See my previous post. Basically, every room is directly off another room. Such houses are very common where I live.
Daisychained/passthrough bedrooms are also very common - you have to pass through one bedroom to get to another. Sometimes three bedrooms are chained together. Let’s say someone in the third bedroom has the flu. They have to pass through two other bedrooms, the living room, the dining room, and the kitchen to get to the bathroom.
Huh. Just one more thing making me feel old. Where and when I grew up, ranch style was the epitome of “cool.” I am saddened to learn they are now the object of derision. 
Yeah, like Kunilou said, the land is expensive now but it wasn’t always. The postwar neighborhoods where the ranch-styles are ubiquitous were mostly built on very cheap land that was on the outskirts of the cities (some of which may have actually been ranchland). More road infrastructure and more people owning cars (or two cars) made the low-density outer ring suburbs practical, where they mostly hadn’t been before the war. Of course, now those outer ring suburbs are inner ring suburbs or even small urban centers in their own right, so the land has become pretty expensive.
The thing is, though, the Farnsworth House, and Phillip Johnson’s Glass House, are great because of the windows: you’re basically living in a beautiful and an un-simple but rather bio-diverse outdoor environment, while you and all the modcons are protected from nature’s nastier aspects.
How do we provide that for those of us who aren’t millionaires? With the amazing advances in LowE glass technology, I personally believe there will be more and more of this: instead of a stucco box jammed with stuff from China, the same area will be a three-sided floral hedge, or vine-covered trellises, with a few feet between it and our glass-walled houses, with the front an open porch that engages the street.
It’s a bit of an armchair planner’s myth that suburbs emerged only after WWII, and that crowded cities predominated before. Suburbs have been around as long as there have been cities. Modern American suburbia began to emerge in the 1910s, with interurbans and increasing personal car ownership expanding mobility for a rapidly growing middle class. Before that, leafy suburbs catered to upper income households who could afford the luxury of carriage rides to a commuter train station.
In the 1920s, tens of square miles with hundreds of streets was subdivided just outside of the city limits of Buffalo, in anticipation of a building boom that wouldn’t come until the 1950s. Same thing in Cleveland, Detroit, and Chicago - streets built in the 1920s would sit empty for 25 or 30 years before they saw their first houses.
The 1960s were (at least in the sciences) a decade all about being futuristic, technologically savvy, and efficient. We had just orbited a man around the earth and were trying to go to the moon and after that beyond!
The design of all buildings, including homes, reflect that thought: design them for their intended purpose and don’t waste resources on architecture. When you are living on the moon colony, resources are precious and let’s get used to that.
Go to any 100+ year old college campus. The old and the new buildings are beautiful. You can easily pick out the ones built in the 60s and 70s because they are rectangles and squares with all the charm of a garbage dump. The twin towers were also a good example of this along with the multi-purpose sports stadiums like Three Rivers Stadium in Pittsburgh and Veterans Park in Philly. Round concrete doughnuts that serve their intended purpose.
I grew up in an Eichler, otherwise known as a glass house. In the post-war period, they were an inexpensive, open and airy alternative to ranch homes, at least in certain parts of California. Steve Jobs said that growing up in an Eichler influenced his design aesthetic.
That would be cool at my little place in the woods. I’d hate to heat and cool it, or hide from burglars. 
I lived in an Eichler for a bit while I was in grad school. There still around, and in parts of Palo Alto, that’s all you’ll see. (That would be the southern part of PA… not the much more tony parts closer to University Ave). I toured one that a friend of a friend is thinking of buying and it was all original. Man, that place was A DUMP!!! Crazy design, ceilings with no attic or insulation, tiny rooms. Hard to believe that was a hot design at one point.
I don’t know about that. My house in Fremont was built in the mid-50s. At the time my neighborhood was the hot one, but land was so cheap that there was an air strip half a mile away.
Disney chose Anaheim for Disneyland because it was so cheap, among other things. Land in Queens was a lot more expensive - many of the houses where I grew up (early '50s) were rowhouses or semi-attached. I think Levittown pushed people to ranches.
In SW Louisiana, higher then that. In heavy rains water came up to our slab from the coulee by our house - and we were on high ground. The house across from the coulee had water lapping at its walls. Basements were not going to make it.
All houses in the East seemed to have basements, but none out here in California do, though I don’t think water is a problem.
NW it is common too. I think frost heaving is a big consideration. If you already have to dig down 4 feet to get to stable ground below where it freezes, why not dig a little further and put in a basement.
Price has to be the biggest factor in the popularity of Ranch homes after WWII. A quick glance at Edwardian Homes or Victorian Homes on Google Image shows mulit-story homes with turrets, oval rooms, and extremely complicated roof lines that would be very prohibitive to build under modern labor costs. Just painting a multi colored Victorian costs a small fortune.
The boxy style of the ranch makes it very quick and easy to frame and build. Typically bathrooms were arranged on opposite sides of the wall. That allows the plumbing stack and pipes to be shared. My house has my kitchen sink sharing the pipes with the hall bathroom. A big cost savings for the builder and buyer.
Ranches have simple roof lines and they usually aren’t pitched very steep. Making roofing cheaper.
These things are pretty cyclical. The two story McMansions will be ridiculed in the future and might not even hold their value as well as the traditional ranch homes. An increasingly aging population won’t see any charm in stairs.
A lot of the San Fernando Valley in Southern California is Eichler style. My house is one. I don’t know about crazy design or tiny rooms, YMMV and all that. No attic - check - it’s ceiling then roof all in one lasagne of layers. But most of So Cal ranches don’t have attics or basements. That’s why we have Public Storage everywhere. 
Au contrair, mon ami. Basements are becoming increasingly popular in CA as people want more sq ft, but towns put restrictions on the visible mass of the homes.
I have a basement in my house, as done my next door neighbor.
Now, this isn’t your grandma’s basement with a dirt floor and open framing. We’re talking finished rooms, maybe game rooms, media rooms or bedrooms.
Mrs. Plant (v.3.0)'s house, built on a slope :rolleyes: was a “game room” with a kitchenette beneath, now a fish room with aquaria. The infamous low water level does sometimew leak into downstairs on the way downhill.
That’s a good point. Hard to think that this was at one point considered futuristic enough to be used in sci-fi films about the future. I spent many undergraduate days in that cold and uninviting building.
This New York Times article says that Jobs grew up in a “likeler”… a non-Eichler California Modern home. (I won’t characterize it as a knock-off. But that certainly seems to opinion of Eichler fans.)
OTOH, Steve Wozniak grew up in a genuine Eichler.
So Jobs appropriated not just Woz’s technical genius, but his childhood. 
We never bothered to lock our front door. If we were away longer than a few hours, when we got home my mother would open the front door and scream very loudly, “BURGLARS! WE’RE HOME!!” As kids, we found it very amusing. (I never had an actual housekey until I went to college and lived in a dorm. Never having carried one before, I promptly lost it.)
Fortunately, we were in Palo Alto, so weather wasn’t an issue. We had no air conditioning, which really wasn’t needed, and there was some kind of under-floor heating that kept us warm enough for Northern California.
For me, the word “home” still conjures up the image of an Eichler. I swear I got misty-eyed looking at those Google images.
