The Postwar Tract House and Everyday Style

The postwar tract house turned the single-family home into a mass-produced good, and standardized what it had in it. After 1945 the country needed houses fast and built them by the hundred thousand, Levittown and its many imitators, laid out in rows and finished on a budget. Style, for the first time, came standardized and affordable.

The fittings were made for volume. Builders bought lighting and hardware in bulk, so a whole subdivision often carried the same fixtures, the same knobs, the same bathroom sconces. That sounds like a knock, but the parts were frequently better than their cheap-and-fast reputation. Solid-brass and steel hardware, simple pressed-glass shades, honest builder-grade fixtures made when builder-grade still meant metal and glass rather than plastic and pot metal.

The look was a stripped-down, mass-market version of mid-century modern: clean lines, minimal ornament, and optimism about the future rendered plainly and cheaply. A tract house from 1955 wasn't trying to be a showpiece. It was trying to be a good, modern, affordable home, and its fittings said exactly that.

Those parts are worth more now than the houses' original budgets suggest, partly because so many were installed and partly because the ones that survive are well made. A simple 1950s semi-flush fixture or a set of period doorknobs carries the everyday character of the postwar house, the version of mid-century most people lived in rather than the designer version in the magazines.

When we stock a piece from this period, we're stocking the ordinary made durable. It's not rare the way a hand-blown Victorian shade is rare. It's common, sound, and increasingly hard to find in good condition, because common things get replaced without ceremony.