What is a ranch style house? Cliff May's California ranch, the low roof and the picture window, the 1950s suburb, the raised ranch and the split, and why it is coming back

Architecture · 4 September 2026

A ranch style house is a one-storey house, long and low, with a gently pitched roof of wide eaves, an asymmetrical front with a large picture window, an attached garage or carport at one end, a front door under the eave without a porch, sliding glass doors from the living room to a patio at the back, and an open plan in which the living, dining and kitchen areas run together and the bedrooms are grouped down a hall; it was the most common house built in the United States from about 1945 to 1975, nine out of ten new houses in some years, and it came from the California architect Cliff May, who from 1932 built houses in the manner of the Spanish ranchos of the state's past, one room deep around a courtyard, and from the low horizontal houses of Frank Lloyd Wright, and was taken up by the builders of the postwar suburbs, who could put it on a slab, on a wide lot, with a car beside it, faster and cheaper than anything with stairs. Below: where it came from, the features, the plan and the family room, the kinds, why it fitted the suburb, the great tracts, the fall and the return, the differences from the bungalow and the mid-century modern house, where to see them, what they cost, and the myths, with the houses that preceded it in what is a bungalow and the style beside it in Mid-century modern architecture.

Cliff May and the rancho

The ranchos of Spanish and Mexican California were adobe houses of one storey, one room deep, with a corredor, a covered porch, along the front or around a courtyard, low-roofed with tile, and the rooms opening onto the porch rather than into one another; Cliff May, a San Diego furniture maker and musician descended from the rancheros, built his first house in that manner in 1932, of adobe-coloured stucco with a low roof, a courtyard and rooms that opened to it, and sold it, and by 1939 had built fifty in San Diego and Los Angeles and been published in "Sunset" magazine as the "California ranch house"; his houses were long and low, turned their backs to the street and opened to a private garden, had the living room at the centre and the bedrooms in a wing, and used glass walls and sliding doors as the adobe had used the corredor. "Sunset" and the "Sunset Western Ranch Houses" book of 1946 spread the type through the West, and May himself designed for the builders, with 18,000 houses built to his plans by the 1950s; the other source was Wright's Prairie and Usonian houses, low, horizontal, with the carport, the slab and the open plan, which the builders copied without the architect. Ranch-style house.

How to recognise a ranch house

• One storey, on a slab or a crawl space, long and low, wider than any earlier house, 15 to 25 m across the front on a lot of 20 to 30 m.
• A low roof, hipped or gabled, of 4 in 12 or less, with wide eaves and no visible rafters, of asphalt shingles or, in the West, wood shakes or tile; a chimney of brick or stone, often a wide one at the front as a feature.
• An asymmetrical front, the garage at one end under the same roof, the living room with a picture window or a bay in the middle, the bedroom wing at the other end with smaller windows, the door somewhere between under the eave, with a stoop and no porch.
• Windows wide rather than tall, horizontal sliders or awning windows, sometimes a band of high windows in the bedrooms for privacy, and the picture window, a single large pane flanked by two openers, on the front.
• The back open to the yard with sliding glass doors to a concrete patio, the "indoor-outdoor living" of the advertisements.
• Materials mixed, brick or stone at the base or on the chimney and the front, horizontal siding or board and batten above, in one or two storeys of colour; the decoration, if any, is shutters that do not close, a cupola or a weathervane on the garage, and a wagon wheel by the driveway.
• Inside, an L of living and dining room with the kitchen behind a counter, a family room next to the kitchen from the mid-1950s, three bedrooms and one and a half or two baths down a hall in the wing, a utility room, and, in the Midwest, a full basement under it all.

The kinds

• California ranch. May's kind: an L or U around a courtyard or patio, long, with a low tile or shake roof, a board-and-batten or stucco wall, exposed beams inside, and glass to the garden; the big, custom, Western one.
• Suburban ranch. The builder's kind of 1950–70: a rectangle of 100 to 150 square metres, three bedrooms, the garage at the end, the picture window, on a slab, the house of Lakewood, Levittown and every tract; "the ranch" without qualification.
• Raised ranch. A ranch lifted on a full basement half out of the ground, so that the front door opens on a landing with a stair up to the living floor and down to a garage and family room in the basement; a two-storey house of the 1960s and 70s that calls itself one storey, common in the Northeast and unloved.
• Split-level. The ranch cut into three half-levels, the living room and kitchen at ground level, the bedrooms a half-flight up over the garage, the family room a half-flight down; a house of 1955–75 for sloping lots and growing families, the house of "The Brady Bunch".
• Storybook and Cinderella ranch. The ranch of the 1950s with gingerbread, diamond-paned windows, scalloped bargeboards and a steeper roof, in Southern California, as a fairy-tale cottage stretched flat.
• Rambler. The name for the ranch in the Northwest and the upper Midwest; "rancher" in British Columbia and the Mid-Atlantic; "single-storey" in the listings.

Why the suburbs built it

The house of 1946 had to be built fast and cheap for the veterans with a GI loan and no down payment, and the ranch needed no stairs, no second-floor framing, no basement in the West, and could be put up on a concrete slab with radiant heating by a crew that did the same thing on every lot; the lots were wide because the land at the edge of the city was cheap and the family had a car, so the house could spread sideways with the garage attached, which the Cape and the bungalow had never had; the picture window looked at the street and the lawn, the sliding door at the yard and the barbecue, and the open plan put the mother in the kitchen in sight of the children in the family room and the television, which arrived at the same time; and the ranch was informal, Western and new, which is what the magazines and the builders sold. The FHA, which insured the mortgages and set the standards, approved the plan; the highway programme of 1956 built the roads to it; and by 1960 the ranch was the American house from Long Island to Los Angeles, the split-level its cousin in the hills. It was also, on its slab with no stairs, the first house for the old, and the retirement communities of Arizona and Florida are ranches to this day.

The great tracts

• Lakewood, California (1950–53). 17,500 ranches on 3,500 acres south of Los Angeles, built at 100 a day by Weingart, Taper and Boyar, with a shopping centre, the largest development in the country when it opened; 100,000 people by 1954.
• Levittown, New York (from 1949) and Pennsylvania (1952). The Levitts switched from Capes to ranches in 1949, 17,000 of them on Long Island with a carport and a picture window, and built the Pennsylvania town of 17,000 with six ranch and split models.
• Park Forest, Illinois; Daly City, California; the Eichler tracts of Palo Alto and Orange County, where Joseph Eichler built 11,000 modernist ranches with glass walls and atriums, the architect's ranch for the middle class.
• Cliff May Homes. The Cliff May Homes of Long Beach, Denver and Cupertino, the prefabricated "Californian" of 1953, 18,000 built.
• Everywhere. The suburbs of Phoenix, Dallas, Houston, Atlanta, Denver and the Sunbelt cities are ranches almost entirely, and the older cities' rings of 1950–70 are ranches and splits.

The fall and the return

By 1975 the lots were expensive and the families wanted more house on them, and the two-storey "Colonial" and the neo-eclectic house of the 1980s and 90s, with a two-storey foyer and a three-car garage, replaced the ranch as the builder's house, while the ranch of 1955 was the starter house, the old people's house and the teardown; the raised ranch and the split were despised outright. The return began about 2000, with the revival of mid-century modern taste, the ageing of the boomers who want no stairs, the open plan that the ranch had first, and the price of the lots the ranches sit on in the first-ring suburbs, so that a 1955 ranch in Palm Springs, Denver or Austin is bought for its bones and its yard and given a new kitchen; the "modern ranch" and the "farmhouse ranch" are the builders' best sellers of the 2020s, and the single-storey house is again a third of new houses.

Ranch, bungalow, mid-century modern, rambler

• Bungalow. The ranch's parent of 1905–30: one storey with a porch, on a narrow lot, with the Craftsman's wood and brackets; the ranch is a bungalow without the porch, twice as wide, with a garage and a picture window.
• Mid-century modern. The architect's house of the same years, of glass walls, flat or butterfly roofs, post-and-beam and exposed structure, by Neutra, Eichler, the Case Study architects; a ranch is a builder's house with a pitched roof and traditional trim, and an Eichler is a ranch that went to college. The style is in Mid-century modern architecture.
• Minimal traditional. The small house of 1935–50 with a lower roof and a front gable, the FHA's Cape without the charm; the ranch's older sibling.
• Rambler and rancher. Regional names for the same house.
• Contemporary. The 1960s and 70s ranch with a shed roof, vertical siding and no picture window, the last of the line.
• Farmhouse. The modern "farmhouse" of the 2010s is a ranch with a steeper roof, a porch put back and board-and-batten in white; the ranch has come round to the porch it dropped.

Where to see them, and what they cost

Palm Springs, with its Alexander tracts of 1955–65 and Modernism Week each February; Lakewood, with its museum of the tract; Rancho Estates in Long Beach, 700 Cliff May houses on their own; the Eichlers of Palo Alto and Orange, with tours; Arapahoe Acres in Denver, a district on the National Register; and every suburb of 1950–70, where the ranch is the house on the corner. A tract ranch of 1955 costs what its lot is worth, from 150,000 dollars in the Midwest to 1.5 million in California; an Eichler 2 to 4 million; a Cliff May original 3 to 10; the problems are the flat or low roof and its drainage, the slab and its plumbing, the single-pane glass and the aluminium windows, the asbestos in the floor tile and the popcorn ceilings, and the rewards are the plan, the yard, the light and the absence of stairs, which is why the buyers of 2025 are the same ages as the buyers of 1955.

Versions and theories

• The ranch is a Western house. It began in California and was named for the ranchos; the Midwest built more of them, with basements, than the West did.
• Cliff May invented it. He named it, designed the best and sold the idea; the builders invented the tract ranch from his plans and Wright's, and May was not an architect by licence until 1956.
• Ranches were cheap houses. The tract ranch was; May's were expensive, and the ranch of a Hollywood producer in 1950 was the most expensive house in the country.
• The ranch killed the porch and the neighbourhood. The ranch turned the house to the back yard and the car, and the porch went; the sociologists have blamed it for the loneliness of the suburb since 1957, and the farmhouse ranch of 2020 has put the porch back.
• The split-level is a ranch. A ranch cut into levels for a slope and a bigger family; the builders sold it as one, and the buyers of 1965 preferred it.
• Ranches are ugly. The tract ranch of 1955 was called the ugliest house in America by every architect for forty years; the same architects now restore them, and Palm Springs charges admission.

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