If Wishes Were Houses, Sears Made Them Come True : Americana: Customers could buy tables, pianos, davenports and a home kit. Cottages that retailed for $2,000 now bring $200,000 in some Washington suburbs.
There was a time when the Sears, Roebuck & Co. catalogue--that doomed relic of Americana--offered more than overalls and girdles, refrigerators and jigsaws, pocket watches and accordions.
It offered entire houses.
For more than 30 years in the first half of the century, Sears sold houses by mail. The houses came in a kit, shipped by rail, with the pieces labeled and diagramed like a model airplane.
“Everything came pre-cut, ready to go. It really is amazing that people could order a house through the mail,” said Elizabeth David, a historian who has studied Sears homes in Virginia.
Walls, floors, windows, toilets and bathtubs, even wallpaper and nails, came packed in wooden crates. Floor plans for many of the 450 models Sears sold between 1908 and 1940 were marked with locations for Sears pianos, tables and davenports.
Customers could buy the kits on the installment plan, paying for shipments as they arrived. The company also offered mortgages and loans for construction.
Sears’ decision to discontinue the nearly century-old mail-order business--the spring 1993 catalogue is the last edition, though orders will be taken through the rest of the year--recalls an extraordinary chapter in the marketing of the American dream.
Sears sold about 100,000 homes, most of them in the Midwest and East, said Sears archivist Vicki Cwiok. The company kept no records of buyers and there is no comprehensive directory of Sears homes, she said.
The “Modern Homes” catalogue continued until 1940, when the Depression had forced Sears to foreclose on many of its kit homes.
“It just wasn’t very good public relations,” Cwiok said.
Several hundred Sears homes were built in the brand-new suburbs of Washington in the 1920s and 1930s. Arlington County has one of the nation’s largest concentrations of Sears homes, many of them tiny one- and two-bedroom cottages originally built as summer retreats for Washingtonians.
Large, well-preserved collections of Sears homes stand in Carlinville, Ill., and Akron, Ohio, among other places. An entire neighborhood is dominated by Sears homes in Hopewell, Va.
Kit houses built for $2,000 now command more than $200,000, said Karen Lam, a real estate agent who specializes in Sears homes.
Lam’s own Sears house, a bungalow model in Arlington called the Vallonia, was ordered from Sears for $1,956 in 1920.
Lam’s house has the original bathroom, the original solid, unpainted woodwork, and the small kitchen--with no place for a refrigerator. That appliance sits on the back porch.
“It’s so charming, and really beautiful, with all the old wood,” she said.
Even bottom-of-the-line Sears homes boast solid construction and a level of detail uncommon in modern homes, she said. Nostalgic touches include second-floor sleeping porches in many homes and deep, claw-footed bathtubs.
The houses are attracting increasing interest from preservationists as architectural examples of vintage Americana. The Arlington Historical Society chose Sears homes over mansions and historic 18th- and 19th-Century houses for its annual fund-raising house tour a few years ago.
But the houses also hold a more elusive appeal as a monument to the American middle-class dream of home ownership.
Richard Sears and Alvah Roebuck’s advertisements admonished the family man to “give the kiddies a chance,” while assuring the first-time home buyer: “In the end you will have a beautiful home instead of rent receipts.”
Sears launched its “Wish Book” in 1896. The catalogue featured four pages of kit houses in 1908, and as the enterprise grew Sears began issuing a separate homes catalogue.
“During the last few years there has been a tremendous demand for substantial and comfortable homes for an industrious and thrifty people,” read the introduction to Sears’ 1924 “Modern Homes” catalogue.
The catalogue that year offered everything from cottages like the “Arcadia,” costing less than $1,000, to substantial four-bedroom colonials like the “Lexington,” which cost $4,353 complete.
Within a few years--after World War II--William Levitt took up the torch of affordable housing, manufacturing homes by the thousands in his suburban developments. But by then, Sears was out of the housing business.
And soon, Sears will be out of the catalogue business.
“It’s sad, very sad,” said Cwiok.
