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The catalog homes—available in 447 different styles—offered new modern conveniences like electric wiring, bathrooms, asphalt roof shingles, and central heating for a relatively low price, thanks to the company’s ability to mass produce parts. The materials were shipped by train precut, and included everything needed to assemble a house, including the nails. And the houses were built to last—plenty of people have written in to the Sears archives to report that they live in Sears Modern Homes almost a century after the houses were built.
Sears Modern Homes
Sales were down, and there was too much inventory sitting in expensive warehouses. Also, it should be noted that many of the kit home manufacturers sold plans and materials, so while not a "kit house" per se, you could still have a Sears or Wards plan built with their materials, or their plan built with local materials. As might be expected, there is a hope among many old house owners that theirs could be a Sears kit. According to the information on Aladdin kit houses, it's estimated that between 1908 and 1981, there were 70,000 Aladdin homes manufactured. Sears, in the kit house business for just over 30 years, sold 70-75,000 according to the Sears Archives.
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But before the Chicago business became America’s largest retailer—and affixed its name to the world’s tallest building—Sears started by selling time. The company also still operates about 400 stores nationally, but it’s struggling with a new concept for a limited version of its flagship department stores. It may be the end of an era for Sears, but its history is being preserved one home at a time. Quinn wrote an article on kit homes for the neighborhood’s newsletter in 2001. He said several neighbors told him they suspected their homes began as kits, which were popular when the Field Club neighborhood was being built.
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Sears houses can be identified or authenticated using the following methods. While financing through Sears helped many homeowners purchase homes, many of those purchasers defaulted during the ensuing Great Depression.
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At any rate, Sears always furnished estimates of the finished cost of the house, including labor (not part of the Sears package). There is a tendency to think of the “Sears House” as a monolithic entity, but there were actually many different Sears catalogs that offered houses and auxiliary buildings, such as garages. Others continued to sell just lumber and building parts, which had been a Sears staple. Distinctions among the buildings offered, the quality of the materials, and the construction methods used can be confusing. It may be hard to believe now, but Sears, Roebuck & Co. (Sears) helped build American neighborhoods as we know them today.
Bungalows, for instance, were among the most frequently built of all of Sears house types (and along with the Colonial Revival and the Cape Cod cottage, the longest-lived), appearing in every catalog from 1908 onward. As late as 1939 the “Winona,” which first appeared in 1916, is shown with another, rather stodgy five-room example, the “Plymouth,” which first appeared in 1934. Sears capitalized on increasing members of the middle class and WWI veterans who sought to build and live in their own homes. Each house style enjoyed a unique name, such as Starlight or Crescent, which only increased the appeal. Buyers could request design changes as they wanted, and some even provided entire blueprints to Sears.
Models
Later, more lavish versions came equipped with the sought after amenities of the day, including built-in china cabinets, mirrored closet doors, dining nooks, kitchen cupboards, built-in ironing boards, telephone niches and medicine cabinets. The Modern Homes mortgage program peaked in the late 1920s but showed increasing signs of strain as the full effects of the Great Depression hit. The Modern Homes program was finally defeated by tens of millions of dollars in mortgage defaults, as well as pre-World War II shortages of building materials. He was convinced that the building supplies could be sold at a profit if storage could be centralized and the goods distributed more rationally—and if there was a little extra incentive for buying them.
Surviving buildings
The Carlinville, Illinois, concentration consists of houses bought in bulk by the Standard Oil Company in 1918 to house its mineworkers at a total cost of about US $1 million. The houses, comprising eight models, were all built in a 12-block area known as the Standard Addition. Construction of the houses took nine months which were completed in 1919. The bulk order is the largest known order for Sears Modern Homes and led to Sears, Roebuck naming their "Carlin" model after the city. By the time the Modern Homes project folded for good, Sears houses were a staple of the American landscape.
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Its front facade is characterized by tall and large round-arch windows, with a stepped parapet above. Because everyone stole ideas from each other, it's sometimes difficult to determine the origin of an old house. In that case, you research as far as you can and then sit back and enjoy the house you have. • And a general impression of a successful retailing goliath that was as much of Americana as Chevrolet and apple pie.
Frank Kushel continued to head the Modern Homes program until the end, by which time he was still hardly any better known than he had been in 1906. In the early 20th century, companies such as Sears, Roebuck and Co., sold tens of thousands of mail-order kit houses. The Sears Merchandise Building Tower is a fourteen-story structure, with a limestone base and brick walls. It is crowned by a Classical Revival top floor with round-arch windows and a modillioned cornice.
Sears' Hamilton home was one of the first models offered in the Modern Homes debut catalog in 1908. It was one of the homes in the original Modern Homes catalog of 1908, though this particular one was built in 1926. Eric Romain owns one of them, a Vallonia model in Royal Oak, Mich., and his area in particular has quite a few kit homes.
House-plan books like those from Palliser & Palliser date back to the Victorian period; full construction drawings were offered, and sometimes also a millwork package. By the middle of the bungalow era, a host of companies offered pre-cut kits, which would be shipped by rail for on-site construction. Not only lumber but also everything down to the nuts and bolts, and even paint, were included. Leading sellers included Keith’s, Aladdin, Sears, Harris Brothers, Montgomery Ward, and Gordon–Van Tine.
One of the most fascinating parts of the story, is that the framing lumber was (in most cases) pre-cut and labeled, allowing the homebuilder to follow an instruction booklet to help in the organized construction process. Kushel wasn’t the only or even the first person to come up with a scheme to sell houses by catalog and ship them by rail. It wasn’t until about 1911 that Sears included framing lumber in its package, and the company didn’t begin to offer pre-cut and factory-fitted lumber until 1914. Before then, the lumber still had to be cut to fit at the building site. Montgomery Ward, Sears’s foremost catalog competitor in general merchandise, was even slower to jump on the bandwagon, waiting until 1910 to sell house plans from a catalog and 1918 for ready-cut houses. Sears and its competitors all depended on rail service, which by the early 20th century covered most of the continent, and regional lumber mills where the wood could be centrally processed.
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