The ranch house

Is the design worth the extra money?

By Martin Harris
May 1984

HOW long has the New England love affair with ranch-house design been going on? For a long time now; decades rather than years; through recession and prosperity, cheap energy and oil crises, good times and bad.

Ranch-house design comes, understandably enough, from ranch-house country, the American Southwest. It’s characterized by a sprawling floor plan, one-story design, low-pitched roofs with wide overhangs: All very logical for locations where land is cheap, Summers hot, breezes pleasant, Winters brief and mild. It has never made an awful lot of sense in New England, where land is dear and Winters severe. And it has never made an awful lot of sense when construction money is tight, because ranch-house design is fundamentally cost ineffective and can be justified only when single-floor design is needed because occupants can’t cope with stairs or choose not to, for reasons of convenience.

We went through a good many years when construction money was plentiful and interest rates low. Homeowners then didn’t worry about capturing costeffectiveness in design; a lot of them wanted the ranch-house “look”, and so a lot of ranch-house designs were built in country and climate that were never really suitable. Those were the easy years, when average house size climbed from a postWorld War II average of less than 1000 square feet to over 1400 SF in the midSeventies; but they were followed by harder times with energy crises and interest-rate explosions. Now average house size is down to less than 1200 SF and still dropping. Under pressure from both economics and demographics, it will probably drop even lower. Once again, people who build are looking for maximum return for their construction dollar; once again, designs that are fundametally inefficient to construct or to operate in New England are going to get a very hard look-see.

That sort of tough analysis never really disappeared entirely from the New England mind-set: ranch-style houses built here were rarely made as sprawling as their Texas forebears (the Lyndon Johnson house is a classic example), but New Englanders were willing to buy the rest of the ranch-house “look,” the deep overhang, the low-pitched roof, and the one-story design. They’ve paid for the low-pitch roof with ice-dams at the eaves or through the electric heating cables needed to prevent ice-dams at the eaves, particularly where generous overhangs were kept as a part of the authentic design; but that was small potatoes compared with the real costs for the ranch-house design .

That real cost comes from the unavoidable fact that foundation and roof costs consume twice the percentage of total project cost for a one-story design that they require for two-story construction. Almost never are soil conditions so poor that two-story residential work needs a foundation system heavier than the minimum practical design (poured concrete or block frost walls on a continuous footing).

It’s enlightening to put some dollar figures to that statement, just to show how money is spent, comparatively, in single-story and two-story residential design. Let’s use, for convenience, a house of 1000 SF in size, and let’s say it costs $40 per SF to build. Let’s assume that the house, like most in New England, has a basement (not counted in the total square footage).

Foundation costs usually run around $7 per SF; that includes footing, wall, and basement floor slab. Whether a one- or two-story house is involved can change the foundation cost by 50 percent, for 1000 SF of foundation (price, $7,000) would be required for a one-story unit, while only 500 SF (price $3,500) would be needed for the two-story house. The same principle prevails when the roof cost is studied. The roof system includes the rafters or trusses, the sheathing, the finish shingles, flashing, and so on, and averages about $5 per SF for average residential construction. For the one-story house, 1000 SF will be needed (price, $5,000), but for the two story design only half as much will be needed, at half the price ($2,500).

The bottom line? For the same useable square footage on a ranch design as on a two-story design, the owner will pay $6,000 more in foundation and roofing costs. That premium will either be added to the total price or subtracted from the overall quality of construction if the costs are to remain at a flat $40 per SF.

Against that premium we can deduct a few savings: No stairway (price, about $1,500); no staging needed for construction (hard to put a price on that); shorter chimney and mechanical riser lines ( offset by added length of horizontal systems).

Overall, then, the ranch-house buyer pays a premium of some $4,500 for the design he likes, as compared to a more traditional design. ls it worth it? That’s a question only the buyer can answer. But he should know enough about construction costs to ask the question in the first place. ■