Although the desire for novelty is generally tempered by an inclination to the safe bet, there was one period when buyers let their hair down. Buoyed by the post–Second World War boom, optimistic about the future, and gripped by the idea of Progress, Americans embraced innovation as never before, in the way they traveled, the way they brought up their children, in their manners — and in their homes. The hallmark of that period was the ranch house. It is said to have been invented in 1932 by Cliff May, a self-taught San Diego architect, but it also owed a debt to Frank Lloyd Wright’s Usonian houses, and to Alfred Levitt’s “Levittowner.” Today the suburban ranch house is considered the epitome of conservative taste, but at the time it represented a radical departure from tradition. To begin with, all the rooms were on one floor. The layout was open and casual, with wood paneling instead of wallpaper, and room dividers instead of interior walls. The exterior was unabashedly contemporary and did away with steep roofs, dormer windows, and porches.
The casual, spread-out ranch house (it was also known as the California ranch and the rambler) had enormous appeal and by 1950 accounted for nine out of ten new houses.4 In hindsight, the rancher’s most striking feature was its diffidence. Low to the ground, it lacked traditional domestic status symbols, such as porticoes and tall gables. Its one extravagance was a large window facing the street — the picture window. As far as I have been able to determine, picture windows made their first appearance in Levittown, Pennsylvania. Alfred Levitt had already used floor-to-ceiling walls of Thermopane glass to open the house up to the backyard, but in the “Levittowner” he put an eight-foot-square kitchen window facing the street. The common criticism that picture windows offer neither privacy nor a view misses the point. Picture windows are meant not for looking out but for looking in.5 They are displays — for Christmas ornaments, Halloween skeletons, and Thanksgiving Day wreaths. Opening the house up to the street — something that neither Wright nor modernist architects did — is a curiously disarming gesture. “Feel free to look in,” the picture window announces, “we have nothing to hide.”
Another design innovation of the fifties was the split-level house, which mated a ranch house with a two-story section, half a flight up and half a flight down. The split-level originated in California as a way of building on slopes, but it also provided useful solutions to two new domestic problems. One was where to put the television. The first televisions, which were designed like pieces of furniture, stood in the living room. As television watching became increasingly popular — especially among children — to preserve the living room for formal entertaining, the set was moved to its own special room: the recreation, or rec room. The rec room was usually in the basement, but in a split level, this was only half a flight down, less drastically separated from the rest of the house. The other problem was where to put the car. Using the lower floor of a split level as a garage was an inexpensive alternative to the attached carport. A variation of the split level was the bi-level, which had a half basement (for the bedrooms) and located the entrance halfway between the two floors. By 1970 four out of five new houses were either ranchers or splits.6
When I was growing up in Canada, my friends and I lived in new, ranch-type houses. Ours was not large. It contained a living room, an eat-in kitchen, three bedrooms, and a bathroom, all in less than eight hundred square feet. This would have been a tight fit for the four of us, except that we also had a large basement, which accommodated my train set, my parents’ collection of National Geographic s, and a laundry area. There was also a rec room — my first design project. I nailed sheets of textured plywood to the walls, laid vinyl tile on the floor, and stapled perforated acoustical tile to the ceiling. I built a small bar in the corner and a Mondrianesque room divider. I was eighteen, and I thought it the height of chic.
Housing has always been governed by a simple rule: as people become richer, they spend more money on their homes. Historically, this has meant using more expensive materials — varnished mahogany instead of painted pine, marble instead of brick — updating the décor, or adding technological refinements, such as gas lighting, indoor plumbing, or central heating. In addition, spending more money has usually meant making the home bigger. This happened in Renaissance Italy, seventeenth-century Holland, and nineteenth-century England. It also happened in the prosperous second half of the twentieth century in the United States.* Some statistics: in 1950 the median size of a new house was 800 square feet; by 1970 this had increased to 1,300; twenty years later it had grown to 1,900; and in 2003 it stood at 2,100. More than a third of new houses built today exceed 2,400 square feet.7
My childhood bedroom was about 8 feet by 10, just big enough for a bed, a desk, and a chest of drawers. My younger brother’s room was smaller. The most generous space in our home was the garden, where my father grew gooseberries and crab apples. Our 60-by-100-foot lot was small for the time. My best friend, whose father was a local grandee — the manager of Woolworth’s — lived nearby in a larger ranch house, which occupied a much bigger lot. That’s the thing with ranchers; as they get larger, they stretch out and need more space. A 2,000-square-foot ranch house with a two-car garage, for example, needs a lot at least 120 feet wide.
By the nineteen eighties, buyers wanted larger houses, but Proposition 13, which required developers to pay for their own infrastructure, had made land much more expensive. The builders’ solution was to return to two-story houses, which don’t need such large lots, and which are up to 30 percent cheaper to build because of smaller foundations and roofs. Today, more than half of all new houses have two stories.8 But that is only one change. No one builds ranch houses or split-levels anymore. Picture windows and carports are gone, so are breezeways. Home buyers’ affair with modernistic design is over. Ryan Homes has a telephone-directory-size catalog of all its models currently in production, more than 150 of them. When I leaf through the pages, I notice that all the houses have similar architectural features: pitched roofs, gables, dormers, bay windows, keystones, shutters, porches, and paneled doors. Americans’ fondness for such conventional imagery is characterized by some critics as nostalgic and retrograde. In fact, it represents a long domestic tradition that extends to colonial New England and Virginia. In that history, the brief fling with the rancher was an anomaly.
The practice of giving names to house models, which originated with the mail-order house manufacturers, has continued to this day. For example, Ryan names its neotraditional models after famous writers: Hemingway, Faulkner, and Fitzgerald. Linthicum has chosen four models for New Daleville: the (Sidney) Sheldon, the Melville, the Michener, and the Carroll. I don’t say anything to him about this distinctly odd literary round table. Which models to build and how much to charge for them are crucial decisions. “The Sheldon is the smallest and will be our loss leader,” he says. “It’ll allow us to advertise a low price, in the upper three forties. The Melville is slightly larger, a sort of center-hall Colonial that will sell in the mid–three fifties. The Michener is next, and the Carroll will be our largest and most expensive product, in the low four tens. We’ll build a furnished model of the Carroll. Not everyone will be able to afford it, but you need something that will make an impact so that people will remember you.”
Since Ryan is already advertising New Daleville on its website, I take a look at floor plans of the Sheldon. At 1,944 square feet on two floors, it’s no McMansion and is slightly smaller than the national median for new houses. Like all the models at New Daleville, it comes with a two-car garage, detached or attached, depending on the type of lot. The first-floor entry foyer is flanked by a living room and a dining room. This is a traditional arrangement (similar to that of my own house), but what is distinctly untraditional is the living room’s size — it’s one of the smallest rooms in the house. In the Sheldon, the buyer can even dispense with the living room altogether by adding optional French doors and turning it into a study. Starting in the eighties, the living room, which had been dominant since the beginning of th
e century, has been usurped by the family room. A successor to the fifties rec room, though no longer in the basement, the family room is a casual living space next to — and usually overlooked by — the kitchen. At first, the family room was merely a convenient place to park the television, but as formal entertaining fell out of favor and informality prevailed, people found themselves spending more and more time in their family rooms, which grew accordingly. The proximity to the kitchen had the added advantage that whoever was cooking no longer felt isolated. The Sheldon’s family room is the largest room in the house, about thirteen by sixteen. A telling sign of the shift in the domestic center of gravity is the location of the fireplace, the domestic hearth. In the Sheldon, as in most Ryan models, the fireplace option is available only in the family room.
Options, which give buyers the opportunity to personalize their homes, are an important part of all production builders’ marketing. “Extension options” add space to the house. In the Sheldon, the family room and the kitchen can be extended by two feet. Or a “morning room,” a sort of breakfast room, can be added to expand the kitchen. Interior trim options include “tray” and “cathedral” ceilings, which raise the height of the room, crown moldings and chair rails, finished basements, and upgraded kitchen cabinets. It is also possible to upgrade the kitchen appliances. (Central air-conditioning, by contrast, is a standard feature.) There are many window options: bay windows in the living and dining rooms, extra windows in the family room and kitchen, and additional windows and skylights that turn the morning room into a full-fledged sunroom. Ryan may sell only hamburgers and cheeseburgers, but it offers a choice of ketchup, mustard, or relish, according to taste.
I ask Ryan’s regional sales manager, Carmela Bond, about the most popular options. “The common choices are those things that are difficult to upgrade later, like flooring or bathroom finishes. Almost everyone upgrades their kitchen cabinets, and fireplaces are very popular,” she tells me. The cost of these options varies. An ordinary window adds $450, but a bay window is $3,000; kitchen cabinet upgrades are $2,000 or $3,000; a front porch can be more than $8,000; a morning room costs about $11,000, while a finished basement adds almost $15,000. According to Bond, buyers routinely add $30,000 worth of options, and in some cases this figure will be twice as high, though rarely exceeding $100,000.
The Sheldon comes with either three or four bedrooms on the second floor. What is unusual, compared with production houses of twenty years ago, is the size of the master bedroom suite. The twelve-by-twenty bedroom is connected to a walk-in closet and a bathroom, which comes in different versions, the largest with two sinks, a Jacuzzi bath, and a shower stall. The smaller bedrooms share a hall bathroom; there is a powder room on the first floor and an optional powder room in the basement. This abundance of bathrooms is typical; half of all new homes built today have two and a half bathrooms or more.9
Once the buyers of a Sheldon have picked a floor plan, they must choose among three façade options, all more or less Colonial and all, to my eye, simple and attractive: a traditional five-bay window arrangement with a central front door; a variation that adds a central gable and a roofed entrance; and a third version with a porch across the entire façade. The wall material is either vinyl sid ing or, at considerable extra cost, brick. The only other façade option is to dress up the roof with false dormers.
According to NVR’s literature, “Our homes combine traditional or colonial exterior designs with contemporary interior designs and amenities.”10 The Sheldon is just such a blend of tradition and modernity. The façade is resolutely old-fashioned — it would not look out of place in Colonial Williamsburg. But while the house appears to be a center-hall Colonial, the interior is actually open, offering an unobstructed view from the front door to the back of the house, and an unbroken connection between the family room and the kitchen. This openness recalls the interior of a Wright Usonian, or a Levittowner. After the adventurous fifties and sixties, it appears that American home buyers have settled down to have their cake and eat it, too.
There’s nothing about the hybrid design of the Sheldon that is particularly unusual. The chairman of the board and CEO of NVR, Dwight C. Schar, once told me, “We don’t lead parades, we follow them.” Schar is skeptical of novelty and mentioned skylights, trash compactors, and central vacuum systems as examples of fads that came and went. “It takes twenty years before a design innovation becomes part of the mainstream. Look how long it took for town homes to be popular.” What about living rooms? “If people can afford it, they want one,” he said. “Even though the living rooms in eighty percent of our houses have little furniture. Our buyers also want a formal dining room, even if they mainly eat in the dinette.” NVR, like all builders, can’t afford to misinterpret or ignore home buyers’ priorities, be they desires for a family room, a fancier kitchen, or walk-in closets. In that sense, at least, the house is a quintessential consumer product — the buyer is always right.
*In 1950 the median national household income was $3,000, or about $20,000 in modern dollars; today the national median income for married-couple families (who are the majority of home buyers) is $60,000.
23
Pushing Dirt
Improving raw land is a messy and unpredictable business.
Since the planning commission has not reviewed the builders’ houses, the first glimpse Tim Cassidy has of the designs is when he accidentally comes across a set of architectural plans in the township office. He immediately e-mails Mike DiGeronimo. “Just at a glance, there are some details that I am sure, in LRK parlance, fall into the category of ‘Don’t Do This.’ Also, side elevations were supposed to be designed such that when a material, such as brick or stucco, is used on the front façade, it is carried around the corner to a transitional element, such as a chimney or a bump-out, on the side elevation. Again, a quick glance indicates that the material changes occur directly at the corner of the façade. I am going to review the drawings this weekend, but I was wondering whether or not LRK had any comments.”
“I sent Mike the e-mail to goose him and remind him that that we’re still here,” Cassidy tells me. “I didn’t want him and Jason to think that they were done with us.” Architectural design is on Cassidy’s mind since he has recently left Tom Comitta’s office to join a local architectural firm. “I’ve been with Tom, on and off, for eighteen years. I started as a newly minted landscape architect, then decided to study architecture. When I came back from Texas, I got married, and started a family. So I resumed working for Tom. But I always wanted to do architecture.”
It turns out that the drawings Cassidy saw were stock plans that didn’t incorporate any of the exterior changes being discussed with DiGeronimo. Cassidy is mollified but wary. “Mike claims that he’s working with the builders and that ‘revisions are pending.’ Who knows? I’ve asked the township not to issue any building permits unless there is a letter from LRK stating that the plans are in compliance with all the design guidelines. So, we’ll see where that goes. The township may not have direct control over design, but there are some permitting matters outstanding, so we still have some leverage.” I tell him I’m pleased to hear that he’s still involved in the New Daleville project. “Of course I’m involved,” he answers. “I live here!”
Mike DiGeronimo has almost finished reviewing the house designs. He’s had some small victories. The shutters will be properly sized. In response to his suggestion, the Ryan staff has agreed to modify the side-facing corners. They will not redesign the elevations, but they will make options such as wraparound porches and bay windows mandatory on corner houses. They also agree that gas fireplaces on walls exposed to the street will have stucco chimneys, even though these will not be functional. DiGeronimo is not opposed to one-sided houses, but he doesn’t like abrupt changes of details and material at the corners, and Ryan goes along with his suggestion to return cornices on the sides and to carry brick eight feet around the corner. “This will raise the house price, so we’ll proba
bly limit the number of brick options,” says Ryan’s Mike Linthicum. “The truth is that brick is a lot more expensive than vinyl, adding more than fifteen thousand dollars, so not many people choose it. Our customers prefer to spend extra money on interior upgrades. But since we do want some variety, we’ll probably price the brick option low to encourage a few buyers.”
On the whole, however, the builders have resisted major changes. Their houses are designed to optimize NVR’s highly rationalized production system, and they incorporate many small refinements, the results of feedback from their building supervisors, sales staff, and customers. Unlike the smaller production builders that DiGeronimo usually deals with, the NVR companies not only are much larger but have a lot of experience building and selling houses in TNDs, and they’ve learned what their buyers are willing to pay extra for. While Linthicum appreciates that architectural guidelines are part of the process, he’s not willing to make any changes that will jeopardize sales. Although he doesn’t say this, I suspect that the high price Ryan paid for the lots means he is under pressure to make sure the houses sell quickly. He refuses to change the design of the entrances or to get rid of the dentil molding at the eaves, for example. The arched windows and the keystones that DiGeronimo doesn’t like are staying, too. “Deleting them would mean explaining to buyers why their houses are different from the brochures, since we’re not going to print new ones,” Linthicum says. “Anyway, I actually think the houses look better with these features. If we take them out, the façades will be too plain for our customers.”
The simplest versions of the Sheldon and the Melville are attractive in a countrified sort of way, especially when equipped with porches. But more expensive models, such as the Michener and the Carroll, particularly with brick façades, have curved broken pediments over the front doors, elaborate transoms, and brick quoins that seem more suited to Rittenhouse Square than to rural Chester County. When I ask DiGeronimo about this, he says they will probably look okay. He sounds resigned.
Last Harvest: From Cornfield to New Town Page 20
