The disco ball is gone. So is the wall-to-wall green shag carpet, the lime countertops, and the fern-emblazoned kitchen wallpaper.
But Gregory Pent left intact the bones of the 1950s Brady Bunch-style split-level that he bought two years ago, and now the house is on the market.
For more than $1 million.
Let’s put them together again: split-level and more than $1 million.
The price of the 3,100-square-foot house, one of several featured in Historic Boulder’s upcoming tour of midcentury modern homes, isn’t a signal that the split-level has entered the history-of-architecture empyrean, along with Arts-and-Crafts, Victorian and Denver Square.
The house backs up against open space leading directly to Chautauqua Park and the Flatirons. In this case, location has a lot to do with price.
But the house nevertheless resonates for those interested in architectural history. Built in 1957 by a highly regarded architect who then lived in Boulder, Tician Papachristou, the house represents an important piece of Boulder’s midcentury modern architecture.
Papachristou, who left Boulder for New York City shortly after building the house, used inexpensive materials in its construction. He filled the house with windows, allowed the dining area and living spaces to flow together (the precursor to today’s “great rooms”), and inserted a gigantic, two-flue fireplace into a stone-fronted wall.
These are some of the hallmarks of midcentury modern architecture, which informed much of the ranch house and tract-home architecture that has swarmed over vacant land from Daytona Beach to Dallas to Denver since the end of World War II.
“The novel thing about the houses (like the Papachristou house) is they are the precursor to affordable housing for the masses,” says Len Segel, a Boulder architect and authority on the city’s architecture.
Pent probably could have scraped the house from the lot and built something more in the vein of McMansion, but he decided instead to respect Papachristou’s vision.
“A lot of renovating this house is trying to stay true to what the house is supposed to be like,” he says.
Most houses built after World War II, however, do not have the cachet of a respected architect behind them.
Just as Tudors, bungalows and Denver Squares line the streets of Denver’s Park Hill neighborhood, will Westminster’s or Lakewood’s catalogs of ranch houses and split levels survive history?
Does it matter?
It depends, experts say.
Architecture enthusiasts once scoffed at the Queen Anne style, a highly ornate turn-of-the-century interpretation of Victorian, says James Hewat, historic preservation planner for Boulder. Now, nobody questions the historical significance of the style.
“The passage of time changes perspectives,” Hewat says. But, he adds, “I don’t know if that that will be the case with the ’50s, ’60s and ’70s.”
Some houses, in fact, are just “designed to be disposable, and they are built with only a 20- or 30-year life span,” says Kathleen Brooker, president of Historic Denver Inc. “Just because it was built doesn’t mean it needs to be preserved.”
That doesn’t mean, however, that we should rush to trumpet the advantages of tearing down the old and pedestrian. A bulk of brick ranchers in Denver, for example, “are a good value, they often are a high-caliber design,” she says. “We need to pay attention to them or they will disappear and we will be left with a gaping hole in our architectural continuity.”
The hole would be more Grand Canyon than pinprick.
Between the Great Depression and World War II, “there wasn’t a lot of architecture being constructed,” says Hewat. “After the war there was this incredible boom.”
City planners in Boulder now are beginning to study the city’s stock of postwar houses. They will visit Boulder’s postwar neighborhoods, take note of the range and density of architectural styles, and start to figure out how to place into context the city’s many variations on a theme of ranch house.
Traditionally, historians examine architecture based in part on its design and its detail, Hewat says. Victorians have their wrap-around porches and turrets, Craftsman homes have their exposed rafter tails and their decorative beams under the gables.
Modern architecture reveled in flattened roofs and the removal of filigree and decoration. Utilitarianism triumphed. The notion clung to much mass-produced postwar construction, which is “so different,” Hewat says, from that which came before. “A lot of the architecture is in its very stripped-down nature a manifestation of modernism.”
“The architecture that predominates after World War II is for the most part very simple,” he says. “We have to look at it with different eyes.”
Jim Brown, publisher of the ranch-house-celebrating magazine Atomic Ranch, has spent the past year looking with great concentration at America’s postwar ranch houses. He says midcentury architecture “is the next big thing.”
We cherish our 1920s bungalows and turn-of-the-century cottages, and we’ll embrace the postwar buildings too, he says. Philosophically, he says, the urge is the same.
“It’s housing for middle-class people, and it takes 50 years for you to have the perspective that, hey, this is a nice house, it has features in it that are good and better than the new McMansions,” he says. “They’re certainly more modest. They have features that are worthy of preservation.”
The Front Range is no hotbed of classic midcentury modernism – as are Palm Springs and the San Francisco Bay Area – but it contains enough noteworthy houses to send Brown here in June, to photograph ranch houses for the magazine. He’s taking pictures of houses in Denver’s Virginia Village neighborhood and Littleton’s Arapahoe Hills.
Brown, whose livelihood revolves in part around people’s delight in postwar housing, acknowledges that many houses and styles likely will never rise to the level of protected historic treasure.
Englewood’s famous Arapahoe Acres neighborhood, the first postwar subdivision listed as a historic district in the National Register of Historic Places, is thick with stylistic modern ranch houses straight out of a “Jetsons” cartoon. Its status as something special comes as no surprise.
But for every Arapahoe Acres, there are a thousand neighborhoods of three-bedroom brick ranchers with sliding-glass doors leading to a patio, or subdivisions of split-levels with living rooms and kitchens on the ground, bedrooms upstairs, and family rooms downstairs, where windows sit high on a wall and the air feels of a basement.
Will these, suburbia’s stalwarts, ever experience the loving gushings of fans, historians, city planners and the rest of the architecture-obsessed?
“That’s a challenge,” says Brown. “Unless you have a distinctive, original ranch, it’s going to be tough.”
Staff writer Douglas Brown can be reached at 303-820-1395 or djbrown@denverpost.com.
