In the 1950s, nine of every ten new American houses were ranches
Long, low and sprawling, the ranch house blended modernist design with Wild West dreams of open space. By the 1950s it made up nine out of ten new homes in the United States. Two decades later builders had cheapened it into blandness, and buyers had moved on to fancier styles.
Its roots lie in Spanish colonial buildings of the seventeenth to nineteenth centuries in what became the American Southwest. Those working ranches were single-storey, built of plastered adobe or board and batten siding, with low roofs and deep eaves to shade windows from the heat. Many wrapped a U-shaped plan around an inner courtyard and had big front porches.
As a suburban style the ranch appeared in the 1920s and boomed with the post-war middle class from the 1940s to the 1970s, especially in the fast-growing Southwest where tract housing spread quickly. Typical features include an asymmetrical rectangle, L or U footprint, bedrooms kept apart from living areas, large windows, vaulted ceilings with exposed beams, and walls mixing stucco with brick, wood or stone. Regional versions appeared, like the Midwest's Colonial Ranch, and the raised ranch turned a finished basement into a second floor reached by a flight of steps. Supermarkets and strip malls borrowed the look to match the new neighbourhoods.
The decline began in the late 1960s as tastes turned towards more formal, traditional architecture. Builders trimmed costs until the houses lost the charm of early examples, and by the late 1970s neo-eclectic homes with historical decoration had eclipsed them. Small tract developments of ranches ended around then, though a 2007 to 2008 cluster in Shafter, California, revived 1950s Western details with sideways-turned garages.
Interest returned from the late 1990s, mostly in existing homes. Younger buyers find them affordable starter houses, older buyers like living on one level, and preservation groups have formed in some neighbourhoods. Vince Gilligan specified a rancher for Walter White's home in Breaking Bad; the real 1972 Albuquerque house is now a tourist attraction.
Source: Ranch-style house
