By Denny Lee / The New York Times
and Joy Kraft / The Cincinnati Enquirer

What could be shabbier than a cookie-cutter home designed by Sears, Roebuck & Co., Michelle d'Arcambal wondered. What could the graying uncle to the Home Depot and Target possibly know of architecture and design, let alone modern living?

Quite a lot, it turns out.

The simple bungalow Ms. d'Arcambal saw on Shelter Island, N.Y., a woodsy beach town on eastern Long Island, was a postage-stamp house in every sense of the term. From 1908 to 1940, Sears sold kit houses by mail that included everything from precut lumber to the kitchen sink. The 116-year-old company may not have written the book on American homes, but it did write the catalog.

Just ask James and Jeanne Stone of Pleasant Ridge, who bought their Prairie-style kit home on Grand Vista Avenue more than 30 years ago.

"It was built in the '20s," said Mrs. Stone. "And it's held up beautifully. We haven't had to do anything more than maintenance until recently when we added a senior-citizen wing to the back - a bedroom, bath, laundry room and expanded breakfast room'' to cut down on the couple's stair climbing.

But she wasn't always impressed with the home.

"I thought it was an ugly house, all white, it looked like a land-locked ferry boat when I first saw it," Mrs. Stone said. "But it had four bedrooms and was on a wonderful street, so we bought it.

This Sears home in Terrace Park is one of 500 in the Tristate. (Glenn Hartong photo) | ZOOM |

"Inside, it was very practical, with a layout unlike all those other homes where you had to go through the living room to get to the kitchen. It has a side door as well, which gave you access to all the rooms. That was important with four boys under the roof."

Over the years the house was painted an earth tone, more to Mrs. Stone's liking and in keeping with the design, which could pass for a cousin of a Frank Lloyd Wright home.

"There's a great deal of interest in kit homes now," said Howard Decker, the chief curator at the National Building Museum in Washington, D.C., which is considering an exhibition on mail-order homes.

Prices of Sears homes range wildly, yet according to Mr. Decker, "by virtue of being a Sears house, they have a higher value than comparable houses in the same area." Buyers are lured by the homes' old-school craftsmanship and place in history, and by a growing preservation movement.

Sears sold nearly 100,000 of these "easy to build" kits in a precipitous era when an emerging middle class fled from polluted cities in search of a better family life. Prices ranged $650 to $5,000. For less than $2,000, Sears would ship two boxcars containing 30,000 pieces of building material to any railroad station, along with a 75-page leather-bound instruction manual. Sears even offered cheap mortgages until the Depression.

More than 500 here

The Stones' home is one of the more unusual Sears kits, according to Beatrice Lask of Clifton, who began researching Tristate Sears catalog homes in 1990 as a University of Cincinnati student. She found 500 Sears catalog homes in Cincinnati.

SEARS KIT HOMES

Books: The bible of Sears homes is Houses By Mail: A Guide to Houses From Sears, Roebuck & Co. (Preservation Press; $19.97) by Katherine Cole Stevenson and H. Ward Jandl. The Houses That Sears Built: Everything You Ever Wanted to Know About Sears Catalog Homes (Gentle Beam Publications; $19.95) by Rosemary Thornton. It contains reprinted pages from Sears Modern Homes catalogs that haven't been published in 80 years. Small Houses of the Twenties: The Sears, Roebuck 1926 House Catalog by Roebuck and Co. (Dover Publishing; $10.47). How to know if you have one: • Rafters, moldings and millwork often have numbers stamped on the ends - a letter and a two or three-digit number such as B119. • Look for shipping labels identifying Sears and the railroad on the backside of basement stairs. • Check the attic and basement for receipts, floor plans, instruction books. These old documents might be found under the bottom board of a built-in bookcase or cabinet.

ON THE WEB

Sears Modern Homes Web site

"I keep finding more all the time," she said last week. Mrs. Lask gives lectures on Sears homes through the Cincinnati Historical Society at Museum Center.

"There were only two Frank Lloyd Wright-type homes in the (Sears) catalog," Mrs. Lask said, referring to the Stones' home. "And they evidently weren't very popular. He was probably a little too advanced for them. Sears wasn't interested in being ahead of the times.

"Their designs were strictly for middle class. They just wanted to give people as much house for their money as they could.

"Many people looked upon them as being a cheaper kind of house, though you actually got better materials in Sears' homes because they used top lumber, better than you'd get at a lumber yard.

"They were really outstanding houses for the money."

About 400 Sears models were manufactured, ranging from squat summer cottages to elaborate Arts and Crafts homes with nine rooms, two balconies and a sun deck. More common, however, were bungalows like the Crafton, selling for less than $1,400. ("No `gingerbread' - just attractive, livable space," the 1932 catalog advertised.)

By contemporary standards, the houses are compact and modest. There is no room for heating ducts or kitchen islands, although the Stones added air conditioning to their home with no problem.

As for many things old and once disdained, nostalgia has lent these run-of-the-mill homes a new coat of respectability and a hint of provenance.

"You own a little piece of history," said Peter H. Miller, the president of Restore Media, which publishes Old House Journal. Mr. Miller lives in a Gladstone, a 1926 Sears model, near Washington that has been faithfully restored. "Your house has a story and, if you want to be touchy-feely about it, a soul. It's where history meets architecture."

More than nostalgia, it is the old-school craftsmanship that most excites homeowners. Hundreds of yards of oak, pine, fir and hemlock would arrive perfectly milled, each piece labeled and cut within 1/16 of an inch of specifications. Sears also made a point of selling old-growth wood stripped from the "virgin forests" of the Pacific Northwest. Compared with early growth, the type commonly sold today because of environmental concerns, old-growth wood has a much tighter grain and denser composition.

"The contractor's guys were freaking out about the wood," Ms. d'Arcambal said on a tour of her bungalow. She stomped up and down on her 80-year-old oak floor to underscore the point. "See how solid it is? I tried to replace the porch, but the contractor said no."

Knowing the real thing

If catalog houses were once dismissed as middlebrow prefabs, the tendency now is to elevate their origin to a suburban legend. Real estate brokers are now capitalizing "SEARS" in listings for emphasis, and Sears has even hired a corporate historian.

"We get a lot of people who call up saying they have a Sears," said Dennis Preisler, the in-house historian. "But the nuances are small between what's a Sears kit home and what's not. They are real disappointed when it's not."

The bad news usually comes from someone like Mrs. Lask or Rosemary Thornton, a self-described fanatic who makes a living documenting Sears homes. Ms. Thornton's book, The Houses That Sears Built (Gentle Beam Publications; $19.95), seeks to dispel a number of myths, including tales of houses arriving by boxcar.

For her Cincinnati study of Sears homes, Mrs. Lask visited the Sears archives in Chicago where she found the company did not have an inventory of its homes.

"They had destroyed all the files and were in the process of getting rid of as many catalogs as they could," she said.

Some people are insulted when Mrs. Lask tells them they live in a Sears home, until she explains.

"Then they often say, `We wondered why it had such fine wood,' or `I couldn't believe each window screen was numbered to match each window,' " she said. "They wondered how such a modest home could have features like hardwood floors, . . . built-in shelving, things you don't usually find."