My parents bought a ranch style house in 1954. Quite a few of my early teenaged friends thought my family was rich as a result. Small town Texas. My mother’s father was a master carpenter; he tried to discourage the purchase but my father was dead set on buying it.
The other popular 60’s house style is the split level. It’s easy to date a neighborhood when there are split level homes on the street. I grew up in a split level.
easy to identify by the overhang and ground level windows. The bottom floor is not a basement. Front door opens into a landing. 5 steps up to the upper floor or 5 steps down to the lower floor.
http://images03.olx-st.com/ui/2/78/87/35047187_1.jpg
They are convenient, look nice, and are efficient.
I just spent 20 minutes looking through real estate listings to find an example of what I’m talking about, and I can tell you for sure that almost nobody puts a picture of the hallway in their listings. Here’s one that I found, though. That picture in the middle of the hallway, that totally irks me.
Most of the ranches I’m familiar with have the living/dining/kitchen in a clump on one end of the house with the garage by the kitchen and the front door opening into the living room, and then there’s a hallway with the bedrooms and a bath off that. And the hallway takes up this huge amount of space and the bedrooms are tiny.
(Houses of my vintage tend to just have one bathroom, and they have to have a small heating hallway. So all the rooms just open onto one another except two bedrooms and the bathroom, on the heating hallway. But the hallway doesn’t take up a ton of space like the ranch houses around here.)
ETA - and most of those Craftsman bungalows that predate the ranches are one floor too. “Ranch” doesn’t at all mean “the only option without stairs”, for pity’s sake."
Interesting, looks medieval. I guess a romantic revival of pioneer/puritan architecture?
Am very much enjoying this education into American domestic architecture. So different to what I’m used to.
Medieval?
Perhaps if it had a thatch roof. 
Emphasis added. That may be true of actual ranches ;), but not ranch homes. Otherwise, such homes would not be ubiquitous in CA, with some of the most expensive land int he US.
Yeah, late medieval English, in fact. It’s the overhanging top floor. Also the white painted clapboard reminds me of old houses in south east England, places like Whitstable in Kent.
My house doesn’t really have hallways, and neither does my parents. The main floor of my house is a great room. Off to one side is about the closest thing we have to a hallway - a sort of recessed area off the great room with 2 doors that go into the bedrooms.
Upstairs is a loft with the main bedroom on one side, my office on the other, and the loft itself in the middle. You walk through the loft to get to one side or the other.
Basement is finished, and all open. Oh wait! There is kind of a hallway down there, it leads from the main open room in the basement to a bathroom, semi-bedroom, and sauna. So I guess we have one hallway in the basement.
My parent’s house has no real hallways. It’s a split-level ranch. Main level is kitchen/dining/living that sort of flow into each other. Upper level is open area with bathroom, laundry room, and bedrooms off of it. No hallways at all.
In tropical countries, it is common for large houses to be built with one room leading to the next (so, yes, you have to walk through bedrooms to get to another) OR have all the bedrooms opening into a courtyard, common balcony, or large central sitting room.
It may be some of the most expensive land in the U.S. today, but what was it in the 1950’s, when those houses were built? In its first 70 years the population of the city of Anaheim went from 833 to 14,556 a 17-fold increase. In the next 70 years it rose to 336,265, 23 times the 1950 population.
For that matter, of the 34incorporated cities in Orange County, 21 of them didn’t exist in 1950.
Also railroad/shotgun styles.
Mine doesn’t really have a “hallway,” but upstairs at the top of the stairs there is a square landing that leads to two bedrooms, a closet, and a bathroom. It probably only takes up about 15-20 square feet of space.
That said, my parents have a split-level ranch, and upstairs there is more of a standard hallway, but it doesn’t bother me at all. The bedrooms are a comfortable size and I don’t feel the hallway is eating into the livable square footage in any meaningful sense. I personally prefer more “open” spaces myself, but I don’t feel the hallway really eats up the square footage or anything.
Unless you are of a relatively elite socio-economic class, you generally are not prioritizing the visual interestingness of a building when choosing housing. Cost, location, and other factors are often much more important.
Most mass-produced residential buildings are visually boring. Look at the widespread criticism of “snout houses,” which are usually two stories.
Visually boring is one thing, as is the “less is more/machines for living” extreme of that: an uninviting compartment. OTOH, the pretentious ornamentation of many McMansions is worse than boring: it’s bad taste.
I grew up in an 1856 house that built after the original owner put up after a trip to Paris: parquet fruitwood floors, a spiral staircase, mansard roof, etc. Many of these features were a lost art after the craftsmen were drafted and traded their chisels for bayonets in 1914, until AutoCAD made them possible. The place had it’s drawback: it was a brick oven in the summer and as drafty as a birdcage in winter, but when I saw it’s goofy descendants going up in the 1990’s, way out of proportion or scale, I no longer felt so harshly about Courvoisier.
Completely agree with you about McMansions though. I think they are a fascinating time capsule of an era of excess that perfectly suited the era of never-ending home price appreciation.
We have a Chicago-style bungalow (note: this is not my house), which has very little in the way of hallways. This is pretty much how our first floor is laid out – the front door opens into a very small foyer, which then leads to the living room. The living room flows directly into the dining room, and then the kitchen. There’s a very small “hallway” (maybe 8 feet long) which connects the dining room to the bathroom and the two downstairs bedrooms.
We have a finished second floor (a lot of Chicago bungalows don’t; the second floor is often just a large attic), with stairs that lead up from the back of the dining room. There is a similarly small “hallway” up there, but it’s more of a landing at the top of the stairs, with doors leading to the upstairs bath, and the two upstairs bedrooms.
Because after WWII, most people could afford a house with good separation of public space (living room, kitchen, dining room) and private space (bedrooms, bathrooms). Hallways help provide that separation.
Before WWII, that kind of separation was less common in lower end houses in the US. I see it everywhere in the housing stock of the town where I now live; the majority of housing was built in the 1800s, and awkward floorplans with no hallways are the norm - main bathroom off the kitchen, bedrooms directly off the living and dining rooms, passthrough bedrooms, and so on. IMHO, such floorplans are unlivable by today’s standards, but the hippies here love them for their simplicity and communal “character”.
That was kind of my point - yes, there are styles of house that don’t have any hallway at all (like Athena’s house, a shotgun style house, a tropical retreat, etc)
But I live in a bona fide ranch and my hallway is actually smaller than kenobi’s bungalow “hallway” and even though it has walls, takes up the same space as pulykamell’s “hallway.”
I was raising objection to Zsofia’s impression that only ranches have huge wasteful hallways. It would seem that not all ranches have huge hallways (mine) and not all houses with hallways are ranches (kenobi). Furthermore even if a house doesn’t have a hallway it still often has an area of wasted space that is used to connect rooms (pulykamell).
Yes.
I can’t speak for SoCal-- I live in NorCal. We have oodles and oodles of ranch style homes, many of which were built in the late 50s and 60s, and land has been higher than average for the US here since at least that time.