In the early 20th century, do-it-yourself kit homes helped fuel the spread of suburbia. Now, with appreciation for the simple and sturdy houses on the rise, an expert tours Annapolis, searching for kit homes among the town’s Georgian- and Federal-style jewels.

Imagine building a home of your own, at half the market price, using top- quality materials and the latest architectural designs—and all from a kit engineered to be so simple that an amateur carpenter could assemble it in a few months.

Too good to believe? Not for the urban dwellers of the early 20th century who, by the thousands, ordered catalog homes from more than a dozen companies, including Sears Roebuck, Montgomery Ward, and Aladdin. The catalogs, written in often flowery prose, informed customers that they, too, could live the American dream by following a thick manual of step-by-step directions and build a house on their own land, often within a streetcar ride of the crowded downtowns.

It was the birth of suburbia, shipped in 30,000-piece kits, each packed in one or two railroad boxcars and delivered by train or even barge. Sears estimated that the average man could, in good weather, build a kit house in about 90 days. Prices ranged from $500 or so up to $5,000, while styles varied from simple cottages to grand, two-story Victorian mansions.

No one knows for sure how many of the kit houses were sold, but Rosemary Thornton, author and national expert on the kit home phenomenon, says that Sears Roebuck alone sold 75,000 in 370 different designs between 1908 and 1940 across the country, including the Chesapeake Bay area.

Annapolis may boast one of the greatest concentrations of Georgian-style buildings in the country, but it also has a little-known collection of kit houses tucked among its stately homes and brick townhouses. “Annapolis has a dazzling collection,” Thornton says. “And it’s unusual because so many of the homes were the finer kit homes with nice amenities, lots of space, and with prices over $2,000.” 

Last fall, photographer John Sheally and I tagged along with Thornton and Patricia Blick, chief of Annapolis’ Historic Planning Commission, on a “windshield survey,” an informal inventory of the city’s kit houses. We’ve toured with Thornton before so we weren’t surprised when she loaded Blick’s lime-green Volkswagen Beetle with cartons of well-thumbed vintage kit home catalogs, copies of the books she’s written, and binders of notes.

A decade of tracking kit houses and memorizing catalogs has evolved into a personal, almost mystic relationship between the 50-year-old author and the houses she loves. “The houses call out to me,” says Thornton, aka, “The House Whisperer.”

Kit homes have undergone sometimes massive renovations, making many of them nearly unrecognizable so Thornton ranks her finds on an authenticity scale of 1 to 10, a measure we’ve nicknamed the Rose Rating. Her evaluations are frank, sometimes melodramatically so. “Architectural train wreck” translates as a kit home that’s been neglected or “modernized” almost beyond recognition. We hear “Poor baby, this is a sin, I feel your pain,” and we know she’s commiserating with a kit house victimized by insensitive remodeling.

To authenticate a possible kit home, Thornton needs to get inside, exploring attics and basements, brushing cobwebs out of her dark hair to search for rafter markings. Wedging her tall frame behind commodes and bathtubs, she checks for manufacturer’s marks. She crawls under breakfast nook tables and scrutinizes doorknobs and hinges. She asks for any surviving original documents.
Often this all occurs while the bemused homeowners, who may never have heard of kit homes, nor suspected they were living in one, get an impromptu Thornton history lesson.

In 1906, two brothers, a lawyer and a newspaper reporter in Bay City, Mich., inherited a lumber company from their father. To boost sales they developed boat kits with pre-cut, numbered pieces for easy assembly and then moved up to offering kits for houses.

Ten years later their company, Aladdin, was offering a full-color catalog of kits for small bungalows up to large Foursquare and Colonial Revival styles.

Sears Roebuck had been selling building supplies in its catalogs since 1895, but not very profitably. In 1908, the company introduced its “Book of Modern Homes and Building Plans,” which featured new kits in seven revisions in just one year. The final version offered 44 home models (and one school). Houses ranged from $695 to $4,115. The school, priced at $11,500 for plans and materials, was the only commercial structure Sears ever offered, according to Thornton.

As other competing firms—Montgomery Ward, Harris, Gordon Van Tine—entered the kit house market, Sears bought up lumber and millwork firms to supply the kits. It sold furniture and accessories to duplicate the catalog illustrations of the home interiors. The company also offered mortgages to individual kit home buyers—one-stop shopping, catalog style.

But soon the Depression soured the housing industry—and kit house sales. In April 1933, Thornton says, Fortune magazine reported that the sales of Sears kit houses had decreased 40 percent from the previous year. As sales continued to fall, Sears followed the example of other struggling kit home manufacturers and published its last “Book of Modern Homes” catalog in 1940.

In the early 1990s, the vintage houses resurged in popularity as preservationists and home restorers rediscovered their nostalgic charm and solid durability. Thornton and a handful of other experts have identified hundreds of kit houses across the country, hoping to save them from inaccurate restoration or demolition.

And now she’s visiting Annapolis.

We’re following the green Beetle as Blick leads us through early 20th-century neighborhoods where she suspects kit houses might be found. Thornton’s radar must be working—we see the brake lights flash and Blick neatly swerves to the right curb of Bay Ridge Avenue in Eastport.

We’ve made a sighting.

The Wild Orchid Café, a well-known restaurant, bears a strong resemblance to Sears Model 126. As we step onto the wide, columned front porch, Thornton nods in approval; kit house vibes are in the air.

The earliest Sears homes were numbered rather than named. The 1909 catalog describes No. 126 as a “five-room bungalow in 20th-century Queen Anne style, light and airy with perfect ventilation.” The kit sold for $657.

Thornton explains that the catalog text was often more quixotic than architecturally accurate and she sees No. 126 as a prairie-style bungalow.

“No. 126 was a common plan used by several companies and appeared in plan books,” Thornton says, glancing around the open dining areas. “This does appear to be a kit house, but it could be from another company than Sears.”

The owners, Jim Wilder, an Annapolis native, and his wife, Karen, aren’t around, but I call them later and learn that they’d heard of the kit house connection before.

“I thought that meant it was something cheap,” Jim Wilder says, laughing when he realizes that the building is a rarity, offered only from 1909 to 1913. “I feel a lot better now then when I first heard about it.”

Leaving the Wild Orchid, we crisscross the city, randomly following Blick’s map and Thornton’s intuition. Together they find more than a dozen likely kit houses—some in pristine condition, a few sadly neglected. Since, Thornton estimates, 30 to 50 percent of the kit homes were modified or customized when they were built—and many more were modified over the years—identification takes an educated eye.

She looks for clues such as the curved dentil moulding over the door of a two-story Sears Newcastle on Chase Street in Murray Hill. The porch supports on a nearby bungalow on Smith Avenue indicate that it’s a Sears Osborne model. We notice a rounded door in an arch-shaped entryway on Archwood Avenue. “Got to be a Montgomery Ward Kenwood from the late 1920s,” she says.

Still in Murray Hill, the Beetle comes to a semi-screeching halt on Lafayette Avenue. Thornton jumps from the front seat and points to a sprawling stucco home with a casual Mediterranean charm.
“Looks like a Sears Osborne,” she says. 
We knock on the door and owner Angela Nikiforou takes a break from making baklava with her granddaughter to talk with us. She tells us that she immigrated to the United States in 1964, sailing from London on the Queen Mary to Ellis Island. When she and her husband bought the house it was painted pink and known in the neighborhood as the Pink Palace. The Nikiforous repainted and expanded it
as their family grew, never suspecting they were living in a kit house.

Looking around the house and basement, Thornton searches beyond the renovations and finds clues—original arched openings between rooms, an original column in what was once the dining room.

“It’s such a classic house and you don’t see this in other catalogs or plan books,” she says. “The unique arrangement of the oversize columns on the front porch and the unusual porch off the dining room—it’s all there.”

Taking everything into account, Thornton announces a 10 on the Rose Rating—this is a classic Sears Osborne.

Still layering the baklava, Nikiforou takes the news calmly. “How about that?” she says. “Nice to know.”

Back in the cars, we spot a Sears Lynnhaven, a two-story house with a steep gable over a recessed front door, on McKendree Street in Homewood-Germantown. Then, another possible Lynnhaven, supersized and customized, on Sixth Street in Eastport. And also in Eastport, a small bungalow with a balcony like second-floor dormer—a Sears Carlin.

But nowhere is Thornton more touched than when we walk along Bay Ridge Avenue in Eastport and find a 1916 Gordon Van Tine No. 575, empty and for sale. The small bungalow with the steeply pitched roof and wide front porch is, according to the original Gordon Van Tine catalog, “the biggest little house you can buy.”

This is a real find because even though it needs work, Thornton says “nobody has hurt this house.“She walks around the bungalow, peers in the window and, with her hand on the door frame, murmurs “I love you, little house.”

In two days we’ve covered much of Annapolis—and identified about 40 kit houses—but, Thornton says, this is only the beginning. Blick seems as excited as Thornton to discover kit houses in almost all wards of the city. She hopes to find additional funds for an official, in-depth survey and, she says, to work with the Maryland Historical Trust to evaluate the collection in the larger Maryland context of kit homes.

“The kit homes aren’t grandiose castles by the sea, but these were the workers’ homes and the middle-class homes, and they’re an important part of the city’s history, too,” Thornton says. “And sadly, it’s this niche in a community’s history that is most likely to get lost and forgotten through the decades.”

Phyllis Speidell writes from Hampton Roads, Va.