ROANOKE TIMES
Copyright (c) 1996, Roanoke Times
DATE: Sunday, April 21, 1996 TAG: 9604220008
SECTION: HOMES PAGE: 1 EDITION: METRO
DATELINE: ATLANTA
SOURCE: JILL SABULIS COX NEWS SERVICE
It's the baby boomer launch pad, Home Sweet Home to a generation. The American ranch house is 50 years old and newly eligible for designation on the National Register of Historic Places.
``I think it's a hoot,'' said Jeanne Gura of the Atlanta Preservation Center, which is honoring the anniversary with a ranch house tour on Sunday. ``People just don't realize that this uniquely American style of architecture has become historically significant. Who would have thought?''
Certainly not some of the homeowners who are opening their ranches for the tour.
Landscape architect Rob Takiguchi, 48, and his wife, Mimi Nelson-Takiguchi, a 44-year-old poet, said they were floored by the idea that their 1956 redbrick ranch is a piece of history. ``I feel like Ozzie Nelson,'' Takiguchi said - mired in the '50s. ``But I know that I really like the house.''
The three-bedroom, 21/2-bath ranch had belonged to Nelson-Takiguchi's parents, and she grew up there during the days of Sputnik, the space race, the Cold War. Nothing has been changed, not the cedar paneling or the harvest-gold appliances.
``When I first moved here (11/2 years ago), I was thinking, `Gosh, we could add a story here and do this and that,''' Takiguchi said. ``But then I stopped and said, `What am I thinking?' This is beautiful!''
Takiguchi's enthusiasm isn't universal.
Atlanta architect Amy Aronson has written ``Recreating the Ranch'' and is in negotiations for its publication in 1997. She lives in a renovated ranch house but admits that fondness for the plain one-story dwelling is ``an acquired taste.''
``We feel about ranches today the way people looked at Victorians in the 1950s,'' she said. ``Victorians were seen as dated, passe. People today want to take the ranch and turn it into a McMansion, with additions and ornamentation, which is fine, but you can also do great things to the interior while preserving the integrity of the architecture.''
Still, ``integrity'' and ``architecture'' aren't often linked with ``ranch.'' In fact, the hefty Encyclopedia of American Architecture doesn't even mention it.
And one architect inextricably linked with the look of Atlanta, the late Philip Trammell Shutze, designer of the landmark Swan House, is said to have despised the ranch house.
That doesn't surprise architectural historian Tom Hanchett, coordinator of the historic-preservation program at Youngstown State University in Ohio.
``The ranch fits into the era of modern architecture, which is stripped down to its essence,'' said Hanchett, who completed a Mellon fellowship in Southern architecture at Emory University last year. ``Today, simplicity is out of date. We're back to details and gewgaws.''
According to Gopal Ahluwalia of the National Association of Home Builders, 73 percent of all new homes completed in 1971 were one-story. In 1994, the figure had dropped to 49 percent. Many of the ranches built today are within retirement communities, where the one-story living and ease of maintenance appeals.
``One thing is very clear,'' Ahluwalia said. ``When we ask people what features they want in a home, it's not those of a ranch.''
That's a sad slide from the ranch's heyday, the years just after World War II, when Southern California architect Cliff May published his ranch design and 15,000 models of the plan went up in a matter of months. May claimed responsibility for the ranch's radically informal style and horizontal profile. He said his inspiration was his ancestors' Spanish haciendas, built in the 1830s.
Across the South today are tens of thousands of ranch homes, Aronson said, with influences ranging from the unadorned flat-roofed International style to light-filled contemporaries to more rustic and sprawling ``Ponderosa'' ranches - ``I call them stretch ranches,'' she said.
Although it hasn't happened yet, any one of them could one day be honored with a brass plaque proclaiming its historic significance.
And as baby boomers age and retire, many will find themselves living once again in ranches. As the Preservation Center's Jeanne Gura points out, ``We were born in the ranch; we'll die in the ranch.''
LENGTH: Medium: 81 lines ILLUSTRATION: GRAPHIC: Stinson. color.by CNB