not a Cape is probably going to be identified, rightly or wrongly, as a Ranch.

The Ranch style has been declining in popularity because it requires so much land, and land is getting more expensive nearly everywhere. In 2005 single story houses, including Ranches, had declined to just 42% of new homes sold — far below its post-war peak. But the main features of the Ranch style, the open floor plan and merging of indoor and outdoor spaces, have retained their appeal, migrating to contemporary housing styles that look absolutely nothing like a ranch.

Post-War Interiors

Postwar housing featured what we might call "minimalist" interiors. The advent of gypsum drywall eliminated the need for the wide trim The Eames Lounge Chair The classic Eames® Lounge Chair from Herman Miller is one of the icons of sculpted post-war furniture. boards required for wet plaster walls. Very narrow trim soon became the standard. Many houses started with tile floors. But the asphalt tile used at the time became brittle after a few years and broke apart. Few houses had it after 1960. Oak wood strip floors eventually became the standard, lasting until about 1975 when wall-to-wall carpeting took over (made possible by the invention of the inexpensive vacuum cleaner — but that's another story). True linoleum and later sheet vinyl were the standards for kitchens and baths. Plain doors and windows, and the absence of crown or chair molding contributed to the "vanilla" look of the period.

Most did not stay vanilla very long, however. Homeowners immediately set about adding the special touches that made their new house a unique home. Some of the more faddish postwar decorating trends came and went quickly. Remember Campaign furniture and the (best forgotten) Mediterranean style? Both appeared and disappeared in about five years, leaving virtually no trace that they ever were.

But the nice thing about postwar houses is that they can adapt to just about any interior styling. They are extremely flexible. While fussy Victorian may look out of place, any of what are termed the "modernism" styles can be used: art nouveau, art deco, industrial, and Scandinavian. Colonial houses lend themselves well to Colonial or Traditional styles. Cape cods can adopt any of these as well as a toned down Arts and Crafts look.

Art Deco Room An art deco-influenced living room. A large sofa, comfortable club chair and bold geometric patterns are typical of the style. Art Nouveau/Art Deco: Art Nouveau began in the late 19th century as yet another reaction to Victorian excess. It morphed into the Art Deco movement that lasted in somewhat muted form until the 1970s. It was most popular in the 1930s and gave period movie theaters their characteristic look. Neither was a true architectural style. They were styles of decoration that Art Nouveau Living Room Bold geometric paintings adorn monochromatic walls. Chrome, glass and leather chairs complement a comfortable bright fabric loveseat in this Art Nouveau style living room. emphasized shape and form. Ornamentation consists largely of low relief geometrical designs, often in the form of parallel straight lines, zigzags, chevrons and stylized floral motifs. Stylists and designers such as Charles Eames, Le Corbusier and the Bauhaus School made full use of the possibilities of new materials such as bendable plywoods and moldable plastics to design furnishings with sweeping curves

Typified by strong and large geometric designs, extensive use of glass in both interior detail and furnishings and bold use of color in carpets and accessories, the Art Nouveau/Deco styles fit perfectly inside the modern ranch house. The walls are typically monochromatic and light to keep the look clean. The tone of a room is often taken from its rugs, usually containing rich colors and strong geometric shapes. A comfortable sofa, at least one club or lounge chair and a coffee table are almost required elements of the Art Nouveau/Deco living room.

Scandinavian Modern: Called by many names, the most common being "Danish Modern", no style captured the post-war spirit like Scandinavian Modernism. The style actually began in the 1930s. It was refined during the austerity of the German wartime occupation of the North Countries, a time when most imported and Scandinavian Modern Dining Room Clean lines and natural materials; a Danish Modern dining room. man-made materials became unavailable and designers were forced to work with local, native materials such as oak, birch, rush, clay and linen cloth. After the war a few exotics slipped in, notably teak and rosewood, but the designs generally remained faithful to their wartime roots in native, natural materials and simple finishes.

Scandinavian Modern living room Teak, chrome, a monochromatic color scheme and sparse, and simple decorations of the Scandinavian Modernist style fit well in minimalist mid-century modern interiors. Taking hold in New York soon after the war, the Scandinavian style quickly spread all across America. Young modern families found it to be the ideal expression of the new, informal, suburban lifestyle. The lines were geometric, clean and unpretentious and the scale was well-suited to the smaller houses of the postwar period. "Hand rubbed" oil-and-wax finishes on wood furnishings meant freedom from worry about the interaction between young children and fine furnishings. If a table got damaged, it could easily be repaired. Framed seating with removable, slip cushions meant that a new look could be had at any time with some simple reupolstery. Light weight Scandinavian furniture made cleaning and re-arranging a snap; and the natural materials and fine craftsmanship were a nice counterpoint to the mass produced, man-made materials that seem to explode into middle of the century: plastics, nylon, orlon, chrome, Melmac®, vinyl and Formica®, to name just a very few.

The Postwar Kitchen

Among their other contributions to the American home, the Levitt brothers largely invented the modern, functional kitchen. The concept of built-in kitchens had been around for decades. Most urban homes built after 1900 had some sort of built in cabinetry. But, unless the kitchen was designed by an architect, not much thought was given to how the room should be organized. Often it was built by a carpenter who, after locating the sink under the kitchen window, built adjacent cabinetry where it looked right to him. Often it was an absolute horror to actually cook in.

But by the end of the World War science was being applied to kitchen design. In 1944, the President of the University of Illinois at Urbana ordered the formation of the Small Homes Council to research housing issues. By war's end, the Council had already published a number of research findings on kitchen organization, Photo: The State Museum of Pennsylvania, Levittown Exhibit The Levittown Kitchen The standard 1950s Levittown kitchen as it looked on move-in day — in pinkish — as recreated by the State Museum of Pennsylvania. To tour this incredible kitchen exhibit, go to The Levittown Exhibit eventually developing the famous "kitchen work triangle" that became the cornerstone of kitchen design for the next half centory. (The kitchen triangle endures today as part of the Kitchen Design Rules published by the National Kitchen and Bath Association).

The Levittown Kitchen

The professors had the design theory, but the Levitts had the common-sense and production genius. They turned their penchant for design and mass production to the kitchen and developed the first widely available modern kitchen. It featured among other things, durable and hygenic enameled steel cabinets (faster to install than carpenter-built wood cabinets), Formica® countertops, a single-spout mixing valve faucet, a Waring® blender base built right into the counter top, an electric range with oven, a refrigerator, a washer and dryer, and a built-in chopping block next to the sink. For its time it was an absolute miracle of function and organization. All of the basic household services were placed in one conveniently arranged location: cooking, laundry, cleanup, storage; with a view of the kids playing in the back yard.

The Mid-Century Modern Kitchen

Photo: Formica Corporation. 1950s Formica Pattern The retro mid-century look is becoming so popular that Formica has reintroduced many of its original 1950s patterns and colors. This one is "Coral Boomerang" from the Classics collection. Photo: Rejuvenation Inc. A typical 1950s kitchen The mid-century modern kitchen as recreated by Rejuvenation Inc. as a setting for its reproduction period lighting and cabinet hardware. Everything in this kitchen is well-researched and absolutely authentic, down to the turquoise tile, Melmac® dinnerware and period cookbooks. Outside of Levitt-built communities wood cabinets were more common than Levitt's preferred enamel-on-steel. The kitchen was streamlined with plain-as-day cabinet doors and drawers. Color was imported in tile and counter top patterns, some quite bold, and in colors rarely seen today including flamingo pink, lemon and turquoise. Typical features included drop soffits, Venetian blinds and a breakfast table of tubular chrome steel with a laminate top and matching chrome and vinyl chairs. At least one corner or end cabinet would be outfitted with open shelves for Mom's cookbooks. Colorful Melamine dinnerware completed the mid-century modern look. Millions of these kitchens were built; most have, unfortunately, been "updated". But the look is coming back as "50s-Retro". Vintage steel cabinets, chrome and vinyl kitchen table sets, and even 50s appliances, if in good shape, are commanding impressive prices in the antiques markets, and just about all of these are being widely reproduced.

The mid-century kitchen was well thought out and functional, but small for the purpose into which it very quickly evolved - the social center of the home. Kitchen design did not really catch up with this revolution in kitchen status for nearly 25 years, but somehow American families made their little kitchens work. Millions of kids were raised in these kitchens and remember them with unreasoned fondness as special places featuring Ovaltine®, warm toll-house cookies, Jello®, ice-cold Kool-Aid®, and Meadow Gold® ice cream doled out one precious scoop at a time.

Reproduction 1950s range The modern equivalent: This Heartland Appliance gas range would be at home in any reproduction mid-century modern kitchen. Cabinets: Cabinet wood was overwhelmingly birch, 1958 GE Range The "Space Age" Keyboard-Cooking range in turquoise from General Electric (circa 1958). due to the widespread postwar availability of high quality birch plywood (originally developed to make war planes and PT boats). Natural varnished birch captured the light and airy look favored by the new suburbanites. Most cabinet doors were simply lipped sheets of plywood with exposed hinges and mechanical or magnetic catches. Cabinet corners were often rounded. The simple, unadorned cabinet designs fit in well with the Scandinavian furnishings of the day. (For more on cabinet door styles, see Cabinet Basics)

If a kitchen aspired to the the Art Deco look, the cabinets were typically painted and the doors were a framed flat panel. Art Decor designs might be applied as light valences or scroll-sawn patterns in the doors.

Countertops: Image: Formica Corporation Chrome edged laminate countertop Chrome edged laminate counter top. For true authenticity, countertops should be laminate. These were often edged in chrome trim, but if not, should have a square or diamond edge treatment. Ceramic tile was also used, and the tile was often carried up the wall to the bottom of the wall cabinets. Tile patterns were typically bold as were the colors. Solid surfacing with a laminate look would work. The key is to keep the square edge typical of the period. Granite and manufactured stone tops would be out of character in a Retro-50s kitchen.

Flooring: Kitchen floors typically started out in asphalt tile set in bold patterns of alternating colors. Asphalt tile is no longer available for the simple reason that it is not very good tile, but there are plenty of vinyl tile replacements. Sheet linoleum was also used. True linoleum is once again available, and in authentic colors and patterns for the period. A good substitute is sheet vinyl. In an upscale kitchen ceramic tile could be found, again in bold patterns and/or colors. Slate and oak strip flooring are also authentic. Oak and slate-look laminates would look right and be easier to care for.

Chrome and laminate kitchen table Chromed tubular steel table with laminate top and vinyl-covered chairs — an essential item for an authentic mid-century modern kitchen as is the bold tile pattern. Big Chill Retro Refrigerator Completely modern and frost free on the inside, this retro refrigerator from Big Chill is completely at home in any mid-century kitchen. As is the dishwasher. If there had been dishwashers in 1955, this is probably what they would have looked like. Molding: The molding in a mid-century modern kitchen should be plain and understated. Complex moldings were not a design feature of the style. Moldings were largely treated as a necessary evil, needed to hide wall edges, but were deemphasized as much as possible. Birch, Sweet Gum and Fir are the most authentic. Pine is a good substitute and is more readily available in the Midwest. Sweet gum is now so rare, due to overcutting and disease, that it is classed as an "exotic" species. But authentic gum trim can often be found in stores that specialize in architectural antiques. Elm and oak were also used.

Appliances: It is certainly permissible to use completely modern appliances in your mid-century modern kitchen. But it would be vastly improved with retro-look appliances. Many are available. They have all the functionality of modern appliances, but feature an authentic style and period colors such as Buick Red, Lemon Yellow, Flamingo Pink and Robin's Egg Blue as well as White, Bisque, and Black.

Most Requested Feature: More space. Many postwar kitchens are small — very small. The idea of kitchen as family social center had not occurred to mid-century architects. Kitchens were considered utility rooms, like the bathroom, to be kept as small as possible to add space to the living areas of the house. Now that we generally see kitchens as part of the living area - in fact, probably the most important part - the space is just not there. There are a number of tried and true options for getting more space for that dream kitchen, however. We can remove a dividing wall between the kitchen and another room, add a small bumpout to the kitchen or even a full addition to greatly expand the space. All of these possibilities are more fully explored in Finding Some More Kitchen Space.

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