Ranch-o-Rama

Madison’s mid-century homes are undergoing a renaissance

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The eye-catching Postweiler house sits on a quiet street in Madison’s Midvale Heights neighborhood. A 1955 ad called it “tomorrow’s home…TODAY.” Characteristic stack bond masonry, with bricks set in a grid rather than offset, wraps a shaded entry and highlights a trapezoidal window wall, seeming to both showcase and protect the open living room. Every element — from the slim proportions of the thinner Roman brick to the double garage door with its three horizontal windows — amplifies its elongated, ground-hugging character.

Perron Nicholas and his wife, Mary Lauten, wanted to simplify their lives, relocate from Mount Horeb to be closer to work and friends, and find a home with distinctive qualities. When Nicholas drove by the just-listed house in 2014, he knew he had to have it. He didn’t realize he would be moving into a historic landmark.

Madison is home to a lot of ranch houses. Many are basic, but others have truly remarkable designs, featuring dramatic roof lines, envelope-pushing floor plans, and subtle modernist detailing. Some were designed by name architects; others are just the best work of area home builders.

Spurned for decades, ranches are in demand again. Mid-century modern styling is pervasive in current home and interior design — what was old has become new again.

Mid-century ranches are rightsized, livable, and filled with charming small details. They are better built than most new construction and easy to add on to and modify. They’re located in easy-commute neighborhoods near many local services. The real estate website Trulia lists the ranch-style house as the most popular type of home for sale in 34 states, including Wisconsin. Modern buyers, like their mid-century counterparts, are falling in love with the idea of the ranch house.

I’m one of them. Mid-century-era homes were not on my radar until I moved back to Madison, my hometown, three years ago looking for a hands-on renovation project. I’d planned to take a year sabbatical from my day job as a residential architect focused on sustainability. What I found in my never-updated 1952 ranch was a new passion. The deeper I dug, the more obsessed I became with the potential of mid-century ranch houses.

The ubiquitous simple ranch house is a form of modernism for the rest of us — an accessible conduit to tap into the great ideas and design of the mid-century period.

History in our midst

In many ways, the Postweiler house epitomizes the features of a classic mid-century ranch: a single-story home, clad in brick and/or wood siding. It is divided into three roughly equal spaces for the living area, bedrooms and cars, all tidily tucked under a shallow, gable roof.

Still, the house doesn’t quite look like an everyday ranch. The builder, Herman E. Postweiler, won a National Award of Merit from the National Homebuilders Association partly on the strength of it. It was a highlight of the 1955 Parade of Homes tour. Even today, people detour a block off Midvale Boulevard just to drive past, says Nicholas.

Nicholas and Lauten have done a lot to update and preserve their home. They’ve protected its character while updating key spaces like the kitchen and bathrooms. Several years ago, when researching how to properly replace their low-slope roof, they learned the house was a candidate for historic designation. Getting certified would grant them access to the Homeowners Tax Credit Program, returning 25 percent of their approved remodeling costs to them on their state taxes.

“If it surprises you that a mid-century ranch house belongs on the National Register of Historic Places, keep in mind that buildings can be eligible for certification if they are more than 50 years old,” says Jason Tish, historic property consultant and former executive director of the Madison Trust for Historic Preservation. Right now the 50-year mark is 1969.

The number of Madison mid-century neighborhoods appearing on historic registers is growing. Just four years ago the University Hill Farms and Sunset Hills neighborhoods were added to the state and national registers, bringing 911 buildings into the program. These neighborhoods stand out because their homes are almost uniformly mid-century in style. The tax credit applies to any home within a historic district, as well as individually registered buildings. Other mid-century neighborhoods have been identified, and only need someone to champion and fund their applications to qualify.

The United States experienced a huge post-World War II building boom as the housing industry raced to catch up with demand. Fewer than 100,000 new homes a year had been built nationally during the Depression and into the war years. In 1946 that jumped to nearly 1 million.

In the 1950s, the ranch style surpassed all others in popularity, and by 1965, as many as 15 million of them had been built nationwide.

Locally, the building boom was especially dramatic. Between 1940 and 1960, Madison’s population nearly doubled, from 67,000 to 128,000. Middleton grew from 1,358 to 4,410. Monona’s growth was even more dramatic, increasing from 1,323 in 1940, to 2,544 in 1950 and then ballooning to 8,178 by 1960, setting the record for 10-year population growth in Wisconsin. This far outstripped proportional growth in other regional centers like Green Bay, Milwaukee and Chicago.

New schools, churches, office buildings and homes were styled with typical mid-century modern touches. Many of the homes were not custom-designed, but less expensive builder-grade ranches.

Home, home in the ranch

The open-concept ranch house first emerged in California. West-coast builders favored a post-and-beam structure that allowed them to substitute glass for exterior walls, in some more visionary designs. More commonly, the kitchen flowed into an eating area that flowed into a living room. Combining living and dining rooms saved space and suited newly casual middle- class lifestyles.

The ranch style was a radical change in American housing. Before World War II, builders favored two- and three- story homes in revivalist styles. “Dating back to the 10th century, two-story houses have always been the mark of gentry,” says Tom Hubka, professor emeritus at UW-Milwaukee’s School of Architecture. “The whole idea of aspiring to a one-story house is a major shift from everything that had gone before.”

Before the 1950s, homes also had strong separation between public and private spaces. Older houses indicated status with a generous front porch leading to an entry hall, parlor, and dining room. Working spaces like kitchens and pantries were set at the back of the house, and family areas — bedrooms and even private parlors — were located upstairs.

A ranch house “unstacks” these spaces onto a single level and does away with the division between “polite” and personal spaces.

The Midwest wholeheartedly embraced the ranch idea, adapting it to suit cold winters and humid summers. Local builders kept the horizontal, single-floor layout, the deep eaves and the connected garages. Practicality meant reducing glass walls to picture windows, adding frost-protected basements and increasing roof slopes to shed snow.

The majority of Madison ranch houses are modest, but builders grew more adventurous over time. A showcase for more forward-looking homes was the Madison Area Builders Association’s Parade of Homes.

These home shows took Madison by storm in the early 1950s. A Wisconsin State Journal report estimated 70,000 visitors and counted cars from 11 states at the 1952 show. That Parade showcased 18 modest ranch homes (priced between $11,000 and $17,000) along De Volis Park, just south of the new Beltline highway. Only a few had attached garages, and many just two bedrooms. An advertising pamphlet for one of these houses cites the “large handsome mirror above the basin” in the bathroom as a notable feature.

Each year of the Parade, home sizes and amenities mushroomed. Several houses in 1954 advertised two-car garages, previously a rarity in Madison homes. A few houses had a second bathroom — an unusual luxury. Subsequent years introduced split-level ranches, four bedrooms and even master suites.

Thanks to the Parade’s more visionary spec homes, interest in innovative design grew across the city.

Nedra Pierce lives in the house her family designed and built in 1961. Her civil engineer father intended every detail of the cutting-edge house to last. Its Revco refrigerator ran until 2012. He installed radiant heat in pre-cast concrete floor panels which still heat the home. The post-and-beam structure is so sturdy that when an oak tree fell on the house five years ago, the only thing that needed repair was the roof’s surface.

Pierce loves the open interior and has worked to accentuate its mid-century aesthetic: “I have some of the pieces that my parents bought when they first built the house.” Over the years she’s collected teak furniture for the house: “I’ve kept to simple, mid-century modern furniture and design.”

Pierce’s godfather, an architect at Taliesin, helped her dad troubleshoot the design. The Mendota Hills raised ranch is striking, with multiple low-sloped roof lines, a fieldstone chimney, redwood plank ceiling, and large plate glass windows overlooking Warner Park. She’s had people knock on her door and offer to buy it.

Her favorite thing? “The location,” says Pierce, who has put her own stamp on the home with landscaping. “It has such an amazing view out to the park.”

The “Wrightification” of Madison’s ranches

Pierce’s house isn’t the only one in Madison that had a design boost from Frank Lloyd Wright.

“The Taliesin influence is strong here,” notes Anna Andrzejewski, a professor of art history at UW-Madison. Andrzejewski sees Madison’s mid-century building boom as a unique laboratory for a regionally specific form of modernism under Frank Lloyd Wright’s long shadow. She calls this process “Wrightification.”

University Hill Farms is a great example of this. The neighborhood benefited from hosting the Parade of Homes in four separate years, starting in 1957. The whole area generally has a greater concentration of architect-designed and contractor-designed spec homes than elsewhere in the city.

Frank Lloyd Wright himself contributed a house design to the 1959 Parade of Homes in University Hill Farms: the Walter Rudin house.

Wright designed 33 buildings for Madison, some of them residences. His first Usonian home — Wright’s answer to mid-century mass-produced housing —  in the Westmorland neighborhood is neither a ranch, nor strict mid-century modern, but many of its features would become elements of the ranch. It has a long, low aspect with deep shading eaves. It groups bedrooms at one end and open living area, entry, dining and kitchen spaces at the other. And it’s built of brick and wood siding, eschewing the plaster finishes of its own era.

A number of local architects studied with Wright at his Taliesin school, then set up their own practices in Madison. Others trained elsewhere in the International Modern style, but after coming to Madison, were soon designing like Wright.

Builders who had constructed Wright-designed buildings or worked with his fellows carried those ideas forward into their own work. The most locally famous of these is Marshall Erdman, a builder who collaborated with Wright on a series of pre-fab houses meant to be more accessible to the public, including the Walter Rudin house (the prefab #2 design). Wright ultimately created just three home designs for the set, and only a few were ever constructed.

That Wrightian influence is what drew Trina Muich and her family to their home. Muich grew up near Madison, but her husband, Tom, hails from the East Coast. They moved back to Madison from Virginia, where “everything was Colonial,” says Muich, and they were looking for something different. Tom was drawn to modern architecture and Prairie School design. They found their dream home in this graceful flat-roofed house.

The Zwaska family had built the house for themselves in 1958 and raised six kids there. They were a neighborhood anchor; the side yard pool was shared by all the local kids and their basement hosted the area Cub Scouts troop, says Muich. The Zwaskas sold the house only when they couldn’t keep up with basic maintenance. Trina and her husband haven’t made too many dramatic changes. “In general, when things break, we will replace them in the same style,” Trina says. Many of their “updates” have been de-installing latter-day changes, uncovering the original doorbell and removing dropped ceilings, which had been hiding the overhead pitched ceilings.

“We love the dramatic front window. We love the style of the house,” says Muich. The location — in Midvale Heights — is also key. “We walk to the library, the Chocolate Shoppe, the EVP coffee shop, and the dog park. We like being accessible to downtown on the bike path. My 9-year-old loves the bus — he wants to ride it every day — and my teenager is all over town on his bike. I can’t imagine not being within range of all this.”

They see this as their forever home. “We want to do what the Zwaskas did: live here for a lifetime.” 

The sustainable future of Madison’s mid-century homes

Today, mid-century neighborhoods are rapidly turning over. Part of it is a happy accident of timing. Longtime — even original — homeowners are selling to younger families looking for first homes and newly retired folks downsizing and wanting a one-story house.

Matt Silvern is a real estate agent who specializes in mid-century modern homes and is updating his own ranch. He finds himself admiring mid-century design features alongside his clients. He looks for clean-lined, subtle wood trim, large picture windows, decorative brickwork inside and out, and interesting vintage tile and hardwood floors.

He also helps his clients keep an eye out for elements that might need work, like outdated electrical and heating systems, damage to the foundation or roof, or hazardous materials like asbestos and lead paint.

The best buys are often homes that have never been updated. Sometimes selecting a house that needs work is the best way to buy into a desirable neighborhood. Homebuyers willing to roll up their sleeves can take advantage of a bargain this way.

Brianna and Kenny Schumacher moved into their 1959 modern in the Mendota Hills neighborhood two years ago. The house was a vacant foreclosure in rough shape when they found it. Cats, and decades of indoor smoking, had taken a toll on interior finishes like carpets, doors and trim. Since moving in, they’ve replaced the roof, demolished interior walls and changed the layout, repainted inside and out, and most recently spent the summer removing and trimming overgrown trees from the property.

“We were drawn to the open floor plan and big windows,” says Brianna. “When we opened the wall to the kitchen there were sliding glass doors hidden in there from the original design.” As new parents, they really appreciate single-level living.

 The Schumacher’s house had an unusually long checklist of home improvement tasks. But most mid-century houses need a few updates to match our modern lifestyle. Because the basic design elements of ranch homes were so consistent, they have predictable update requirements, too.

The UW’s Andrzejewski says that “renovation tension comes in around three elements: kitchen, bathroom and garage.” Mid-century kitchens were designed for a single cook: mom. Families now use the kitchen as a gathering space, and peninsulas or island designs that allow multiple family members to interact are popular. These days, two or even three bathrooms — not one — are seen as a must. And all those early-era single-car garages, with one-lane driveways, create logistical hassles for multi-car families.

Generally, these homes are easy to update. The simple gable roof structure and high quality materials of most mid-century ranches make them good candidates for additions. Plus, even the most basic ranch can adopt the design features of its higher-end cousins in a remodel: highlight the indoor/outdoor connection, add wood paneling, floors and built-ins.

Andrzejewski notes that “people in Madison seem cognizant of our mid-century history. As ranches are remodeled or expanded, homeowners are remaining true to aspects of the original look.”

Kim Oaks lives a 1952 modern house in the Orchard Ridge neighborhood. She and her husband have moved many times for work and they look for mid-century houses when they relocate. This is their third ranch remodel. “We’d choose mid-century modern on an aesthetic basis alone,” she says. But the era has another appeal: single-level living. Her son uses a wheelchair, so they look for vintage single-story houses, then make accessibility updates.

Oaks knows how to add the features she needs to a basic MCM house template. Her least favorite part is “trying to demo lath and plaster walls; they’re a nightmare” compared to drywall.

She turned the walkout basement of her home into her potter’s studio. She also added the knee-wall protected patio to the front of the house — it plays up the horizontal lines of the house in a mid-century friendly nod to the front porches of earlier eras. This simple design move reclaims part of the front yard as social living space.

Neighbors were skeptical at first, wondering if it would feel un-private. “We had several people tell us they didn’t understand why we’re doing that — what if people stopped and want to talk to us? But now we get compliments.”

These homes also need a few energy efficiency improvements to meet modern building standards. Houses of this era are generally airtight, but not well insulated. It’s usually easy to increase overall insulation by focusing on the attic space and the exposed foundation of basements (where outside air sneaks in). Original windows, which can be warped and leaky, can be replaced with modern windows (in a mid-century-friendly style). Ranches and other mid-century homes can often benefit from more natural light as well, and owners have installed skylights, light tubes, or even cut new clerestory windows — which run in a band across the top of a wall — providing daylight and tree top views.

“Sustainability is one of the best arguments for historic preservation,” says Tish, the historic property consultant. Working with an existing building — in an existing neighborhood — cuts down on resource use. It takes far less material to modify than to build from scratch. And infrastructure is already in place.

Mid-century ranches fit right in to the housing stock of a sustainable future. They are modestly sized, suited to casual modern lifestyles and located in walkable, well-connected, neighborhoods, close to schools, libraries, parks and shops.

As Carl Elefante, fellow of the American Institute of Architects, famously said, “The greenest building is one that’s already built.”