The Craftsman Bungalow: Homes for Champagne Socialists

Industrialization, of course, was a heart-breaker in many ways. We went from agrarian life on the family farm with its daily rhythms and homespun distinctiveness to the clockwork urban factories where we sold our time for wage labor.

As Charlie Chaplin described it in his Modern Times film: we became cogs in the wheels of change. The pay-off was an easier physical life out of the mud.

The price was much about our humanity. Malvina Reynolds captured the outcome of industrial change in her song Little Boxes on the Hillside (1961) where she sang of tract homes and the people who lived in them looking “all just the same.”

Enter the Arts and Crafts via the Brit, Gustav Stickley who ushered in an entirely radical response to industrialization. Stickley’s furniture was emblematic. Finely wrought. Highly polished. Pieces that were anything but ticky tacky and that enhanced homes throughout the English speaking world and beyond.

The American Craftsman movement found footing in California during the 1930s with pottery and across the country as early as 1905 in four different styles of homes: Prairie, Mission, Four-Square, and what became the classic craftsman Bungalow we all know and love. There were even pattern books that came out in 1920 so people could build their own, thus advancing the goal of ennobling modest homes for the expanding middle class.

The issue with the craftsman bungalow, however, is that natural rustic handmade materials required costly skilled labor and expensive materials. Usually they are made of wood or stone and have broad roofs covering wide front porches with exposed rafters as well as nooks and window seats within the home.

Thus the title of this entry. Yes indeed, the craftsman bungalow was just the kind of home a socialist who did not want to see humanity dumbed down into wage laborers loved.

That said, to live in one took more money that the average family had and was only in reach by those who could afford champagne.

More, that’s pretty much still the case. Whether you’re looking in Laurelhurst, the Hollywood, Grant Park, or the Beaumont-Wilshire, craftsman bungalows are largely in reach only by those with deep pockets. Yet for those that can buy a craftsman bungalow, they can rest assured that they are getting more than just a house—they’re getting a home.