Post-war Housing Styles Cape Cod, Colonial, and Ranch

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The twenty years after the Second World War brought a sea change to Amer­i­can housing that altered the entire Amer­i­can landscape, creating whole new towns and cities where none had existed before and inventing an entirely new suburban lifestyle.

The Post-War Series: Where Are You Now?

Post-war Housing Styles Cape Cod, Colonial, & Ranch
Post War Atomic-Age Interiors
The Post-War Retro Mid-Century Kitchen
The Post-War Bathroom
Postwar Retro Resources: An Illustrated Guide to All Things Retro

By the end of the World War in August 1945, The demand for new housing had been growing for years.

The Great Depression of the 1930s depressed, among other things, home building. Houses were being built, but not nearly enough of them. Housing starts plummeted 90%, from 937,000 in 1925 to barely 93,000 in 1933.

Decent housing of any kind was nearly impossible to find in 1945, even apartments to rent.

Abnd what there was to rent was expensive.

Rents had already reached an all-time high as early as 1940, prompting the very first federal government rent controls. They were a complete failure – largely ignored by all, landlord and tenant alike.

Then came the World War. All the "strategic" materials needed to build housing went to war with our armed forces, needed for barracks, airfields, warehouses, hangers, and mess halls from Burma to Murmansk.

By the end of the war, housing demand had been steadily outstripping supply for an entire generation of young Americans.

But the Great Depression was history in the Autumn 1945, succumbing to the demands of wartime production. The Allies had won the deadliest and most costly war of all time. Nazi Ger­many then Im­perial Ja­pan, had unconditionally surrendered.

Christmas in 1945 was celebrated in a world without war for the first time in nearly a decade.

Unnoticed by almost everyone except a few economists, the "Arsenal of Democracy" had become rich. The total wealth of the nation had doubled in just four years.

Americans produced more food than they could eat, more clothing than they could wear, more steel than they could use, and pumped more than half of all the world's oil.

Thirteen million Amer­i­can men and women were returning from wartime military service, restarting lives that had been on hold since the Imperial Japanese navy attacked Pearl Harbor in December 1941.

There were a re­cord number of marriages in 1946 and again in 1947, resulting in a record number of births – the beginning of the Baby Boom generation.

But, there was still the prolem of housing, there was none to be had.

Young couples with infants were living above garages, in spare rooms, and 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 especially overcrowded areas but it was not nearly enough.

The GI Bill

Few young Amer­i­cans owned their own home in 1945. Most young families rented. The ideal of actually owning a home was a distant dream to the average wage-earner.

It took years and years to save enough for the hefty down payment demanded by the banks on even a modest house. Many people simply could never do it.

So, the most that young post-war families envisioned for their immediate future was just something clean and decent to rent.

Homeownership was considered completely out of reach until much later in life, if at all.

But, for once (and perhaps the last time) Congress was leagues ahead of the Amer­i­can public.

Starting as a modest and almost unnoticed provision of the Serv­ice­men's Re­ad­just­ment Act of 1944 – popularly known as the "GI Bill" – the government gave every single war veteran the ability not just to rent but actually buy a modest first home by eliminating the down payment and guaranteeing part, and later all, of the veteran's mortgage.

For the first time ever, the average working guy – the policeman, the electrician, the bus driver, the teacher, the line worker – could afford to own a home – and a solid, well built, home that could not, by government edict, cost more than $10,000.

Millions of families who never even dreamed of homeownership suddenly found themselves in the market for a new house.

Housing demand, already enormous, simply exploded.

With a keen 20/20 hindsight over three-quarters of a century later, we can clearly see the many problems caused by the mass post-war migration to suburbia: the sprawl, the highway congestion, the pollution, our growing dependence on foreign oil, the row upon row of almost identical tract houses.

… As Far as the Eye Can See


It's barely dawn when a small convoy of surplus army trucks rumbles through the morning mist over newly paved streets.

Every 60 feet they stop in front of a just-cured 8500-square-foot slab of concrete in what was once a potato farm, pausing just long enough to drop identical bundles of lumber, pipes, siding, bricks, shingles, tile, and wiring, then moving on to the next slab.

The bundles contain a nearly foolproof house-build­ing kit – everything required to finish one house. The materials needed first are packaged on top.

Construction crews soon arrive in small, quiet groups, subdued by the early hour, and quickly go to work: raising walls, framing roofs, hanging drywall, painting, siding, shingling, and laying brick.

Each crew does its particular job, then rushes over to the next slab and starts all over again.

Under the fury of this sustained assault of men and machinery, new houses rise at an astounding rate – one finished house every 16 minutes.

They sell for $7,990; $20.00 closing costs and a mortgage of $57.00 per month – a mere 20% of a working man's take-home pay.

As many as 1,400 of them are sold in a single day.

With the speed and efficiency that built Mar­ine airfields on Guad­al­can­al and tank bridges over the Rhine, seasoned vet­er­ans of war­time construction bri­gades are building a new kind of Amer­i­ca, and with it, a new Amer­i­can lifestyle, far from the bus­tling, crumb­ling, crowded cities; surrounded by green grass and clean air.

Alfred Levitt designed the houses with an eye to mass production, and William Levitt, using 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, assigning each step to a specialist contractor.

Paid by the piece, not by the hour, the contractors did the actual building using pre-cut lumber and pre-hung doors. Pre-assembled fence sections, flower boxes, windows, and staircases arrive ready to install from a central warehouse.

Doing exactly the same job over and over and over again, crews soon developed blistering speed and dazzling efficiency.

Pres­ident Har­ry Tru­man's Vet­er­ans Ad­min­is­tra­tion was determined to use its mortgage-guarantee leverage to ensure that houses for war veterans were substantial but still did not cost over $10,000.

In an era in which comprehensive building codes were uncommon outside of major cities, the VA's detailed regulations for GI Bill housing became the de facto construction standard.

Every house had to pass several rigorous inspections. VA inspectors were wartime veterans themselves and on a mission.

They had absolutely no tolerance for shoddy workmanship or substandard materials. Rare was the house that survived inspection without at least some do-overs.

To beat the VA's $10,000 price cap, basements and garages 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 a large picture window, underfloor radiant heat, and a working fireplace. Windows were glazed with Thermo­pane® dual-glass units – 30 years before they became common. Venetian blinds were installed on every window.

"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.'"

"Nah", I said, 'just look how wonderful it is.'"

Oral history: David and Mildred Glaser, one of the first Levittown couples. Courtesy the Levitt Corp­oration.

Levitt kitchens were decked out in enameled steel cabinets with Formica's amazing new laminated countertops – hygienic and durable.

Every house came complete with a Bendix automatic washing machine – and by 1955 a clothes dryer – a GE kitchen range and refrigerator, a built-in bookcase, and flower boxes beneath the front windows – all included in the price of the house.

A staircase led up to the unfinished second floor that could be turned into more bedrooms as the family grew.

The yard was landscaped with trees and assorted shrubs.

Seven different exterior color schemes and four variations in front and roof elevation ensured that no two houses within sight from any one viewpoint looked exactly alike.

And, it was a wonderful house – the Amer­i­can dream house, all in a row, row after row – just as far as the eye could see.

What we seem to have completely forgotten in the rush to judgment, however, is that in the immediate post-war years, a tiny suburban house with its 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.

Our cities were tired, run-down, and dirty.

There had been little new building for almost two de­cades and very little money for repairs.

Mu­ni­ci­pal coffers during the De­pres­sion were mostly bare, struggling to provide even basic public services.

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.

People just wanted out. They wanted something nicer, cleaner, and new­er, with air you could breathe and green grass for children to play on.

And, for $20 in closing costs, they could have it.

A brand new two-bed­room 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.

And, the name of this glorious place where the Amer­i­can Dream finally came true was…

Levittown

William Jaird Levitt will always be one of the most controversial figures in Amer­i­can life.

He taught the world how to build affordable, high-quality, mass-produced single-family houses (see sidebar), and built more of them than anyone else in history.

But, but never owned a house himself, and hated the suburbs. He lived in 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 penniless in 1994, unable to pay his bill at the hospital to which he had donated millions of dollars.

Like it or not, however, William J. Levitt forever changed our world. His ideas literally rebuilt Amer­i­ca.

He gave us not just a new kind of house in a new kind of neighborhood but a new style of living with a new word to describe it: "suburbia."

By 1950 every major metropolitan area in the United States was in the midst of a housing boom – barely slowed by the Unit­ed Na­tions "Police Ac­tion" in Kor­ea in the early 1950s.

By 1965 most Amer­i­cans were "suburbanites". In 1943 only 43% of all Americans lived in a home they owned. By 1965, that number was over 65% and still climging. It has remained nearly constant for the 75+ years since.

William Jaird Le­vitt's mass production homebuilding techniques had enveloped the nation.

Between 1945 and 1965, 28 million new homes were built – an average of nearly 5,000 houses every working day – a new home every three minutes – more sin­gle-fam­ily homes than had been built in all of Amer­i­can history up to that time.

Production processes pioneered by the Le­vitt brothers helped ensure that houses stayed affordable.

Through the 1950s and early 1960s home prices rose about 5% per year, but only because houses were getting larger and more luxurious: 40% bigger by 1965 with central air conditioning, better insulation, more appliances, improved design, and extensive landscaping.

Per square foot, however, home prices barely budged.

In 1955 the typical new home was a one-story two-bedroom Cape Cod that cost $8,900. Ten years later it was a cli­mate-con­trolled, landscaped, two-story three-bed­room co­lo­ni­al with an attached garage and unfinished basement that cost under $20,000 with a mort­gage payment that was still just a fraction of a work­ing­man's take-home pay.

The Post-war Cape Cod

The Levitts did not invent the Cape Cod house. It is a traditional co­lo­ni­al-era architectural style – boxy, low to the ground with a sharply pitched roof and narrow eaves. It disappears then re-appears from time to time in Amer­i­can architectural history.

The Revival Cape Cod

Colonial-style houses briefly emerged from the shadow of ornate Vic­tor­i­an architecture in the late 19th century Co­lo­ni­al Re­vi­val period following the Cen­ten­nial of the birth of the Na­tion n 1875.

Beginning in the 1920s they appeared again, re-popularized once more by Bos­ton architect Royal Bar­ry Wills whose writings sparked a renewed interest in early Co­lo­ni­al styles, primarily in New Eng­land and the Up­per Mid-At­lan­tic states.

The original Cape Cod houses, built during the Colonial period were very basic, single-story homes with just three rooms, a "keeping room" and two bedrooms.

The keeping room filled multiple roles. It was, at various times of the day, the living room, dining room, and kitchen. It was typically the only room with a fireplace so it was the only room with heat.

During the second "Colonial Revival" period in the 1920s, the humble Cape Cod was resurrected once again as a starter home.

The one-story version had an entry hall, living room, dining room, kitchen, two bedrooms and a bathroom.

Some were built as 1-1/2 story structures by adding dormers to the roofline. The second floor allowed enough room for two bedrooms and a bath opening onto a small hallway at the top of the stairs.

Moving the bedrooms created room on the first floor for larger living spaces.

The Levittown Cape Cod

The Le­vitt brothers successfully adapted the Cape Cod to their mass production techniques and both the style and the techniques were widely copied during the post-war housing boom.

This compact and efficient 850-square-foot Cape Cod design built by the hundreds in Lincoln, Nebraska made the best use of every inch of space. The design serves new families well even today.

The coat closet and stairs were conveniently right off the entry. The kitchen opened into both the dining room and living room, facilitating both family dining and entertaining.

Bedrooms were separated from the public spaces by a short hallway, and the bath was located between the bedrooms and living portions of the house so it was convenient for both guests and family members. The toilet, hidden behind a protruding closet, was partly shielded from view for better privacy.

The furnace tucked neatly into a little closet under the stairs, nestled comfortably alongside the water heater. Unfinished attic space allowed for expansion as the family grew.

Their version of the Cape Cod was a compromise between the single and 1-1/2 story versions.

The house was built with a finished first floor that included two bedrooms with a staircase leading to an unfinished second floor that allowed a homeowner to finish off additional living space without the expense of extending the footprint of the original house.

It had 4-1/2 rooms: a living-dining room and kitchen across the front, two bedrooms at the rear, and a bath tucked in behind the kit­chen. However, it kept the boxy rectangular shape, high-pitched roof, and narrow eaves characteristic of the original Cape Cod style.

The floor 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 backyard.

Not an inch of space was wasted.

The coat closet and stairs were conveniently right off the entry. The kitchen opened to both the dining room and living room, facilitating both family dining and entertaining.

Bedrooms were separated from the public spaces by a short hallway, and the bath was located between the bedrooms and living portions of the house – convenient for both guests and family members.

The toilet, hidden behind a protruding closet, was partly shielded from view from the bathroom door.

The furnace, and later the air conditioning, were tucked neatly into their own little closet next to the water heater.

Variations on the Cape Cod Style

Relatively few pristine post-war capes still exist, however.

Improving your tract house became something of a nationwide obsession in the 1960s, spawning a whole new "do-it-your­self" industry and creating the tool-belt-tot­in' weekend warrior.

Almost as soon as the paint was dry on the original house, homeowners turned to making it bigger and better – finished basements, new gardens, gar­ages, por­ches, decks, and, for the very ambitious, bedrooms in the attic and even whole new additions.

In the Mid­west a lot of Cape Cods were built as one-story homes with relatively low hip rather than ga­ble roofs, reducing the opportunity to easily expand to a second floor.

But, this did not prevent owners from enlarging them: out the back, out the side, or remove the roof and add a story.

Some expansions are so extensive that it is hard to tell that there was once a humble Cape Cod under the pile of additions.

The Colonial

The Co­lo­ni­al-style two-story house has been around in one form or another since before the Rev­o­lu­tion­ary War. The style comes and goes, waxes and wanes, but never quite disappears from the Amer­i­can architectural landscape/

Colonial Revivals

There was a revival of the style in the 1870s. The houses built during this period were typically faced in brick or stone and featured typical Colonial-period detailing such as Palladian windows and Georgian trim around windows and doors, and long the eaves. A small front porch was often supported with columns in a Greek classical mode.

A Carpenter Remembers

By Larry Haun (1931 - 2011), Nebraska-born author and post-war framing contractor in Southern California.


The 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 hand-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.

Ex­cerpt­ed from: "One Car­pen­ter's Life", Fine Home­build­ing #177, March 2006).

The Co­lo­ni­al Re­vi­val of this period is often seen as a stylistic backlash against the excess of Vic­tor­i­an housing styles and a yearning to return to the country's "more wholesome" agrarian past.

This sentiment helped trigger the Arts & Crafts movement that gave rise to the family of architectural styles that paralleled the Co­lo­ni­al Re­vi­val until the 1930s when both began to be swallowed up by the emerging Mo­der­nist movement.

Post-War Colonials

During the post-war 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 post-war 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.

Like the Cape Cod, designed to be 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 different forms, particularly the split-level, became the dominant tract house style by the mid-1960s.

Colonial Style Variations

By then the simple post-war colonial had undergone a number of major transformations.

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.

Attached one and two-stall garages had become indispensable in the 1960s.

But, by that time the style had 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 architectural classification automatically became a "colonial".

The Ranch Style or "Ramb­ler" became one of the dominant home styles during the middle decades of the century and passed the Co­lo­ni­al in popularity by the 1970s.

Unlike other prevalent Post-War styles, Ranches were not a rein­ter­pre­ta­tion of an earlier architectural style.

They were something entirely new – purposefully designed for casual indoor-outdoor living with its open floor plan, semi-enclosed patios, and ex­ten­sive use of glass doors and large windows to bring the outdoors in.

In 1977, over 75% of the single-family houses built in the U.S. were single-story Ranches and Cape Cods.

The California Rancheria

The style was born in the sprawling deserts of the Amer­i­can South­west.

Self-taught San Die­go architect Cliff May is widely credited with having built the first ranch-style home in San Diego in 1932. Arch­i­tec­tur­al Dig­est took notice of the house as style early as 1934, and the notoriety allowed May to build more of his Cal­i­forn­ia Ranch­er­ia houses over the next five years.

The World War stalled home building for several years but in 1944, with the end of the War in sight, Sun­set Mag­a­zine featured May's houses, re-naming them Ranch Houses – the name that stuck. A feature in House Beau­ti­ful followed in 1946 solidifying May's reputation as the designer of this new style of house.

May was critical of conventional architecture. He felt it failed to take into account local climate in the design of houses.

His Ran­cher­ias were designed specifically for South­ern Cal­iforn­ia living and greatly influenced by low-roofed ado­be farmh­ouses 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.

May sold plans for his ranch houses to homebuilders nationwide fueling the spread of the style to all corners of the country.

His ramblers featured an open floor plan, making the best use of the limited space by eliminating interior walls to combine living, dining, and kitchen areas into what later became known as "Great Rooms".

Large windows invited plenty of natural light and sliding glass doors opened onto exterior living spaces, especially patios and decks.

The Eichler Ranches

The Le­vitts adapted May's houses to their mass-production methods, featuring two- and three-bed­room "Ranch­ers" in their developments in New Jer­sey and Penn­syl­van­ia. But they were by no means the only builders to adopt and customize the style.

Of particular note was Cal­i­forn­ia-based builder Jos­eph Eich­ler. His interpretation of the ranch house brought a fresh, modernist approach to the style – elevating it to something of a period icon, much admired and widely copied.

Eichler's designs were known for their inward orientation.

Like the Span­ish Mis­si­ons that influenced the style, The houses opened into a central courtyard or open-air atrium which provided light and ventilation while enduring almost perfect privacy.

Often the front and sides of Eich­ler ranches were completely devoid of windows, offset by entire glass walls enclosing the atri­um and opening into the back patio or court. The enclosed op­en-air atrium brought the outdoors into the very core of the house.

In less temperate climes, the atrium was often enclosed and climate-controlled to better handle scorching summers and frosty winters. The opening in the roof became a skylight which created a feeling of being outdoors, without actually being outdoors.

For more on designing and building an indoor garden room, see A Jun­gle in the Din­ing Room – The Sol­ar­ium Ad­di­tion.

Still, the ranch-style house would probably not have gained much of a foothold in the architecture of the early post-war de­cades were it not for a confluence in the 1950s of three unique events: A casual post-war lifestyle, inexpensive land, and central heating.

Casual Post-War Lifestyle

First, the casual, west-coast style of living promised by the open, one-story ranch design struck a chord with Post-War homebuyers.

The popularity of the ranch blossomed with the widespread growth of casual outdoor dining and recreational activities such as the pool party and barbecue, which, along with the cocktail party, became mainstays of suburban entertainment during the post-war years.

The design was more connected to and more attuned to nature than the popular two-story styles of the period.

Outdoor spaces such as patios and decks were joined to indoor spaces by minimal partitions, including glass walls and sliding patio doors, to create the impression that the two spaces were one larger space.

None of this was new but it was very Amer­i­can.

It started in the early Victorian period due to the influence of the nation's pre­em­i­nent Vic­tor­ian arch­i­tect, And­rew Jack­son Down­ing.

Persuaded by Hen­ry Dav­id Thor­eau's belief that being surrounded by nature is necessary for healthy living, Downing insisted that an expansive front porch or sweeping veranda was an essential transition between the house and nature, an idea that persists to this day.

For more about Victorian influences on modern housing, see The Victorian House Styles: Queen Anne, Italianate, Gothic & Eastlake.

In consequence, houses in North Amer­i­ca commonly feature generous porches, patios, and decks, while most Eur­o­pe­an housing does not.

The difference is largely due to Down­ing's lasting influence on Amer­i­can home design.

Inexpensive Land

The second factor was the wide-scale availability of relatively inexpensive land in suburban tract developments.

Even the modestly affluent could afford the larger lots required for the rambling ranch style. It was not until the late 1970s when land began to become increasingly expensive, that the ranch-style saw a decline in popularity.

Central Heating

Third, and possibly most important, convenient and inexpensive central home heating (and, later, air-conditioning) had become widespread by the 1950s.

Electricity and natural gas powered the post-war furnace, not coal or wood.

In the days when a wood-burning fireplace or coal-fed furnace was the main heat source, heating a house took a lot of work cutting wood or shoveling coal.

Early Amer­i­cans needed over 70 cords or 107,520 board feet of wood to heat their homes in a New England winter, requiring the felling, splitting, and stacking of at least fourteen large trees. It was an all-hands, year-round operation to accumulate enough firewood.

Building up rather than out made the most efficient use of heat rising from the first floor to also warm the second (and possibly, the third).

The Levitt Brothers never built a true ranch-style house. The closest they came was their two-bedroom Ran­cher that included a Great Room in place of the living/dining room of the company's Cape Cod houses.

But, in the post-war years, cheap, reliable central heat produced by electricity or natural gas was available on demand just by adjusting the thermostat.

It made Ranch houses possible in cold climates.

Without central heating and air-con­di­tion­ing, the ranch-style house would probably be nothing more than an interesting regional curiosity; something like the Tide­wat­er style of the deep South or the Span­ish Pueb­lo houses popular in the Desert South­west.

Variations on the Ranch Style

As the ranch style migrated north and east it shed 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 by architectural critics as the "complete absence of style" – unfortunately too often true – but, 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 by variations such as the "Raised Ranch", a design that allowed for a daylight basement and garage under the first floor.

Today the Ranch is, like the Post-War Colonial, a "left-over" style. Any one-story, three-bedroom house with a low roof is probably going to be identified, rightly or wrongly, as a Ranch.

The style has been declining in popularity because it requires so much land, and is more expensive than other styles to heat and cool. Both land and heating are getting more costly nearly everywhere.

In 2005 single-story houses, including Ranches, had declined to just 42% of new homes sold – far below their post-war peak.

But, the style is far from extinct. As interest in building new ranches wanes, enthusiasm for restoring original vintage ranches is growing.

The retro ranch styles of the 1950s and '60s are again very popular with young restorers. Original Eichler and Cliff May houses in California are much sought after for restoration.

In our town, Lincoln, Nebraska, modernist houses built by Strauss Brothers in something of the Eichler style are seeing a resurgence of interest and commanding premium prices. Many have been renovated and many more restorations are underway.

We are privileged to participate in many of them.

"Atomic Age" Interiors

Post-war housing featured minimalist interiors, devoid of unnecessary ornamentation and focused squarely on functionality.

New materials such as plastics and engineered wood products dramatically influenced mid-century designers. Plastics such as vinyl, Plexiglass, and Lucite found a place in post-war design for their own qualities, rather than as an imitator of other materials such as wood or stone .... (Continues)

Updating Your Mid-Century Modern House?

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