A New Sears "Avalon" in Valparaiso

Periodically I report on new homes that are based on Sears models. A builder in Valparaiso, Indiana is selling a house that is purportedly based on the Sears Avalon model from 1923.

1708 Briam Circle, Valparaiso, Indiana. Photo courtesy of Aldred Homes.

Sears Avalon from the 1923 Modern Homes catalog.

I appreciate the sentiment, but this house does not look much like the Avalon. They are both cross-gabled and have a porch and that's the extent of the resemblance.

According to an article in The Times of Northwest Indiana:

“As builders and designers we sometimes have to come up with new ideas by rearranging a few different concepts and elements into something new and fresh,” Aryl Aldred of Aldred Homes in Valparaiso said. “Sometime what’s new is really a fresh approach to what’s been done before. For example, the front porch of our newest home in Wild Rose is patterned after a 1923 Sears Roebuck Modern Home called the Avalon.”

A California-bungalow house with tons of Craftsman-style charm, the Avalon’s signature wide overhanging roof and deep front porch was recreated by Aldred, right down to the tapered columns.

“For each of our new floor plans we start from scratch,” Aldred, who has spent many days touring a variety of Chicago’s long-established neighborhoods for inspiration, said. “We already had the plans and elevations for this home complete, and we were looking for a front façade that would catch your eye and make a real impact on the street. After pouring over many of the Sears Roebuck Modern Homes plans, we came across the Avalon with its classic but forgotten front porch.”

The house has 2,568 square feet and costs $329,900.

A Plan Book House in Des Plaines

Sears and the other kit home manufacturers sold customers the blueprints for their houses, the pre-cut lumber, and everything else needed--including doors, windows, shingles, and paint. Customers had everything shipped to them and all the framing pieces were labeled for faster assembly.

Other people purchased home designs from architectural plan books. A plan book was a huge hardcover catalog with pictures and layouts of all the available houses. But the plan book companies would just sell the customer paperwork--sets of blueprints, a list of all the material needed to construct the house, and sample contracts. The customer was responsible for going to the lumberyard to purchase the lumber and cutting it to the appropriate sizes. Obviously, this was much more time-consuming than assembling a house with pre-cut pieces.

However, it was much cheaper to buy a set of standard blueprints from a plan book company than to hire an architect to draft them. As a result, there are plan book houses all over the United States.

The Home Builders Catalog from 1927.

The Home Builders Catalog Co. of Chicago was one of the leading plan book companies. Home Builders Catalog offered many models that were almost identical to the ones offered by Sears, Montgomery Ward, and the other kit home manufacturers. This makes identifying kit homes even more difficult, since it's often impossible to tell the difference between a kit house and a plan book house without a very detailed study.

The Elyria from the Home Builders Catalog in 1929.

The Sears Mitchell from the 1928 Modern Homes catalog. Telling the difference between certain plan book models and kit house models can be nearly impossible.

 

I was browsing through the Des Plaines Memory site and came across this old photo of a house. It definitely was inspired by the Sears Ardara (or vice-versa).

1184 Jeannette, Des Plaines.

Sears Ardara. Similar, but not a match.

Leave it to kit home researcher Rachel Shoemaker to figure out the model was from the 1928 Home Builders Catalog.

1184 Jeannette, Des Plaines.

The Covada from the 1928 Homes Builders Catalog. Scan courtesy of Rachel Shoemaker. Even the trellises match! However, the house in Des Plaines has an addition off the left side in the dining room/kitchen area.

1184 Jeannette as it looks today.

This Covada was built by  a developer, W.L. Plew, who built dozens of houses in the Des Plaines Gardens subdivision (today called Westfield) . I would bet many of these houses were built using blueprints ordered from a plan book company.

Another photo on the Des Plaines Memory site provides some provenance.

Interestingly, W.L. Plew & Company used an illustration of the Covada on their letterhead... but not the one they built (the house in the illustration is lacking the addition). This illustration is taken directly from the Home Builders Catalog. 

Authenticating a Sears Hazelton

On a recent trip to Norwood Park, I spotted what I thought might be a Sears Hazelton.

5822 N. West Circle, Chicago. Photo courtesy of George Kelly.

Sears Hazelton

The houses have many similarities, but there was one notable difference. On the house in Norwood Park, the front door is on the far right of the house, and it appears to lead into a vestibule of some sort based on the tiny window. The Hazelton has a center entry into a parlor.

Front door in the wrong location. Pretty leaded glass! Photo courtesy of George Kelly.

  
I ruled out the house as a Hazelton.

A few weeks later a man named George Kelly posted on Facebook that he thought he might own a Sears house. And his house was the purported Hazelton in Norwood Park.

Kelly and others on Facebook pieced together various pieces of evidence needed to authenticate the house as being a Sears Hazelton (although it was heavily customized, with a different interior layout). Sears Homes goddess Rebecca Hunter believes that you need at least five pieces of evidence to authenticate a kit house. We have five.

1. The house was built in summer of 1916. This corresponds to a year when the Sears Hazelton was sold.

2. The architect of the house was Ernest Braucher. Braucher was a notable architect of Chicago bungalows, and he also designed some plans for Sears homes, such as the Sears Avalon.

3. The house's exterior dimensions precisely match those of the Sears Hazelton.

4. The millwork on the front porch matches balusters sold in the 1915 Sears Millwork catalog.

The porch millwork. Photo courtesy of George Kelly.

5. Kelly found a shipping label on a piece of lumber.

The shipping label. The return address is 925 Homan Avenue in Chicago, which was the Sears, Roebuck and Co. headquarters.  Photo courtesy of George Kelly.
 

The original owners of the Hazelton in 1916 were Soren E. Nielsen and his wife Katrina. As you can see in the shipping label, the building materials were shipped from Sears to him, and he was to be notified at his home at 2824 W. Diversey when they arrived at the Norwood Park train station. Soren worked as a grocer.

In 1918, Katrina at age 61 became ill and they moved out of the house.  Soren rented the house to optician Patrick Joyce and his family, and they had moved in by September 1918. Katrina died in November of that year.

From 1918 to 1920, the Hazelton was rented to the Joyces. In 1921, Soren sold the house on West Circle Ave. to Bertram Anderson and his new bride, Agnes. 

Bertram Anderson. Photo courtesy of Carrie Anderson.

Agnes Anderson. Photo courtesy of Carrie Anderson.

Bertram and Agnes had been married for just over a year. They referred to the Hazelton as the "honeymoon cottage", according to their granddaughter, Carrie Anderson. Bertram's father, William B. Anderson, owned a nearby onion farm, and Agnes's family lived on land where Resurrection Medical Center is today. So it's likely they bought the house to be close to the family homesteads.

Bertram Anderson outside the Hazelton. Photo courtesy of Carrie Anderson.

Sadly, the honeymoon ended in 1926 when Bertram died of an illness. Agnes was pregnant with twins at the time. In November 1926 she sold the Hazelton to Walter Wolf, a florist.

George Kelly's parents purchased the house in 1963 and it has stayed in the family ever since.

Photo from the early 1970's courtesy of the Illinois Historic Preservation Agency.

The front parlor. Photo courtesy of George Kelly.
 

The dining room with the unique bay window. Photo courtesy of George Kelly.
 

The city of Chicago has identified this Hazelton as "historically significant in the context of the surrounding community".