Allure of the postwar ranch house
If askedwhat is America’s most important contribution to residential architecture, mostpeople would probably suggest the log cabin of Abraham Lincoln, a Southernplantation mansion like Scarlet O’Hara’s Tara (even though it was only a movieset), or George Washington’s Mount Vernon.
Thecorrect answer? The ranch house.
Not onlyis it an American original, its echoes are present in nearly every house builtsince World War II. If this sounds, well, ridiculous, just peel away thoseTuscan touches and Tudor treatments and take a closer look at the constructionmethods, the location of the major living spaces on the back of the house, thegenerous use of glass that blurs the distinction between indoor and outdoorspace, and open floor plans that combine several functions within one area ofthe house. No matter how different a house might look at first glance, you’llfind that the ranch’s fingerprints are all over the place.
Adding thesuburban ranch house to the American architectural pantheon may surprise somehousing aficionados. Ever since the post-World War II period, when this housetype became a fixture on the suburban landscape, critics have derided the ranchhouse as a bland and colorless box.
The truthis more complicated and much more interesting.
A smallnumber of architects working in California and the southwest during the 1920sand ’30s designed the first suburban ranch-style houses. These were based onthe simple, one-story houses built by working ranchers who lived in the harshclimate of the plains and mountains of the West. For young architects seekingforms that were defined by their function and not layers of Victorian brick abrack or the colonial-styled treatments that were popular in the East, theranchers’ houses had particular appeal.
Thearchitects also admired the way the casual lifestyle of ranching households wasreflected in their houses. All the rooms opened onto a shaded verandah, whichfunctioned as both a hallway and an important living area for much of the year.
On theirdrawing boards, the young architects recreated the solitude of the vastprairies by centering the living and dining areas around a private backyardfrom which no neighbors could be seen. Even more startling to the homeowners ofthat time was the way that some of these designers merged indoor and outdoorspaces. Drawing on the work of Frank Lloyd Wright, they used multiple windowsand French doors on the exterior walls that faced the landscaped backyard, aninnovation that made the outdoor area appear to be part of the indoor livingspace. Another Wrightism was using the same space for multiple functions, as ina living-dining room or an eat-in kitchen. Locating the bedrooms on the frontof the house was also unusual for that era.
Becausethe architects’ clients were usually wealthy, the houses were big, oftensprawling across the owner’s building lot as the ranchers’ houses sprawledacross the prairies.
To a 21stcentury eye, the simplicity of these early ranches — with their adobe or boardand battan walls, exposed beamed ceilings and interior spaces that are filledwith natural light — is highly attractive. But the style did not initiallyreceive the architecture establishment’s imprimatur. Though some of thepioneering designers had a conventional architectural education, Cliff May, whois credited with popularizing it and was one of its finest practitioners, wasby training a furniture designer, and he never became a licensed architect.O’Neil Ford, one of the earliest ranch-house designers in Texas and later oneof the state’s most respected architects, learned his craft by correspondence.
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If youwant to delve more deeply into the history of the ranch, the best book is”Ranch House” by Alan Hess (Abrams). Hess provides a detailednarrative followed by gorgeous photographs and brief descriptions of 26 classicranches designed by the better-known designers during the ranch style’s glorydays. Nearly all of the featured ranches are one-of-a-kind, high-end,custom-built houses. For asense of the exuberance, bright colors and just plain nuttiness of the ranchera, Michelle Gringeri-Brown’s “Atomic Ranch: Design Ideas for StylishCustom Ranches“(Gibbs-Smith) presents more than 25 custom and tract-builtranches that have been lovingly restored by their current owners. The book alsoincludes several brief essays on ranch period furnishings, including furniture,artwork and dishware. JerryDitto and Lanning Stern’s “Design for Life: Eichler Homes” (ChronicleBooks) describes the compelling story of Joseph Eichler, a California landdeveloper and home builder who got the design bug after renting a housedesigned by Frank Lloyd Wright. The text is largely the recollections ofEichler’s son Ned, which gives a reader an immediacy these other books lack. Eichler,who became a home builder in his mid-forties, had no previous training orbuilding experience, but he had a remarkable design sensibility. Workingclosely with his architects and very hands-on at the building site, Eichlerproduced tract-built houses with an unusual level of sophistication. He perfecteda post-and-beam system of construction (instead of the wood stud walls used bymost ranch builders) and this allowed him to create entire walls offloor-to-ceiling glass. Eichler’s company went bankrupt in 1967, but to thisday, his houses are still known as “Eichlers.” To get asense of what’s required if you want to undertake an extensive remodel or abrand-new ranch, “Updating Classic America Ranches” by M. CarenConnolly and Louis Wasserman (Taunton) is your ticket. The authors, anarchitect and landscape architect who practice together in Milwaukee, describeextensive renovations of 20 ranches around the country and the design andconstruction two brand-new ones, including one they designed themselves. Thedescription are clear, the photographs informative and the before and afterfloor plans helpful. If you’remore interested in an overview and sense of the way that houses have evolvedand changed in the 20th century, read “Key Houses of the TwentiethCentury” by Colin Davies (Norton). He presents 106 of the last century’smost famous and most influential houses. Rather than deep analysis, Davis givesa broad brush treatment, allocating only two pages to each house, but heincludes telling details about the original owners’ experiences of living in amasterpiece. |
During the1920s and ’30s ranches remained a regional house type. After World War Two whencivilian residential construction resumed, they became a nationwide phenomenon,but this did not happen overnight. As with any change in the home buildingindustry, it started with a few pioneers whose success was quickly copied.
Thecircumstances that led to the widespread adaptation of the ranch were unique.
In 1945American home builders faced an unprecedented challenge. Theirs had been asmall-scale cottage industry. The largest firms never built more than 20 housesat a time, and their construction methods were laborious. But with the war’send, home builders faced several million buyers who were eager to leave crowdedand often-substandard apartment living in cities for houses in the suburbs, andwho had the means to do so in the form of federally guaranteed mortgages.
Not onlydid the builders need to build houses quickly, but the houses had to beaffordable and appealing to a whole new market, largely composed of people whohad never been able to afford a house before.
Inresponse, several California builders offered a streamlined, slimmed-downversion of the earlier ranch-styled houses. These new houses were smaller, andthey were built differently, using a vastly simplified, assembly-line approachto home building that had been developed in the San Francisco and Los Angelesareas to house the huge number of workers who had moved there to work indefense industry plants.
Thepostwar ranches were built directly on a concrete slab, which eliminated thetime and expense of excavating a basement or crawl space. The wood framingarrived at the site in precut pieces that could be assembled quickly into wallsand then erected. Windows, doors and kitchen cabinetry that had been fabricatedat the building site before the war were now made in factories and shipped tothe site, ready to be installed. With these innovations, less skill was requiredto build the houses, and the builders could tap a much larger labor pool.
From ahome builder’s perspective, the simplified ranch was a perfect design choicefor the postwar market. With no stylistic or aesthetic dictates and an inherentair of informality, it could be endlessly adapted to any budget without lookinghopelessly compromised. The ranch’s multifunction spaces such as the eat-inkitchen and the living-dining room reduced the number of walls within thehouse. This, plus the big windows that overlooked the backyard, gave a spaciousfeel to these small, two-bedroom houses with less than 1,000 square feet. Tomake the ranches look larger, the builders turned the longer side to face thestreet. As with the earliest ranch houses, the living areas were usually on theback and the bedrooms were on the front.
From amarketing perspective, the ranch style was a stroke of genius because it tappedinto the popular culture’s fascination with the Old West as portrayed inmovies, books, radio shows and magazines, and as personified by movie starslike Roy Rogers and John Wayne.
Themass-produced ranches were frequently designed by architects, but the relationbetween the architect and the homeowner was radically altered. The architect’sclient was the home builder, and the houses were designed without regard to aparticular building site. The architect had far less artistic control over theend product because the builder determined the specifications and supervisedthe construction.
Thesuccesses of the California builders and William Levitt, who developed asimilar assembly-line approach on the East Coast, were soon copied by homebuilders across the country. For the next 30 years, from the late 1940s to theend of the 1970s, the ranch was the dominant house form in the United States.
One-storyhouses are still built in many markets, but as land costs have escalated,multistoried houses on smaller lots are becoming the norm. Today a one-storyhouse is rarely called a ranch, and the postwar ranch homeowners would notrecognize the present-day versions. They’re nearly three times as big, with twoto three times as many rooms and crammed onto smaller lots with the next-doorneighbors as little as 10 feet away.
But theessential features of the scrappy little postwar ranch live on in the eat-inkitchen/family room that is the heart of every house built today, in theorientation of these light-filled spaces towards a private backyard rather thanthe street, and in the informal lifestyle that has become the national norm.
Questionsor queries? Katherine Salant can be contacted at www.katherinesalant.com.
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Copyright 2006 Katherine Salant
