The History of Sears Kit Homes

It may be hard to believe now, but Sears, Roebuck & Co. (Sears) helped build American neighborhoods as we know them today. Sears kit homes were an easy way for members of the middle class to realize their dreams of homeownership. Once purchased by catalog, the building materials were shipped in railroad cars and fully erected in as little as 90 days.

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The History of Sears Kit Homes

To understand the profound impact Sears once had on consumers, it&#;s useful to compare this former catalog and department store giant to Amazon. From to , the Chicago-based operation sold around 75,000 homes to anyone who had the cash and access to a catalog to choose one. Around 400 different styles were available, from Craftsmans to Cape Cods, to accommodate nearly any budget and family size.

Once ordered, the homes were shipped via train car and delivered as far as Alaska. These far-reaching effects were owed to the catalog&#;s great acclaim. Around one-fifth of the country in the early 20th century subscribed to this 1,400-page consumerism Bible, filled with more than 100,000 items each delivered directly to a customer&#;s front door with a quality guarantee.

The Modern Homes Program

When in Sears began its Modern Homes program, the company was in a brilliant position to reach interested people. And the same four-pound catalog that made home purchases possible also contained all necessary furnishments, from living room furniture to bathroom towels.

Why did a company renowned for its catalog success choose to sell homes? To unload its surplus of building materials sitting in warehouses. A former manager of the Sears china department turned a loss into a sales leader when he suggested bundling this stagnant inventory into a home kit. The Aladdin Company was just one competitor already testing the waters with such an idea, and Sears quickly followed the same path.

Selling the Concept of Dream Homes

Sears capitalized on increasing members of the middle class and WWI veterans who sought to build and live in their own homes. Each house style enjoyed a unique name, such as Starlight or Crescent, which only increased the appeal. Buyers could request design changes as they wanted, and some even provided entire blueprints to Sears. Staff then packaged the necessary materials and shipped the loaded cartons to a buyer&#;s address.

Once the kits arrived, buyers needed land and workers who could assemble the kits as instructed. The public immediately embraced this concept, and Sears homes sprung up across the country. At one time, Pleasantville, New York, had so many of these mail-order homes that a particular hill was named in their honor: Sears & Roebuck. Today, some Sears kit homes are included on the National Historic Register.

Accessible Housing for All

Sears kits were hugely popular for another reason: the catalog assured buyers that anyone with rudimentary skills could have their home built in 90 days. To substantiate this claim, the kits contained elements like balloon framing to simplify the building process. Sears also standardized the use of asphalt shingles and drywall to drive down construction costs for buyers.

The company&#;s simplistic home designs changed life forever. Most Americans in the early 20th century lived in multigenerational houses with different rooms allocated for different family members. But the Sears kit popularized newlywed homes and jumpstarted single-family living. It also made modern conveniences like electricity and central heating more widely available to Americans of all social classes.

Sears even shipped materials enough to build a schoolhouse! They had enough supplies and reach that their Honor Built products could span a large gamut of projects from small to large to satisfy alpost any need of the public.

The End of an Era

In , they reportedly sold around $7 million in Sears kit homes. A year later, the Modern Homes department had grown to 120 salespeople working out of 16 district sales offices. But preparations for World War II ended the enterprise in , by which time the demand for lumber had exploded. Output simply could not keep pace.

The Supplies Priorities and Allocations Board intervened in with an order that curtailed nonessential construction. This meant homes could only be erected for employees in defense industries like:

• Bomber plants
• Aircraft plants
• Shipyards
• Tank plants

Consequences of War

Records show that Sears planned a new housing development in a New York suburb in &#; the same year the order was issued. But the company was forced to refund customer deposits because it could not source the lumber needed. The war&#;s growing demands quickly halted most residential construction throughout the U.S., and the Modern Homes segment of Sears closed.

Today, Sears homes remain as popular as ever, especially among history buffs and home investors. Some sell on the marketplace for over $1 million. If your home was built between and , compare its floor plan and exterior dimensions against a Sears home field guide, such as &#;Finding The Houses That Sears Built&#; (, Gentle Beam Publications). You might be surprised to find that you, too, live in a mail-order home.

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Houses have been built in one place and reassembled in another throughout history. Possibly the first advertised prefabricated home was the &#;Manning Portable Cottage&#; conceived in by London carpenter H. John Manning. This house was built in components, then shipped and assembled by British emigrants. Prefabricated homes were produced during the Gold Rush in the United States during the 19th century to enable California prospectors to quickly construct homes. Also known as kit houses, pre-cut houses, ready-cut houses, mail order homes, or catalog homes, they remained popular into the first half of the 20th century. Kit house manufacturers sold houses in many different plans and styles, ranging from simple bungalows to imposing Colonials. For a fixed price, manufacturers supplied the materials needed for construction of a particular house with the exclusion of brick, concrete, and masonry (such as would be needed for laying a foundation, which the customer would have to arrange to have done locally). One American company heavily invested in the kit house concept was Sears, Roebuck and Company. Sears Catalog Homes were ready-to-assemble kit houses sold through mail order by Sears. Sears closed their Modern Homes department in . More than 370 designs of Sears Homes were offered during the program's 32-year history.

While Frank Lloyd Wright is best known for his unique, one-of-a-kind showplace homes, the architect also gave considerable thought to designing beautiful yet affordable homes. The degree of detail he brought to such designs as Fallingwater and Taliesen is also evident in the evolution of his &#;American System Built&#; (ASB) homes. Although not designated as National Historic Landmarks (NHLs), these simpler designs aid in understanding the breadth and reach of Wright&#;s body of work. Wright began designing his own American System Ready-Cut structures with &#;prefabricated&#; construction integral to their concept in . Here, however, prefabricated meant &#;ready-cut&#; parts, rather than whole wall units, cut to size and shipped to the site where they would be assembled. The buildings were often referred to as &#;prefab homes,&#; but they really were not, since no part of the homes were constructed off-site. The lumber was cut at the factory, packaged along with all other components, and delivered to the work site for construction. The designs were standardized, and customers could choose from seven models. Wright&#;s firm produced over 960 drawings for the American System- Built Homes project, the largest number of drawings for any project in the Wright archives. More than a dozen suburban dealers were licensed to sell ASB Homes. Wright designed more than three dozen different housing units from bungalows, to two-story houses, to duplex apartments.

Toward the end of his &#;Prairie&#; period, Wright began experimenting with modular poured concrete construction. This phase of residential design was focused in Los Angeles in the s, and resulted in four &#;textile block&#; designs. The face relief patterns vary for each of the four textile-block projects. The method of construction consisted of casting three-inch thick concrete blocks on site in Wright-designed molds, next to and on top of one another without visible mortar joints. In all but one of the homes, steel reinforcing rods were run horizontally and vertically in edge reveals of the blocks, then filled with thin concrete grout, "knitting" the whole together.

Wright introduced his Usonian "Automatic" modular concrete homes in the early s. "Automatic" was used to suggest that the owner might participate in the actual construction of the home, laying or even making the blocks. The Usonian Automatics advanced concepts he introduced in the s with his textile block designs.

Wright's early block houses had wood roofs and later houses introduced ceilings suspended from concrete beams. He designed coffered blocks in a &#;waffle iron patterned&#; ceiling.

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