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Ranch Home Plans Design Ideas

February 3rd, 2012

Ranch floor plans have been an essential American style of suburban home for the past century. Ranch homes are well known in residential neighborhoods, particularly suburban housing developments. The ranch home tries to bring the outdoors into the living space of the home, while providing essential needs of function, comfort, and aesthetics. The ranch style is derived from California’s Spanish colonial architecture of the 1820′s, typified by horizontal, adobe-brick buildings which were low to the ground. Later on sawmills led to the board-and-batten techniques which characterize the Craftsman and Prairie home styles. Ranch homes became popular in California in the 1930′s, pioneered by architect Cliff May, who designed them to emphasize a casual way of living based upon ideas of simplicity, the practicality of space and materials, and efficiency. After the Second World War many developers throughout the country began mass-producing ranch homes in suburban areas. The National Association of Realtors states that the affordability and single-story design make ranch style homes the most prolific American residential design. Although long the butt of trendy jokes about design, ranch-style homes are now coming back into their own.

Ranch style typically consisted of a single story arranged in an asymmetrical L- or U-shape, but by the 1950′s two-story and split-level (to accommodate building on hillsides) styles became popular. These homes are linear in shape and they invoke a horizontal line placed in the sites on which they are built. Exteriors usually have brick accents and featured large windows. A low, flat roof – slightly pitched, but still attempting to emphasize the horizontal orientation of the architecture – is also associated with this style; as well as attached house garage plans. Interiors are designed to capture an open and informal feel, with specific living zones – kitchen and dining room being a buffer zone between living and sleeping areas. The rear of the home features floor-to-ceiling picture windows and sliding glass doors to allow entrance to the outside. Building materials include wood paneled interiors; brick and wood cladding; and other natural materials like stone. Some ranch homes feature visible wooden rafters, terrazzo flooring (to promote radiant heating), built-in shelving and closets, and exterior details such as false shutters on the small, horizontal windows facing the street.

Because ranch home plans were built quickly and spread widely all across America, they are sometimes regarded as possessing little individual style. However, this building style became a key component in how Americans connected to and lived a comfortable, casual way of life which integrated the family car with the TV technologies which came into being during that time. Spaces were quite open, and built to serve multiple uses by the use of small, movable partitions or curtains. Kitchens were usually adjacent to the living areas, and there was a flow from garage to kitchen to dining area to living area to bedrooms. Living areas often had picture windows and sliding glass doors opening onto backyard patios. Nowadays ranch style homes are often custom-built, and feature large, floor-to-ceiling windows which slide on tracks to open the house up and extend the sense of home into the outdoors.

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Tags: Ranch spanish colonial architecture

The Popular Split-Level Ranch House Design

January 31st, 2012

Ranch home designs have been extremely popular in the United States since the 1950′s, and are as quintessentially American as jazz and cheeseburgers. A ranch home design typically is asymmetrical and low-slung, with a horizontal, spreading orientation in either a rectangular, U-, or L-shaped configuration. Roofs are gable or hipped with wide eaves. Ranch homes usually have attached garages and feature minimal ornamentation but they contain modern design elements such as large plate glass picture windows, sliding glass doors, and Formica countertops.

Another common feature was the raised ranch, or split level home, which emerged as a variant of the original ranch style during the late 20th century (although some early examples predate the Second World War and Sears’ catalogue of Honor-Bilt Homes listed several split level designs in the 1930′s). Unlike traditional ranch style homes, these were innovative in using interior space. Instead of arranging the rooms on one floor, the style reorganized space in accordance with its use. For example, in one popular split level variant the entryway, kitchen, dining and living rooms occupied the main level; the bedrooms upstairs were accessed by a half staircase leading up; and the laundry area, guest bedroom, and family rumpus room were accessed by a half staircase leading down. In some ranch house designs the garage was placed on the lower level, with easy access via half staircase to the upper level. Another possibility was a split entry home, characterized by a small entry with half staircase leading up to the living areas and bedrooms upstairs and another half staircase next to it leading down to the garage, laundry, and family room. There were many other configurations also.

The split level’s popularity derived partly from its modernity and its differentiation from traditional mid-20th century styles of housing, such as Minimalist, Cape Cod, Colonial Revival, and bungalow cottages. This architecture can be made to blend into a hillside site in a natural manner. These houses maximize their square footage and their curbside presence, and they minimized costs without needing larger lots or basements by taking advantage of the natural curvature of the land, so that earth-moving costs are minimized. The split level ranch style provided an ideal balance between the buyers’ goal of getting as much house as could be for the money, with the builders’ goal of making a good profit.