The California bungalow could well be the most beloved house form in Southern California today. Designed and built between the 1900s and the 1920s, it is also the most modern of 20th century production houses. It was designed by architects schooled in traditional design and practicing in the Midwest, in places like Chicago, St Louis and Minneapolis. Their designs were packaged and offered for construction in plan book form thousands of miles away, either in a modular or in a truly industrialized precut form. Such bungalows were built here in the tens of thousands.

California bungalows are proportioned and scaled immaculately. Their architectural elements, doors, windows, front porches, sleeping porches and chimneys are beautifully delineated and incorporated into a coherent house form. Their interiors are full of light and air and their gardens are native in response to this particular climate and flora.

Bungalows have survived almost a century of heavy use by families because they were so intelligently built. Their makers were craftsmen skilled in common carpentry. Bungalow materials were then, and still are, easily available, and their details were meant to be constructed by hand labor and without power tools. The order of these buildings, from their foundation to the eaves and roof was ingeniously designed with joints to protect all wooden material components and to express their unique qualities and assemblies.

Bungalows were built using the most basic drawings and specs. These documents were available inexpensively because they described simple buildings to be built repeatedly. Yet repetition was never the source of routine expression. The basic building box was wrapped by highly expressive constructed elements that gave each bungalow special form and a unique identity.

The generations of people that have inhabited bungalows since have recognized the psychic and physical comforts that these buildings can offer to their families: Their roofs, porches and fireplace chimneys speak directly to the idea and symbolism of the house. Their interiors offer clear distinctions between private, public and service space. Living rooms and dining rooms are wainscoted, beamed and anchored by elegant built-ins. Bedrooms are plastered boxes, sparingly ornamented by wooden floors and wall moldings. Kitchens and bathrooms accommodated the highest standard of sanitary engineering of their time. Gardens and yards gave the American masses access to light, air, fragrance, greenery and homegrown food that in Southern California, and until the the1940s, could challenge Tuscany.

Today, bungalows are more than popular and accommodating houses. They were designed a hundred years ago as active contributors to the character of some of America’s greatest Neighborhoods. They still offer a plethora of valuable urbanist lessons. If Architecture is concerned primarily with the design of buildings, and Urbanism primarily with the design of the spaces between them, then there are two principal aspects to bungalow-based Urbanism worth noting and admiring: the Street and the Court.

The streets in Neighborhoods dominated by bungalows exhibit a number of extraordinary urbanistic characteristics: Typical front setbacks at 20 to 30 feet are very ample. Streets are relatively narrow. The streetscape is highly articulate, typically of alternating canopy-shaped and column-shaped trees. The combined front yards of houses give the impression of a huge shared park overlooked by porches.

Cars are parked in back yard garages accessible through side yard driveways or alleys. The repetition and variety of front porches and the continuity and color of materials—principally, shingles and siding—give a vivid impression of both individuated houses and a rich fabric of continuous building. This is a rare moment of harmonious design in an ensemble of production-made, common 20th century buildings in America. Almost everything else we have ever attempted to design in this vein since that time has resulted in confusion, cacophony and eventually in the visual and organizational chaos and the resulting social alienation of tract housing and sprawl.

As densities tended to increase within Southern California Neighborhoods in the 1910s, attached housing types–first duplexes and quadruplexes and then courtyard housing, popularly known as courts—were designed in bungalow form.

Duplexes and quadruplexes resembled palatial, oversized bungalows and could, therefore, be arrayed on streets interchangeably with typical bungalows. The type was a side-by-side shotgun house on one story, in the case of duplexes, and a side-by-side and stacked shotgun house on two stories, in the case of quadruplexes. Entranceways for both types were designed behind a porch, two of them leading directly into the ground floor units, and two into stairway entrances for the upper level units. After one hundred years, these hybrid bungalows exhibit all the charm of their single house precedence and all the cleverness of the disguise that allows them to double and quadruple the density of the single house without looking out of place in a common Neighborhood street.

The court was at the turn of the 20th century a new housing type. Bungalows were arranged in a two-part pattern: Pairs facing the street and also lining a courtyard, in as many pairs as would fit in the depth of a lot. The two bungalows at the head of a court were designed as typical porch-dominated houses facing the street, no more and no less so than any other single-family house adjacent to them. The space between the bungalows, slightly larger than typical side yard setbacks, became the entrance to the court. Cars were typically located behind the court or to the side, entered from a side yard alleyway(s) or an alley. On rare occasions, and on sloping sites, cars were placed in underground garages. The consequence of the design idea of the court was the seamless incorporation of density into a Neighborhood. A court next to a single-family house signaled an unobtrusive and virtually invisible increase of density by at least four to six times between these two adjacent lots.

Bungalows interior to lots were also paired. The space between each pair was large enough to define through repetition a central courtyard. Symbolically and functionally, this was a common garden that represented and enabled the simple social rituals of mutual dependence typical of community. The narrow spaces separating each pair became private gardens dedicated to daily private uses.

The physical design of single bungalows, duplex and quadruplex bungalows, bungalow courts and their streets was so simple to repeat that they are now commonly to be found in city after city throughout Southern California. Their beauty can be measured both by their continuing success in the market over four generations of inhabitants, and by their inclusion in list after list of culturally significant buildings and Neighborhoods. Their positive social consequences continue to enrich the life of those that live in them and can be confirmed region-wide in the passion of their owners as they continue to maintain and restore them to the highest standard.

Isn’t it really time to start utilizing the potent common sense architectural and urbanist lessons that bungalows are silently imparting to us each and every day?

Originally published in Old House Journal, Volume 30, Number 3, May/June 2002