HACKENSACK, N.J. - Carolina Loaiza and Steve Ramirez weren’t looking for a one-story place when they went house-hunting. But when they walked into a Montvale, N.J., ranch house, they knew they were home.
“It was beautiful; it was perfect,” said Loaiza, a 28-year-old nurse. “I grew up in a split-level home, and I remember my mother carrying the vacuum cleaner up and down the stairs. When I saw this house, I really loved the floor plan, with everything on one floor.”
One of the nation’s most common home styles, ranches sprouted up by the millions across America’s new suburban landscape after World War II to feed an insatiable hunger for middle-class housing.
The ranch is a real love-itor-hate-it style. While many consider them outdated and too small, others say ranches could be just the ticket for baby boomers whose aging knees are tired of stairs. And with revived interest in midcentury modern design, thanks in part to the TV show Mad Men, ranch houses may soon enjoy a second heyday.
The ranch houses of the 1950s and 1960s, with their long, low profiles, can trace their roots to 19th-century working cattle ranches of the American West, cross-bred with the horizontal Midwestern Prairie style of Frank Lloyd Wright. Wright created tiny ranch houses, called Usonian houses, designed for middleclass families.
After a long drought in home construction during the Great Depression and World War II, developers produced ranch homes by the millions, along with other styles, including Cape Cods, starting in the late 1940s. As middle-class families increasingly bought cars, tightly packed houses near public transportation “could be replaced by sprawling designs on much larger lots,” according to A Field Guide to American Houses, by Virginia and Lee McAlester.
“It was at a time when land was still fairly inexpensive,” said T. Robins Brown, a historic preservation consultant for Bergen County, N.J.
The houses were built at different price points and sizes - from two-bedroom homes in working-class towns to sprawling versions in more affluent areas. For many working- and middle-class families, they were the first step into affordable homeownership.
“The ranch house was the home of the American 20th century,” architecture critic Alan Hess declared in his 2004 book, The Ranch House.
By the 1970s, however, tastes were changing, and few ranch houses were being built.
“As a culture, we tend to get bored. There are these stylistic cycles,” said Michelle Gringeri-Brown, editor of Atomic Ranch, a quarterly magazine devoted to ranch homes.
And in expensive regions, no one’s constructing ranch houses because builders find it more cost-effective to make the most of a property by putting up two-story homes. Moreover, buyers tend to prefer colonials over ranch homes, several real estate agents said.
“Ranches are a bit stodgy,”said Kate Conover, a Re/Max agent in Saddle River, N.J.
Some older ranch homes have bedrooms so small that they can barely accommodate the queen- and king-size beds many people now prefer.
For all these reasons, Gringeri-Brown said, many people are incredulous when they hear historic preservationists talk about saving ranch houses.
“Are you kidding me? I grew up in a house like that,” they say.
“I think when there are so many of them, you don’t necessarily appreciate them as a something special or appealing,” Gringeri-Brown said.
But now that they’re more than 50 years old - the age at which buildings are eligible for the National Register of Historic Places - ranch houses are getting a lot of attention from architectural scholars.
And owners of ranch homes say they love living without stairs in an open floor plan. Rick and Darlene Bandazian downsized from a big colonial in Wyckoff, N.J., to a smaller ranch home about eight years ago, after their sons left home.
“The population is getting older, and the need for this type of home is obvious,” said Rick Bandazian, 59, a real estate agent with Coldwell Banker in Franklin Lakes, N.J. “Ranches will be a hot commodity in the next decade or two.”
And many buyers choose ranch houses for their potential, seeing the basic rectangle as a building block they can expand on.
Carolina Loaiza and Steve Ramirez, who have one child, were motivated by the possibility of expansion.
“We like the fact that if later on we decide to expand the house, or our family gets bigger, there’s always room to go up,” said Ramirez, a 28-yearold police officer. A previous owner already added a fourth bedroom over the garage.
Business, Pages 68 on 03/31/2013