The postwar ranch house has many moods: wild Modernist, safe traditionalist, split-level suburbanite, unassuming stucco box. And local custom may slap other names on the variable style: rancher, traditional, rambler, contemporary, raised ranch, and most often, “starter home.”
Hallmarks of the Style
Above: One of Denver’s many traditional ranch homes.
Facing: Cliff May houses have patios reached via wood-frame french doors.
If you ask someone what type of home he or she has, often they pause, seemingly at a loss. “I don’t know; it doesn’t really have a style,” they might say. Chances are the ubiquitous “just a house” is a ranch. When one home might be a wild Googie-inspired ’60s interpretation of modern with an outlandish raked roof, and another a prim schoolmarm of a house, all polite brick and sober clapboard, it can be hard to see they shared the same drawing board.
But it’s the details that matter and that make the ranch such a residential success story: the walls of glass, fanciful rooflines, open floor plans, atriums, post-and-beam construction, quiet facades, clerestory windows, and more.
HISTORY
The ranch house has its roots in the mid-nineteenth-century adobe ranchos of the West. These homes were themselves based on architectural forms from Spain and Mexico, and borrowed from the California missions as well. Often L- or U-shaped with a covered veranda or “corredor” skirting a central patio, the front facade was usually plain, while the back elevation had rooms that opened to the porch or the patio. Sound familiar?
Cliff May, a Southern California builder who is often credited with fathering the proliferation of the style, began designing small ranch houses in the ’30s. He would go on to craft both impressive custom ranches of 6,000 square feet as well as tracts of partially prefabbed two-bedroom homes under 1,000 square feet.
But it was the postwar need for lots of houses now that really pushed the ranch house model into prominence. The flood of returning GIs made the quickly built, affordable modern ranch the house best suited for the optimistic future. By the end of the war, an estimated three million U.S. families needed homes; 13 million GIs only swelled those ranks further. Restrictions on building materials were lifted, and extended families that had doubled or tripled up on quarters during the Depression and the war now wanted their own piece of the American Dream. The GI Bill of Rights helped make that a reality.
Tract after tract of both Modernist and traditional ranches were built all across the nation, from Levittown in New York to Daly City in California and everywhere in between. Whether the homes made you think space-age futurism or conservative traditional values, they became hugely popular and blanketed the countryside. There were even all-steel, porcelain-clad prefab ranches called Lustrons that were trucked to sites as numbered parts, much like the kit houses that had been so popular during the preceding decades. In 1950 alone, 1.5 million homes were built, most of them ranches. By the late ’50s and early ’60s it was hard to remember when ranch homes weren’t the American housing standard.
Although the architecture can vary significantly—a split-level ’60s rambler versus a long, low Eichler or Midwestern brick ranch—these postwar homes have distinctive features in common.
Above: Traditional ranches such as this one in Arcadia, California, proved popular with wealthier buyers.
Left: Daly City near San Francisco.
Facing: Buyers flocked to postwar ranch house tracts like this one near Denver.
ROOFLINES
The sometimes whimsical roofs are the first thing many people notice. Flat, butterfly, steeply pitched, saw-tooth, and a dozen variations on these themes are commonly seen, particularly in homes that were designed to appeal to modern sensibilities. Other more traditional styles have hip roofs based on early 1900s Prairie School architecture, or the ubiquitous side-gable roof that seems to be the most popular design of all.
FRONT FACADES
“Private” best describes the street visage of most ranch homes. While they can seem a tad boring when it comes to curb appeal, the front facades display a whole range of materials: stucco, board and batten, brick, stone veneer, vertical or horizontal wood siding, cement block, clapboard, and more. Perforated block privacy walls, exaggerated eaves, decorative shutters, and fanciful dovecotes are other common touches.
OPEN FLOOR PLANS
The merged-function room of the ranch house was a modern departure from compartmentalized living. While bedrooms and baths could most often be found in a wing with a central hall, the public spaces for entertaining, dining, cooking, and relaxing became one. Larger ranches tended to place this public area in the center of the home, separating children’s bedrooms from the adult wing, perhaps the beginning of today’s trend for master suites. These floor plans can be simple boxes or rectangles, or have more rambling U- or L-shapes. On tighter lots, the split-level rambler with a garage tucked under the living space and a daylight basement was a popular solution.
1. A butterfly roof split-level ranch near San Francisco.
2. An A-frame roofline in Denver.
3. A hip-roof stucco box in Westchester, California.
4. Split-level ranches were built on sloping or narrow lots.
5. One of Houston’s modern flat-roof ranches.
6. In Denver, this dining room, kitchen, and living room all flow together.
7. A Cliff May home has had the partition wall between the kitchen and living room removed to open it up fully.
WINDOWS & WALLS OF GLASS
Step inside the front door of a ranch, and the surprise is the expansive view through the rear wall of glass. Not every postwar home has this heavy emphasis on bringing the outside in, but light and plenty of it is what sets the midcentury ranch apart from its predecessors. Architects achieved this through floor-to-ceiling windows, sliding glass doors and clerestories—windows that go up right to the roofline. In more traditional ranches, you’ll see bay, diamond-paned, and double-hung windows as well.
POST AND BEAM & “PONY” WALLS
Typical midcentury construction consisted of posts that supported beams, which in turn carried the roof load, allowing for both exterior walls of glass and non-load-bearing interior walls. Because of this, when Modernist ranch houses did have walls dividing the public space, they often stopped short of the ceiling—pony walls—or had large pass-throughs. This kept even a partially enclosed kitchen more open and allowed it to share light with adjoining rooms—an internal window, in effect.
ATRIUMS & PATIOS
Nothing said indoor-outdoor like ranches that included entry atriums— an open-air patio between the entry door and the interior itself. Typically two or three rooms open directly into these private areas via sliding glass or french doors, making the differentiation between yard and house a moot point in temperate climates. For homes without atriums, rear or side patios served a similar function and helped modest-size houses live larger than their square footage would suggest.
1. Brick fireplaces were often juxtaposed with large panes of glass.
2. When the sliding glass doors are open, the patio and family room are virtually one.
3. A clerestory window.
4. Post-and-beam construction was used in both the house and its carport.
5. The kitchen is screened off from the dining and family room space, while a pass-through makes it convenient for the cook.
6. Non-load-bearing pony walls divide midcentury floor plans without blocking daylight from the interior rooms.
7. A contorted ficus tree grows in the atrium of a Thousand Oaks, California, Eichler.
8. A once-rural ranch house has both front and rear patios.
CARPORTS & GARAGES
Postwar, the automobile allowed the population to spread out into the newly minted suburbs, and its hold on American life was evident in the pride-of-place location of the attached garage or carport. Some designs, like Joseph Eichler’s California homes, nearly brought the family car into the house. More traditional styles still had a detached garage at the back of the property, or on tight or sloping lots, under the house next to the entry stairs.
INTERIORS
Ranch interiors varied as much as their exteriors. Baths and kitchens were compact and traditional immediately postwar, employing many of the same appliances and fixture styles used in the ’30s and early ’40s. But by the ’60s, contemporary design had made huge inroads, and sliding kitchen cabinet doors, conversation pits, and streamlined, modern surfaces signaled this was not your momma’s house.
TRADITION MEETS MODERN: MATERIALS
Midcentury houses still emphasized time-honored materials: flagstone, brick, wood, tile, plaster, terrazzo, grass cloth, cork, and linoleum. But modern materials like aluminum and steel windows, Formica counters, drywall, plywood cabinetry, electric kitchens, and aggregate floors joined newer building techniques—cement slab foundations, radiant heating, and tar-and-gravel roofs—to make the postwar ranch house a mix of old and new technology.
1. Like Eichlers, this Portland, Oregon, Rummer has both a front carport and an attached garage.
2. This dramatic carport extends the eaves of a midcentury ranch in Denver.
3. Detached garages at the rear of the lot were still popular postwar, like this cement block double garage.
4. A model home in Littleton, Colorado, displayed the latest in contemporary furnishings and streamlined kitchen surfaces. 5. This brochure for an all-steel Lustron home emphasized the compact efficiency of the smaller postwar home.
6. Aggregate flooring, grass cloth, and mahogany paneling.
7. Scored and polished cement.
