Post-war Housing Styles Cape Cod, Colonial, and Ranch
This article contains information about sources of supply or additional information. Such information regarding any person, commercial product, or service identified by trade name, trademark, manufacturer, or otherwise, is not a paid advertisement, is for information only, and does not constitute or imply an endorsement or recommendation by StarCraft Custom Builders or any officer or employee thereof.
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?
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.
The American Dream House, All in a Row, Row After Row…
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.
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.'"
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.
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
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 House
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).
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)
We can help.
We design and build kitchens, bathrooms and room additions that fit your post-war modern architecture and is just right for your budget and your personal style. E-mail us at design@starcraftcustombuilders.com and let's get started.