I’ve noticed that in ads and Hollywood movies, when it comes time to symbolize the values of comfort, family and domesticity the style of architecture chosen is almost always a bungalow built between the years 1900 and 1929. In the popular culture’s subconscious, Victorian houses are the haunted domain of serial killers and modern Dwell-style abodes house unhappy hipsters. The ur-North-American-house is a pre-cut kit house built between WWI and the crash of 1929.
The Pacific Ready-Cut Home Company, like other kit houses manufactures such as Sears, milled and cut everything at a large central facility and shipped to the building site on the back of a truck or train. You hired a contractor to finish the home or you did it yourself. Like modern tract homes, you could customize your house with cabinet, door and window choices. I suspect that our house was a kit as there’s an almost exact copy a block away.
Headquartered in Los Angeles, Pacific Ready-Cut was the largest kit house company in the United States. Looking through the 1925 catalog I spotted many familiar homes in our neighborhood. My friend Colin, who tipped me off to the catalog, found his own home. While I didn’t find our house, I found one suspiciously close, “Style #48,” whose floor plan is a mirror image of ours.
For those of you who own homes from this period, the Pacific Ready-Cut catalog can help solve restoration questions. I have a rule for restoration work around our house: if it’s missing replace it, if it’s broken repair it. When it comes time to replace missing features a kit house catalog can be invaluable.
As an example of a typical repair, I blogged about fixing our built-in ironing board. Thanks to the Pacific Ready-Cut catalog I now know that it had a sleeve board and a tiny shelf. I can now add those items to the repair bucket list.
In our neighborhood, house flippers have taken to ripping out all the walls and built-in cabinets in old houses in a misguided attempt to make them conform to the current vogue for everything mid-century modern. As a real estate agent once told me, “people like an old house on the outside and a new house on the inside.” Let it be known (and you heard it first on Root Simple) that the mid-century modern trend is over. Soon, Eames chairs will be tossed out on the parkway to join unwanted 1970s Mediterranean headboards. The Pacific Ready-Cut Home catalog will become a kind of sacred scripture guiding us all back to sensibly constructed homes with solid and modest cabinets.
Kidding aside, I really think we need a small house movement rather than a tiny house one. Why not just start building these perfectly good early 20th century houses again?
A big thanks to Colin for the tip on the catalog and on a article in the LA Times about the Pacific Ready-Cut Company. Which, before its demise switched to manufacturing surfboards! The Times article notes that there are thousands of Pacific Ready-Cut Designs not shown in the 1925 catalog I linked too.