Modern Home No. 161

In the midst of my various, wandering research forays I discovered a large collection of houses that Sears, Roebuck & Company sold via mail-order to folks around the country. To start with, I chose one house design I particularly liked, and I modeled it based on one very small, and very blurry image from a website. It's not accurate, as I have since discovered, but these renderings still look pretty good. I present, for your perusal, The Niota.

The Front

The Rear

The dimensions of my house are not terribly accurate when compared with the floor plans reproduced in the book "Small Houses of the Twenties". My design is too large. The original was 22' x 34', and my design is 24' x 37'6", or about 10% larger. I did get the height/width proportions correct, but the book says the first floor ceilings are 9', and the second floor ceilings are 8' 6". After spending a lot of time attempting to redo my model with the correct proportions, I'm not sure the text actually matches the house, as shown. In fact, I'm sure the second floor ceilings were no higher than 8', which is the height I made them. The geometry of the roof and the various other proportions don't work quite as well with a taller ceiling.

Some things worth noting:

• The kitchen is miniscule. It's even smaller in the catalog version. I moved the sink from the left-hand kitchen wall to the back wall, so it could get a window. Shoot me, but I prefer my kitchens this way. I placed a refrigerator in the only spot that seemed practical. It's hard to say where an icebox would have been placed back in 1911 when this design debuted. Probably where I put the fridge.
• I made the back porch concrete, as well as the stairs. It seems unlikely that the original plan was that way. The back porch would have been wooden planks, and the stairs would have been wood, as well.
• In the original design, there is an apparent discontinuity of the chimney between the first floor and the second floor that isn't in my own plan. Yep, I cut out a photocopy of the design and overlaid the second floor image with the first floor image, and the chimney makes a 2' shift to the east at the second floor. Not bloody likely, if you ask me. The plan must be wrong. It makes more sense that the chimney intruded into the panty, and not the kitchen. On the other hand, the kitchen stove would have needed chimney access, so ... you make the call.

First Floor

On the second floor, below:

• I like the way the stairs are tucked up under the roof. I didn't think there would be enough headroom, but there is.
• The bathroom is somewhat larger than the original plan. It's almost a foot longer and over a foot wider.
• All the bedrooms are larger than the original, but that should be no real surprise, since I started with a larger footprint.

Second Floor

Here are some images. I hope you enjoy them as much as I do. I had a great deal of fun modeling this house. It won't be the only one I do. Not by a long shot.

This is the front view, above, shown at night. Yes, I do like a night view.

This is another front view, from the other side. I took liberties and made the dormer over the bathroom into a gabled dormer, instead of a shed dormer, as is shown on the other front view. Actually, I would have preferred that both dormers be gabled, but that's not how it was shown.

The view from the front doorway looking toward the dining room. The stairs are on the right (gee, you think?!?), and the "parlor" is on the left. I decided to make the doors between the front hall and the dining room, and between parlor and dining room into doorways. I think they look better, not closing off these areas. In 1911 they might have preferred to dine in relative private, but ... not in this plan.

This looks up the stairs. I wanted to show how the ceiling over the stairs might have been designed to look. Don't look too closely at the funky crown molding on the short piece of wall about center in this view. The program doesn't allow me to dink with moldings, too much, so I couldn't make them look "correct".

The parlor, though perhaps folks back in 1911 would not have had a print from an impressionist artist, though the painting in question did exist in that time. I felt something needed to go on that wall, so there it is.

Here is the dining room, looking toward the front of the house from the kitchen doorway. Today dining rooms aren't the large, formal rooms that they were back around the turn of the century. In many house designs I've looked at, the dining room was the second largest room in the house (the parlor is largest).

Here are the kitchen cabinets and the sink. I put in a gas stove, though in 1911 they probably didn't look quite like this. This kitchen has practically no counter space, a fact that makes me wonder what someone would have done to remodel this house in later years. Perhaps the back porch would have been incorporated into the kitchen. It's hard to say.

And this looks toward the dining room door and the rest of the kitchen. Yes, these two images show the entire kitchen and everything in it. It's so small you would have to go outside just to change your mind.

Here is the bathroom. I tried to place fixtures that would be somewhat representative of the era. The claw foot tub is a definite "you bet". The rest are close, enough. There's no mirror for the sink, so I wonder how someone shaved. In looking at the actual plan, there appear to be only two windows in this room, but clearly one window intrudes in front of the sink. Perhaps the mirror was to the side, or something.

This is the middle bedroom, the one with the dormer that's visible in the main front view. It seemed the more interesting view. And once again the crown molding isn't looking as it should. Forgive me, OK?