Ranches regain some respect

Dominant style of '50s so comfy, so American

It's easy to ridicule the ranch.

They're modest, one-story houses with small closets and low ceilings, little insulation and old pipes.

And they're common. Ranches were the predominant style in Raleigh and across the country for a couple of decades starting in the 1950s.

Now, they're a regular victim of the trend of tearing down old houses and building larger ones.

But even as the once innocuous style disappears, there is new awakening to its subtle appeal. The affordable but bland ranch home is becoming hip to a new generation and an object of desire to an older one.

Younger people love them for their kitsch. Baby boomers seek them for their stairs-free living.

A survey by the home builder KB Homes found that 8 percent of recent home buyers would have preferred a one-story home. The company is marketing new ranches with billboards across the Triangle and featuring them in several neighborhoods, including a section of the Martha Stewart-inspired neighborhood in Cary called Twin Lakes.

Jeanne Lambin, who works with the National Trust for Historic Preservation and is author of "Preserving Resources from the Recent Past," has been tracking interest in ranch homes.

She has seen a spike in the number of Web sites, advocacy groups and neighborhood associations devoted to preserving ranch homes. Surveys and studies show that cities, including Raleigh, are beginning to note their historical importance.

"It's the iconic American building type aside from the skyscraper," Lambin said. "It's kind of the domestic interpretation of how the American Dream should take shape."

Manufacturers are selling retro kitchen appliances in shades of that earlier era -- beach blue, buttercup yellow, jadeite green. Linoleum is making a comeback.

The original ranch-style homes were often on actual ranches.

In California, Mexican settlers were building the single-story houses with rooms opening up into an interior courtyard, where home life was focused, said Jim Brown, publisher of the three-year-old Oregon-based Atomic Ranch magazine.

The public face to the street was modest and the front door was almost invisible, he said. Livestock roamed the streets, he said, and they didn't want cows to walk through the front door.

Part of postwar boom

The style became popular after World War II as veterans moved back home and started families. Government mortgage programs sparked a building boom.

In 1950, 2,000 homes were built in Wake County, according Wake's revenue department, up from 869 the year before. About 1,860 were single-story homes.

Ranches were easy and inexpensive to construct. Builders used prefabricated wall units or standardized wood-framed windows and sliding glass doors.

Some have basements. Others don't. Local builders used native materials, Brown said. In the Triangle, brick ranches are common on top of North Carolina's red clay.

What they generally have in common are simple, open floor plans with a separate wing for bedrooms and bathrooms.

Large windows help the interior almost melt into the backyard.

Many families could afford them. The first planned African-American postwar neighborhood in Raleigh was Rochester Heights, a collection of ranches and, their cousins, split-levels, in Southeast Raleigh, according to a survey of the city's neighborhoods built from 1945 to 1965.

The study found that collections of ranch homes, along with some other styles, in 10 Raleigh neighborhoods are worthy of the National Register of Historic Places.

They include the custom-designed, upscale ranches in North Raleigh's Lambshire Downs neighborhood and the middle-class Rochester Heights.