Rancho Pequeño

It was December and the ground was frozen the first time we saw the house. Abandoned, was how it looked. Foreclosed-upon, was what it was. The front yard was a variety of weeds, the back was undisguised dirt, and the carport had an accumulation of old newspapers, beer cans and a drift of dead leaves. Shut down, drained of heat and water, it was as forlorn as a jilted lover.

Inside, though, it was light-filled and open. Damaged and neglected, but it had a good feeling in spite of that. It contained 1,030 square feet on one level, three bedrooms (one of which was quite tiny), and one small bathroom.

We left, to think about it for a while, and returned to our 1,870 square foot, two-storey, 1908 brick house, on a huge lot in The Trendy Neighborhood. Just before Christmas, over dinner with friends, we talked about the little house. We realized we’d become intrigued by it. Our friends thought we were joking.

Sitting in the old house a few days later, it occurred to me that for some 30 years, save a couple in a 1950’s apartment building, I’d been living in structures built before World War One. My personal architectural (and décor) tastes are modern. “Comfortable Modern”, I would call it, as opposed to the hard-edged, pared down aesthetic that deploys lots of concrete, steel and stone --- and not much wood, fabric or softness.

Either mode of modernism contrasts starkly with the sort of houses and other buildings I’d been living in. Like all architecture, buildings constructed in the 19th and early 20th centuries reflect well their times and the social milieu in which they were created.

Houses tend to be rather vertical (up-right, if not narrow) and have a limited amount of windows (don’t look inside). They also have a lot of single-purpose rooms (compartments) and doors in every doorway, which can be closed and locked (this one speaks for itself).

Because of this, and their formal floor plans, they tend to be rather dark. High ceilings don’t help much with this, but do create more cubic feet of air that need to be heated or moved around.

In the middle of January we returned to the 1955 ranch, in The Decidedly Untrendy Neighborhood, to have another look. It was colder this time, the ground covered in snow. While the snow camouflaged the weed-ridden ground, it made the house look more desolate. Neither foot prints through the snow nor tire tracks to the carport. It was not encouraging.

We went inside anyway. Daylight cascaded though the windows. Three weeks past the Winter Solstice, and the days were beginning to reach once more for Summer. The sky was clearing off into one of those stunning sunny days that happen here, making even 30 degrees seem warm.

It was not up to 30 degrees, however, and the house was not warm. It was dirty. Cheap, gray carpet covered the oak flooring in the living and dining areas. The place was owned by a bank in California, which had someone paint every ceiling and wall with stark white, semi-gloss paint. Not carefully. Over-spray marked the oak floor here and there. Perhaps they thought it would make the home seem brighter. It accentuated the cold.

Eventually, we decided to buy the house and sell our old home. I had thought about the new place (Rancho Pequeño) sufficiently to put down some ideas about renovation --- and how to accommodate my office. The price was good, the neighborhood reasonably middle class and the area was much quieter than The Trendy Neighborhood. The house also fit into our goal of shedding excess possessions and de-complicating our life.

In addition, it presented me with an opportunity to design and build something for us. Rather remarkably, I had never done this in the 26 years I’d had my own architectural practice. Well, once before, many years ago, but realization of that project floundered on a divorce.

The bank that owned the property, and their real estate agent, seemed thoroughly disinterested in selling it. There had been no “for sale” sign in the yard. This was a year or so before America was swamped by a foreclosure disaster. The bank, which probably stood to make little or no money on the sale, felt no sense of urgency whatsoever. Time drifted by (an offer made, a counter-offer awaited). Meanwhile, we laid plans for remaking of our lives.

Eventually, the sale went through. The first thing we did after the closing was rip out the nasty gray carpet. Meeko the Wonder Dog assisted, in her own special way.

During the long interval between offer and closing, I had designed the renovation of our new home, and an addition for my office. There was also time to research the history of the house and its designer.


A Brief Digression Regarding Cliff May

Rancho Pequeño is one of about 174 ranch style homes built on six double-length blocks and two adjacent half-blocks, in 1955 and 1956. All of the houses have board-and-batten siding and vaulted ceilings throughout. The builder, T. Mitchell Burns, was the developer of the area (Harvey Park, in southwest Denver) and was also a real estate agent.

The houses themselves were designed by Cliff May, with his partner, Chris Choate. May lived in Southern California, where he had been designing custom and tract homes since the 1930’s. Cliff May was already well known in California through publications which featured his work and helped popularize his designs. One of the most prominent of these was Sunset Magazine, for which he designed a headquarters building.

A native Californian, he was deeply influenced by the mild climate of Southern California and the heritage of its large Mexican ranches (ranchos). He was descended, on his mother’s side, from one of these rancheros. As he stated in 1946, “A ranch house, because of its name alone, borrows friendliness, implicitly, informality, and gaiety from the men and women who, in the past, found those pleasures in ranch-house living.” (Cliff May and the California Ranch House, a research paper by Laura Gallegos; available on the cliffmayrancho.com website)

Cliff and his architectural partner, Chris Choate, designed and patented a system of prefabricating wall panels that would speed the construction process and lower costs for both builder and home owner. Panels were 80” high and 64” or 32” wide. Atop the wall panels, on each long side of the house, was placed a continuous 4” x 8” redwood beam. The 2x6 roof structure rested on a 6” x 14” wood beam that ran down the center of the house, supported by two 4x4 redwood posts in the middle of the span.

This prefabrication system was franchised to builders around the country (the “Cliff May-Chris Choate Manufacturer-Distributor System”). They were licensed to build the parts and assemble the homes, within specific territories. T. Mitchell Burns, for example, had the distributorship for all of Colorado and New Mexico, and the eastern half of Wyoming.

Cliff May Homes provided sales literature, and some national advertising as well. Eight floor plans were available. Of these, Burns built three in his Harvey Park development. These were modified for local conditions by changing French doors to singles with an adjacent fixed door panel and adding a fireplace to each floor plan. The floor plan shown below is the one for our house.

Burns created variety in the layouts by flipping or reversing floor plans, and by varying the arrangement of the house and detached carport on the sites. Some houses are closer, some farther, from the street. Some have carports in front of their houses, some are to the side, and so forth. All this manipulation yielded a streetscape that is incredibly varied compared to the usual 1950’s subdivision. Of course, additions, renovations and alterations over the years have varied the mix even more.

For more information about Cliff May, check out this website:
http://www.cliffmayrancho.com/


Back to the Rancho

We were gripped by the realization that we had just taken on two home renovation projects at once: work to prepare The Trendy Victorian for sale; and work needed to make the Rancho habitable. Little did we realize that most of the next year would be spent working on one or the other of these two projects.


Demolition and Discovery

Like all renovation projects, ours began with demolition. Following the dreadful gray carpet out the door were the kitchen cabinets (original, heavily painted over, and otherwise unremarkable). This proved to be a larger task than anticipated, because of the countertops. A previous owner had installed white ceramic tile over the original turquoise plastic laminate (Formica) countertops. They were enormously heavy.

The original ell-shaped, half wall separating the kitchen from the living and dining areas had been removed in the 1960’s (we would have taken it out anyway). The kitchen floor was next to go. It followed the layering theme of the countertops. On top were black and white vinyl tiles, laid checkerboard fashion over sheet vinyl flooring. This in turn was glued to a layer of ¼” plywood, which had been nailed into the diagonally-laid wood subflooring. As soon became evident, the nails had been driven through a final layering of vinyl asbestos tiles over more ¼” plywood. The whole mess was filthy, it was heavy and it was a constant threat to our hands and feet.

A roll-off dumpster was ordered up, lest we become hemmed in by refuse. It (and another one like it) would be needed. The roof had original, rock wool insulation (nasty stuff), but the walls had nothing. Therefore, we decided to insulate them. This required removing all the drywall from all the exterior walls. Messy, and difficult. Burns had used foil-faced fiberglass reinforced gypsum board in his Cliff May houses. This was assuredly the hardest drywall I have ever had anything to do with. It was also pale pink. Many hundreds of pounds of it went into the dumpsters.

Because of the design of the exterior wall panels, which included an x-brace within, it was impossible leave the drywall, drill holes at 16” intervals, and blow in insulation. It was also not feasible to use typical fiberglass batt insulation in the walls, once the drywall was off. Besides, fiberglass is not terribly environment-friendly. Therefore, we opted to install blown-in cellulose. Much of the insulation was recycled paper product (some of it newspaper, from the look of it). It had the advantages of being “green”, lower cost and very insulating.

We also removed and replaced a couple of interior walls. The bathroom, as noted, was tiny and called for a little more space. At the north end of the house, we removed two closets, so we could join the two bedrooms into one and create new closets.

Rancho Pequeño was commencing its transformation! The succeeding stages of this transformation will be talked about in coming posts.

Thanks for reading.