Back at the ranch house

Hold back the sneer and join in wishing happy birthday to the rancher -- that all-American, all-Californian house that has sheltered us for so long. Low-slung and under-sung, the ranch house is where so many of us live, or have lived, or where our families reside, or where our friends grew up.

By countless repetition and endless variation, the rancher, more than any other dwelling, embodies the abiding Southern California dream of the universal, egalitarian, single-family home.

Plain? Well, don’t blame the rancher. There’s still plenty to say for those old values of simplicity, harmony, informality, ease, neighborhood. In fact, look around: The ranch house and all that it stands for is enjoying a spurt of renewed respect these days.

An affectionate book published in September, “Ranches: Design Ideas for Renovating, Remodeling, and Building New,” argues that the time has come to rethink “the homes that everyone loved to hate.”

“The ranch has not only survived, it’s on its way to timelessness,” say the authors, landscape architect M. Caren Connolly and architect Louis Wasserman. “The ranch’s popularity is rising once again. Home buyers have come to appreciate both the subtle appeal of these straightforward homes and the settled suburban neighborhoods in which they tend to be found.”

It’s hard to pin down exactly what birthday it is, but let’s call it the 50th. Maybe it’s actually the 52nd or 53rd -- or, if you insist, the 70th.

This much is certain: A half-century ago, Southern California was in the midst of a boom like none other. In the years from 1945 to 1955, World War II veterans moved west in a colossal migration -- adding 40% to the population. A new age of optimism had dawned. And it called for new things -- cars with tail fins and houses that didn’t look like the farmhouses left behind.

There was a whiff of diesel smoke in the air back then. Bulldozers flattened citrus orchards and bean fields. If you didn’t hear the sound of hammers, you weren’t listening. “At last, what you’ve been longing for ... carefree living,” said a brochure for a 1953 tract of ranchers in Long Beach. “Introducing the all-new Californian ... built for you -- a modern Western family.” Often, buyers saw only a single model on the corner of an empty field. They selected between floor plans A to G. The houses flew up overnight, as they say, shaping not just the landscape, but the character of Southern California. By the untold thousands, ranchers, or “ramblers,” as they were also called, began to ring neighborhoods built in the 1920s and 1930s. The remainder of the country would soon fall in step.

So, just what is a ranch house? This: a one-story, strongly horizontal dwelling with a V- or L- or U-shaped footprint, embracing an inward courtyard patio instead of presenting an outward-looking porch and topped off with a gently pitched, low overhanging roof.

Architect Cliff May, a sixth-generation Californian who died in 1989, is generally credited with perfecting and popularizing the ranch home. He began in the early 1930s (happy 70th birthday, rancher), but did not reach full stride until after the war (happy 50th). Both a designer and a partner in developments, May’s name is attached to nearly 20,000 houses here and around the world -- and his influence is seen in many times that number.

His ranchers, most of them tract homes, are descendants of two-century-old ranchos, updated with post-and-beam, open-ceiling modernism. May was among several influential architects of the day who capitalized on Southern California’s climate. Sheets of glass substituted for walls and doors to bring the outdoors inside. Spanish-style extended eaves acted as “visors” against glare and heat.

He moved garages from behind his houses to the front, to eliminate the wasted space of driveways. His homes presented “a blank facade to the public” and emphasized private terrain inside the fence. He favored Spanish corredors, covered lanais that provided transition from house to patio. Inside, he softened the abrupt transitions between rooms, removing doorways, employing half-walls to add spaciousness to his 1,200-square-foot tract creations as well as to his larger, custom ranchers.

In short, the original ranch house resembles nothing so much as an airy tent with the sides rolled up.

“Friendly ... relaxed ... in scale with people ... “ says Jerry Yates, an architect and professor of interior architecture at Cal State Long Beach. He is talking about the “language” spoken by his May-designed home in Long Beach. “You live at ground level,” he continues. “Walls of windows connect you to the day, to the time of day and the weather of the day. Yet, you maintain a modicum of privacy. Inside, everything is exposed except the wiring. The house doesn’t close down on you; you don’t lose contact with the structure, the bones of the house. And I think that makes for a deeper connection.”

Two streets away, second-grade teacher Susan Klodt expresses a common sentiment. After 30 years in her rancher, she finds herself “confined, shut-in” in small homes of another style with their linear divisions of space. “I always feel I’m being relegated to a certain room.”

Despite testimonials, though, the ranch house has long lacked one essential: status.

As a symbol of the middle-class, the rancher was simply too middlebrow to be taken seriously; too ubiquitous to be anything but ignominious. The innovations of Cliff May were quickly diluted by other builders, compromised, blended back with the commonplace of the old farmhouse so that the rancher often became just a ground-hugging cracker box -- your mother’s old Buick station wagon with bargain linoleum floors.

During boom times, complete construction plans could be purchased in booklets. It became the house of developers, not architects. Life magazine published a special housing edition in 1953, featuring an idealized $15,000 home “designed” by the National Assn. of Home Builders. It was, of course, a rancher.

And if the ‘50s meant liberation to the World War II generation, it meant bland conformity to their baby boomer children, ranch house and all.

As a result, Southern California -- which celebrates equally the grand, the bizarre and the funky in architecture -- has long disregarded its most important contribution to housing.

“How could they make the same mistake so many times?” asked newspaper columnist Westbrook Pegler when he first laid eyes on a housing tract.

In their authoritative book, “Los Angeles: An Architectural Guide,” David Gebhard and Robert Winter simultaneously acknowledge the rancher and dismiss it by restricting its mention to a single sentence: “By the end of the decade [1930s], Cliff May and others had fully developed the California ranch house, which was to dominate not only Southern California but the whole of America after World War II.”

The authors make just one additional mention in their overview of our architectural heritage, observing that the ranch house “continued to exhibit old values, the two-car garage or carport near the street, the open family room and adjoining patio, the outdoor living space. Again, California pioneered a style of life for America.”

Those words were published in 1994 and represented at least a generation of condescension. Since, however, thinking has started to shift -- backward.

In 1997, the editors of Sunset magazine republished the celebratory postwar book, “Western Ranch Houses by Cliff May.” In a foreword, the editors remind us that as early as the 1930s, May “was building for the Southern California climate and for people who thought living would be different there.”

May’s ranch houses, the editors noted, were practical. “What made Cliff May exciting to anyone interested in home building in those early days was this drive to perpetuate ideas in livability rather than form and facade,” said the Sunset editors. “His passion was not so much architecture as the way people wanted to live.”

In a 2003 book “Ranch House Style,” Katherine Ann Samon says revival of the ranch house at the start of this new century “is unmistakable.”

Those who live in ranchers find they provide the most curious of things, both seclusion and neighborliness. Yates moved into his Cliff May rancher in east Long Beach five years ago, fleeing the fashionable oceanfront community of Naples. There, his one-story cottage had been dwarfed by McMansions.

“Moving here, we got our privacy back,” he explains. Then, once his family was secure in its domain, they could relax. Neighbors were friends again. When the Yateses and the family next door replaced the fence between them, they added a gate to make visits easier.

“Tastes have changed radically since 1953, but the virtues of these houses didn’t change. They’ve just been rediscovered,” says D.J. Waldie, author of “Holy Land: A Suburban Memoir.”

Indeed, nostalgia has become a selling point. Realtor Vince Messing has been dealing in Cliff May ranchers for 28 years in a 750-home, postwar tract of Long Beach known as the “Ranchos.” Buyers want the typical “openness, lightness, airiness,” he says, and something more. “They’re asking for retro now. They aren’t looking for someone else’s addition or updated remodel.”

They don’t just want a rancher, they want the real thing. And just in time for the big birthday party. Step out to the patio, let’s light those candles.