Despite my knowledge of the 370 designs of Sears kit homes and my passing familiarity with the designs from the other kit home companies, I was never able to identify the homes in the photos from the West Coast.
Then about three years ago, someone sent me information about a "Sears Kit Home" in Studio City that had been featured in a nationally-syndicated home improvement program. I carefully studied the picture of the modest California bungalow but again, didn’t recognize it as a kit home from Sears or the other companies.
I sent the photo along to my friend and fellow architectural historian, Dale Wolicki. He responded almost immediately with a phone call.
"This house is in the Los Angeles area, right?" he asked, matter-of-factly. "It's probably a house from Pacific Ready Cut Homes."
Later, I found the house on page 30 of the 1919 Pacific Homes catalog. Dale had been right. It was a kit house from this regional company, based in Los Angeles.
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So what is a kit home?
Kit homes were sold via mail order catalogs and shipped to the wanna-be homeowner in about 10,000 pieces. These complex do-it-yourself kits came with a 75-page instruction book that told you how all those pieces went together. Kit home companies promised that a man "of average abilities" could build his own kit home in about 30-90 days.
In addition to Sears, there were five national companies selling kit homes through mail order.
Aladdin Homes (Bay City, Michigan) was one of the largest and Gordon Van Tine (based in Davenport, Iowa) was another large company. (Gordon Van Tine supplied kit homes for Montgomery Wards, too.) There were also Lewis Manufacturing, Harris Brothers and Sterling Homes. Pacific Homes (also known as Pacific Homes Systems) only sold regionally.
Pacific Homes was probably one of the larger regional companies, selling about 40,000 kit homes during their 32 years in business (1908 – 1940). By comparison, Sears (the largest of the national companies), sold 75,000 kit homes during the same time frame, but in all 48 states.
| The Catalog -- The Homes Armed with my Pacific Homes catalog, I found hundreds of examples of these kit houses, still standing in California neighborhoods. Below is one such example, along with the catalog page describing the kit for this model. (Click photos for larger view.) | |
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| The Style 218 plan in Pacific Homes catalog (above, left); an actual Style 218 kit home (above, right). | |
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Surf’s Up
The history of Pacific Homes is especially interesting (and wonderfully Californian) because in the 1930s, the company transitioned from making kit homes to surfboards. In fact, Pacific Homes became one of the country's first commercial producers of surfboards, creating the famous "Swastika" surfboard. The swastika was a symbol from Eastern philosophies and denoted peace and harmony. Pacific Homes dropped the emblem from their boards in 1939 as World War II broke out in Europe and the symbol became equated with Nazism. The company also took on a new name, "Waikiki Surfboards.†A year later, the company got out of the kit home business, focusing solely on surfboards.
So where are these old Pacific Homes now?
During a recent trip to Los Angeles, I found about 200 Pacific Homes in a fairly short time in Pomona, Pasadena, Fullerton, Anaheim, Long Beach, Monrovia, Whittier, Santa Monica, LaVerne, Claremont, Ontario, Glendale, Beverly Hills, West Hollywood and more. Based on what I found during my visit to the Los Angeles area, I’d suspect that any 1920s bungalow community within 500 miles of Los Angeles will have some (and perhaps many) Pacific Ready Cut Homes. Sales of kit homes peaked nationally in the 1920s.
The Pacific Homes Mill was located on 24 acres at 5800 S. Boyle Avenue (downtown Los Angeles). Not surprisingly, all of the houses built around the mill's site are long gone. The exhibition grounds (an entire neighborhood of these kit homes) was built at 1330 South Hill Street. Another community of Pacific Homes was built along 81st Street. When the 405 (Los Angeles freeway) came through, several of these little bungalows were displaced, and probably destroyed. The massive interstate now divides what remains of the long row of Pacific Homes along 81st Street.
In the 1920s, Pacific Homes built two full blocks of their kit bungalows along Carson Boulevard in Beverly Hills. I was saddened to discover that several of these homes have either been razed or ruined through insensitive remodeling.
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Ignorance is not bliss
It frustrates me that so few people have even heard of Pacific Ready Cut Homes, even as these architectural treasures are being destroyed.
I’ve found that more often than not, people living in Sears kit homes do not realize they have a kit home. And Sears is by far the most recognizable of the kit home companies. Far fewer people have even heard of Pacific Homes, much less realize that they live in one.
Sears homes have enjoyed publicity on television shows and in newspapers in recent years. This brings me to my second frustration: Poor research by folks who ought to know better.
One well-known remodeling personality misidentified a Pacific Home as a Sears Home on his nationally syndicated television show. Other shows do not delve deeply enough into history to discover that the house they're remodeling is a Pacific Home.
In February 2005, Weekend Warriors (HGTV) featured a segment on a young couple building and installing a dining room buffet in their 1920s bungalow. The couple expressed disappointment that they didn't know more about the history of their modest home. Watching the episode, I was stunned to see that their house was a beautiful example of a Pacific Ready Cut Home #79.
Another wonderful teaching opportunity lost.
| (Click on photos for larger view) |
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A legacy in danger
California has an architectural legacy in Pacific Homes. This amazing and impressive company offered several hundred designs of homes. They sold about 40,000 of these kit homes in their 32 years in the housing business. And these were solid homes, made from superior quality millwork and lumber. These houses were built with Douglas fir and redwood, first-growth lumber harvested from virgin forests in the Pacific Northwest.
Pacific Homes offered a nice variety, too -- Bungalows, two-story homes, Spanish Revivals, craftsman style, English Tudors and more.
My lofty goal is to make folks aware of this very significant chapter of California's architectural history. In order to preserve and protect these historically-significant homes, they must first be found and identified. And the only way to do that is to increase awareness of this Los Angeles-based kit home company.
To Next Part of This Story
Rose Thornton is the author of "The Houses That Sears Built", "Finding the Houses that Sears Built" and she and Dale Wolicki have co-authored, "California's Kit Homes." She travels throughout the country, lecturing on kit homes and has given more than 200 lectures in the last three years. Ms. Thornton is a contributing editor to The Old House Web.
