Laundry appliances are in a large, handy kitchen closet instead of the basement. Cleaning materials are on shelves high above a child's reach. |
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ROB KAROSIS /
COURTESY OF
"BUNGALOWS" |
Gary and Beth's Seattle bungalow has an appealingly tactile quality, common to many bungalows, because the stone and the wood shingles. |
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ROB KAROSIS / COURTESY OF "BUNGALOWS"
The master bedroom is large enough to accommodate several oversize pieces of furniture, allowing the owners to use this space for cocooning, conversation and comfort. |
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In an age when teardowns, scrape-offs and wraparounds are radically altering the residential landscape and "McMansions" are the prevailing crop of our farm fields, people are awakening to the value of traditional American neighborhoods. Many of us are returning to what can be called classic American housing types — the bungalow, the colonial, the Cape Cod and the ranch. The appeal of the bungalow is the same now as it was 100 years ago. At a glance, you can appreciate the solidity, a sense of security and a relationship with other houses along the street. Inside, the rooms are arranged in a way that reinforces family togetherness, with easy access to the yard to encourage outdoor living. Back when "Bungalow Mania" introduced thousands to homeownership, the style was more than the fashion of the day. It incorporated a number of progressive ideals of the early 1900s — the straightforward use of materials, an informal way of living and accessibility to the outdoors. The first bungalow owners were middle-class families who felt secure enough about their social standing that they didn't need to use shelter as an outward display of their worth.
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From "Bungalows: Design Ideas for Renovating, Remodeling, and Building New," by M. Caren Connolly and Louis Wasserman (Taunton Press, 2002, $29.95) |
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Today, people are again attracted to homes of an appropriate size, built with honest materials. The bungalow fits the bill, while offering such extras as oak floors, stained-glass windows, bay windows, coffered ceilings, wainscoting, brick and tile fireplaces, kitchen built-ins and substantial frame-and-panel doors. Exterior details vary from one home to another, so that it is rare to find any two bungalows that look exactly alike. Still, the houses along a street relate to each other in scale and materials, resulting in some of America's most charming neighborhoods.
While most bungalows of the past had second-floor bedrooms, with dormers to bring in light and increase headroom, the homes were meant to look like one-story structures with a strong visual connection to the site. The heavy roof overhang, supported by squat columns and braces, intentionally cast a strong shadow to emphasize this ground-hugging aspect. A great number of these homes had front porches that were integral to the architecture.
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| The old kitchen and mudroom were combined to create a large, new kitchen with dining booth. The room has modern conveniences but retains a pedigreed look in part due to the natural materials. Windows above the sink look similar to the double-hungs elsewhere in the room, but they are two-paned casements that open easily with a crank. |
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Even though bungalow plans were often ordered from catalogs, reinforcing their shared characteristics, the style is highly adaptable. Builders of the original bungalows favored regional materials for their lower cost and reduced maintenance. Bungalows are often found in particularly attractive, established neighborhoods. The majority of them were built on the edge of downtown areas and in first-tier suburbs, in a day when social reformers were loudly describing urban ills. A century later, bungalow owners continue to appreciate this pedestrian-friendly environment, where the sidewalks are a great place to bump into people of all ages and catch up on neighborhood news.
Bungalows are suited to a variety of sites and climates, and their floor plans can accommodate anything from a historically faithful renovation to additions that literally go right through the roof. The style's adaptability can be explained in part by what it lacks: redundant walls and useless space. The open plan of the first floor was a departure from the compartmentalized Victorian home. Many of today's home buyers are drawn by these assets, in a housing market dominated by huge houses with wasteful floor plans.
Bungalows are characterized by relatively little conspicuous ornamentation. The door might be massively crafted of oak with a graceful arch or a cherry construction flanked by sidelights. The one showy feature is apt to be windows of stained or beveled glass, often in intricately assembled designs. Typically, living rooms include a decorative or working fireplace with glass-enclosed bookshelves; some homes have intimate built-in seating arrangements known as ingelnooks. The centerpiece of the dining room is apt to be a built-in china cabinet and buffet.
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| ROB KAROSIS / COURTESY OF "BUNGALOWS" |
| The rooms in the original house were filthy, thanks in part to a major rodent infestation. A dropped acoustic-tile ceiling in the dining room was torn down to reveal the original beams. It took more than two weeks to strip the paint from the woodwork to reveal the beautiful grain of the Northwestern fir. |
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By placing importance on these family areas, the bungalow helped break down the rigid zoning that segregated Victorian households. The style's lineage is surprisingly exotic. The term itself is derived from the Hindi bangala, a one-story house with a low, extended roof that created a shady, well-ventilated veranda for outdoor living. When the British occupied India, they often summered in bangalas, but it wasn't until early in the next century that the bungalow caught on. Bungalow colonies became popular vacation destinations in mountain and seaside resorts. In Boise, Idaho, so many bungalows were built in a short time that it was nicknamed Bungalow City.
Along the way, the bungalow's basic form was influenced by the English Arts and Crafts movement, the Stick style and the Prairie houses of Frank Lloyd Wright, as well as Swiss, Japanese, Mediterranean and Spanish styles. As is often the situation in real-estate development booms, architects did not play a major role in shaping these houses. Very few bungalows were designed by an architect for a particular client or for a particular site. Bungalow plans could be purchased easily from pattern books and then constructed by the owner or a local contractor. And for the first time, these homes were mass produced (and mass marketed through mail order) by companies such as Aladdin, Montgomery Ward and Sears Roebuck. Manufactured housing was celebrated as a futuristic way to bring home ownership to more people.
Often, the answer to making these houses more livable today is simply to rearrange the floor plan in the most productive way, without expanding at all. Other options are to raise the roof, add a dormer, find storage space hidden behind existing walls, or build an addition.
Gary and Beth's Seattle bungalow was in such rough shape that they had to gut it and re-create its original charm almost from scratch, logging almost 2,000 hours of sweat equity.
Bungalows provide wonderful opportunities to harvest fallow space, particularly second-floor areas under the broad roof. Downstairs, by removing nonstructural walls, you can further open up an already unrestricted plan.
Bungalow owners who add on to their homes, even doubling the size, tend to take care that the result still looks as though it belongs in the neighborhood.
Architect Louis Wasserman and landscape architect M. Caren Connolly share an architectural practice in Milwaukee, Wis., and a passion for bungalows.
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