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Sears houses, sold in kits and delivered to your local railroad station, were the biggest and most ambitious product offered by the company that sold everything via a catalog. In 1908, Sears issued its first specialty catalog for houses, Book of Modern Homes and Building Plans, featuring 44 house styles ranging in price from US $360–$2,890. As its mail-order catalogs were already sent to millions of homes, Sears had a distinct advantage over other kit-home competitors. Modern Homes catalogs were issued most years (apparently sometimes twice a year) from 1908 until 1940, although there are a few years for which no catalogs are presently known. In the beginning, Modern Homes designs were assigned numbers rather than names, but soon titles—often suggesting a style provenance—began to accompany the attractive illustrations.
A Sears Roebuck house ©
"You realize you live in an example of what Sears was able to accomplish back in the day when they were the biggest catalog seller in the country," says Andrew Mutch, who owns a Sears home outside Detroit. Sears issued its first Christmas catalog in 1933, featuring such must-have items as a Mickey Mouse watch, a Lionel electric train set, a “Miss Pigtails” doll and live singing canaries. In the decades that followed, the catalog would be adorned with Christmas scenes, even as its pages swelled. By 1968, when it was officially renamed the “Wish Book,” the catalog boasted 225 pages of toys and 380 pages of gifts for adults, for a grand total of 605 pages. The Malden (Model No. 3721) cost $2641 in the period between 1933 and 1940.
Kit Houses from Sears, Roebuck
Other styles included the Vallonia, the Martha Washington and the Crescent. Sears even offered a six-classroom schoolhouse, complete with an auditorium and library. Sears promised that, working without a carpenter and only rudimentary skills, a person could finish their Sears mail-order home in less than 90 days. Most customers, however, relied on local builders to put their house together.
Vintage Mail Order Houses That Came from Sears Catalogs, 1910s-1940s
In lowering the barrier to entry, it had allowed Sears to sell far more kit homes far faster than any of its competitors. The company ended up foreclosing on tens of thousands of its very own customers. But by then, Sears houses had become a staple of the American landscape.
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Sears Homes
Richard W. Sears turned a handsome profit, then moved to Minneapolis to establish the R.W. While we were there, we met an interesting couple whose mission it is to restore historical homes in downtown Cordele. I’ve been admiring, with interest, the progress on a big old home across from the downtown post office for the last year or more so it was really interesting to meet the people doing the work. Don’t rely on light fixtures or plumbing, because those components were sold outside the kits as well, she says. Websites can provide a lot of tips on what to look for, or it is possible to bring in someone for an authentication. Quinn led the effort to establish the Field Club Historic District with the National Register of Historic Places.
The Story on Sears Houses
“If it wasn’t an architect-designed or building-designed home, there was a good chance it was going to be a one-off or it could be a kit home,” Quinn says. Official property and mortgage records can be helpful, although sometimes old files go missing, which was the case when Ed Quinn went to continue his research on the original city permits for Omaha’s Field Club neighborhood about a decade ago. With several factors at play, it can be hard to distinguish a Sears house or a pattern-book house from other builds from the same era. "The whole kit home phenomenon is pretty unique to architecture in the United States of America. So therefore I feel very strongly that we must save at least a percentage of these houses," she says. When Mutch purchased the home, he received a rather unusual housewarming gift from the previous owners — a binder of information on Sears homes. By the 1950s, Sears had opened more than 700 stores in the United States and had expanded into Mexico and Canada, where it joined forces with a Canadian mail-order company and became Simpson-Sears.
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"It's where you went when you didn't have any money to shop at the other stores," she says. The Hamilton model home, now owned by Andrew Mutch, under construction in Novi, Mich., is pictured in 1926. He isn't old enough to remember Sears in its prime, but he says he and other kit home owners are saddened by the company's financial troubles. "I realized not only was this a house, but there's this whole story behind the house," Mutch says. "Being middle class and being able to go buy and own a home that you can build with your own hands" makes the houses special, he says.
Although it is sometimes claimed that no Sears kit homes were built after 1940, Sears continued to offer pre-cut kit homes through 1941 and into early 1942. Primarily shipped via railroad boxcars, these kits included most of the materials needed to build a house. Once delivered, many of these houses were assembled by the new homeowner, relatives, friends and neighbors, in a fashion similar to the traditional barn-raisings of farming families.
More recently, prefabricated construction has been heralded as the future of affordable, eco-friendly housing (including high-rises), since it’s easier to cut down on waste when materials are cut in a factory compared to traditional on-site construction. Still, today's prefab home construction isn't ready to become the housing revolution some architectural boosters predicted. Transporting homes can be expensive, and some prefab housing developments have run into design flaws and technological roadblocks. In comparison, getting your home straight from a Sears catalog sounds pretty good. Sears may be leaving our malls, but physical mementos of the company’s heritage live on across the United States. In fact, to many architectural historians, they are more desirable than ever.
And it’s around this time that Richard Sears saw a way to sell even more. The terms were easy, requiring a down payment of 25% of the cost of the house and lot, as little as 6% interest for 5 years, or a higher rate for up to 15 years. More radically, the application form asked no questions about race, ethnicity, gender or even finances. This made home ownership possible for thousands of buyers who were not welcome at their local banks. Most of the houses had two or three bedrooms, although some had four or even five. The majority had only one bathroom, and some, especially in the early 20th century, had none, since many rural and even some suburban areas lacked piped-in water and sewers or septic fields.
Optional materials included window screens, storm windows, plasterboard, plumbing, and heating and electrical fixtures. In addition to blueprints, a construction manual with step-by-step instructions was included. In 1935, some newspaper reports stated that Sears had "discontinued" the "modern homes department". However, there's no evidence that Sears actually stopped selling homes and it continued to issue a new "Modern Homes" catalog throughout the 1930s.
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