The mid-century ranch episode with Wisconsin architect Della Hansmann dives deep into a topic that I personally don’t give much thought to: the ranch house.

View the mid-century ranch episode enhancements here.

KM: Della, thanks for coming on, I appreciate it.

DH: Absolutely. It’s a pleasure to be here. 

KM: We’re both part of the design network, which is a group of podcasts that, it seems to be mostly women, which is strangely nice. I mean, that’s unusual, right? 

DH: We don’t really represent the bulk of the design world unfortunately yet, but perhaps we do represent the bulk of people who are so generous as to share ideas with their listeners via podcast. 

KM: That’s true. That might be what we have in common. So your podcast is Mid Mod Remodel. You’re an architect who has a really specific niche, which is really interesting to me. So why don’t you tell everybody about that and how that came to be, and I know that you’ve also done your own Mid-Mod remodel. 

DH: Yes. In fact, I should say I’m still doing it. 

KM: Well, aren’t we all. I don’t think architects finish, really.

DH: No! I mean you have to move out of the house into another house in order to finish the house, maybe. Yeah, so I do specialize very specifically in remodels of Mid-century ranch houses. Generally that means the houses built between 1945 and 1965. That’s what the mid century means here in Madison, Wisconsin anyway, I think there are different areas where the same national building boom took off in different parts of the country. I do work mostly in Madison, but also I’ve done houses in Georgia, I’ve done consults, not full designs for Boise Idaho, Washington state. So people have started to get in touch with me and just say, I have a ranch house. Can you help? And since everything happens now, the answer is sure. Why not? It’s been really interesting to focus down this much and I really feel like what drew me to this era in the first place was happenstance. I bought a Mid-century ranch and I went looking for resources, books, magazine articles, the internet, anyone to tell me, what should you do to tune up a Mid-century ranch? And as an architect, of course, I had my own opinion, but I’ve always been a researcher, and what I really prefer to do is hear a bunch of other people’s opinions and then draw my own conclusions. And I couldn’t find that raw material, I just didn’t find enough advice out there to satisfy myself. And in fact, my whole neighborhood is Mid-century and we have a great local branch library and Madison has a strong library system. So I went to the library and we had a whole shelf on Frank Lloyd Wright, and a whole shelf on how to fix up a Victorian cottage—there are not any Victorian cottages in the watershed of this library—and there were maybe four books on Mid-century era houses. There was atomic ranch the first book, atomic ranch the second book, a history book, and this wonderful thoughtful book that was put together in the 80s and 90s. I’m blanking on the name of the authors. They’re architects, but basically their advice was how to make a ranch look less like a ranch by putting drywall everywhere. So it was basically like, why don’t you just cover the brick with drywall and cover the stone with this and sort of make everything look very 90s Postmodernism. Which I’m sure was just the bee’s knees to the people who had their houses done that way, but it was not the advice I was looking for. 

So I started to dig deeper. I started to go to the art library at the university and read old books written in the 1950s about current housing theory by architects written then. I started to just study the houses around me, I started an Instagram account photographing area houses and admiring their many details and pointing out some of their weird quirks and started to get feedback from other people who would follow the account and send me pictures of their house or ask me questions about it. And as I started to work on my own place, I basically just fell into this obsession with Mid-century. And I think that it’s very easily rewarded because this era of construction falls right in a crossover, like a Venn diagram, a snippet of an era when craft was still really important and buildings were built with very sturdy, long hearty materials and an era of mass production, more machined materials, and of people wanting to live, for lack of a better word a more modern lifestyle where nobody had servants and you weren’t designing a house to pretend you had servants anyway, so kitchens were more attached to the living space and things were more compact, things were happening all on one level. And so that crossover of really well-built houses that were built with old growth pine that you just cannot get for love or money these days and put together by craftspeople who knew what they were doing, trades people who were specialized, really lovely work. And yet at the same time, practical, modern, relatively recent, haven’t had a chance to sort of be predated by time, the way some older buildings have. It’s just a wonderful moment. So these houses are really well-built. They don’t quite align with how people want to live in them now. And particularly for people of my own age demographic, elder Millennials, people in their thirties and early forties who are due to American’s circumstances, just starting to buy houses right now, we’re buying our first houses. A lot of what we’re buying are these ranch houses, and it’s suddenly having this Renaissance moment. 

KM: Interesting. So you ended up buying one yourself and you were fixing it up with your father. 

DH: Yes, my dad retired just about the same moment that I moved back from Chicago, left my last job at an architecture firm and I was going to move back to my family hometown Madison. I didn’t actually have a plan. I wasn’t applying to firms here yet. I thought, I want to get my hands dirty. I want to do some construction. Because this is something that architects always believe we want to do, and then we realized it was more fun to drive than to build it. I have actually had a blast working on this house, but my dad and I sort of like picked it together. We were like, we’ll buy this house, I’ll fix it up, I’ll take a house that had never been remodeled, a single owner house, and we’ll put in a bunch of design into it and our own labor. And then we’ll flip it nicely. 

KM: So you’re the second owner of this house. 

DH: I’m actually the third owner of this house, but it was owned by one family for 10 years who did almost nothing to it. And then was bought by another family who did like a few minor repairs in nineteen sixty something.

KM: Oh, cool. That’s pretty lucky. 

DH: Yeah. A few things were done actually just in the five years before I bought the house, they replaced a bunch of the windows and updated the furnace. And I would have replaced the windows differently, but in many ways it was an ideal situation because they paid for a bunch of things that aren’t design. And then I got to just come in and have a blank slate. So I tore out the carpets for example, and found original hardwood floor in perfect condition. And this is a quirk of the era- my house was built in 1952. The common availability of wall-to-wall nylon carpeting was in 1954. It sort of popped onto the market. So ranch houses that were built before 1954 usually have oak hardwood flooring. As soon as wall-to-wall carpet existed, there was a craze for it and people thought it was so comfortable, and like the material of the future. So they covered all their hardwood floor with nylon carpet, cause they thought it was really cool. And the quirk of a lot of ranch houses is that they stay in a family because they’re so livable. They’re often lived in from the time they were bought until the person retires or passes away, institute, and then their kids sell the house. In my case, the previous owner went into an assisted living facility. So they just have these secret surprises underneath. This floor is in great shape, I didn’t even have to have it refinished. I just literally took the carpet up and scrubbed it on my hands and knees for a day, and now it’s beautiful

KM: Wow, that’s amazing. That’s unusual. 

DH: Yeah. Well it is, but it’s not. It’s an unusual quirk of-

KM: Well for around here, it’s unusual. Like that just doesn’t happen here. 

DH: Yeah. I have found it to be very clear when I talk to people around Madison, when I’ve done consultations for people, if their house was built in 55, they have plywood under their carpet. If it was built in 53, Hardwood. So there’s also this watershed moment for Madison due to the vagaries of our building community. And also something about when Congress passed a law that made the 30 year mortgage available, houses went from being single car garages to two car garages in one year. And you can see it as it moves through the neighborhood. So it’s really been interesting to both be a history nerd about it, and then also to get into the practicality of like, okay, I’m working with a particular homeowner on a particular house, what is its history? What do they want? I love every part of it.

KM: That’s pretty awesome that you get to that level of detail of knowing the houses. Like you really know a lot about a house before you even go see it at this point, because you specialize in that very type of house. So that’s pretty cool. 

DH: Particularly when it’s a Madison House, because I’ve been obsessing about this for several years now, I will actually have houses that I have photographed and put on Instagram and talked about and thought about a lot. And then the actual owner of that house will get in touch with me, or someone will buy that house and get in touch with me. And that happened literally last week, someone wrote me a message saying you posted about our new house on Instagram last year, we were about to close in March. Can you help us? And I was like, yes, yes I can.

KM: Well that’s great. You’re kind of taking an inventory of all your possible projects and then they just come to you after that. 

DH: It doesn’t always happen that way sometimes because I’m paying attention to it’s heartbreaking. I’ll watch a house get torn down or a ranch get turned into a two-story colonial out of nowhere. And I’m just like, why are you doing that? Don’t do it. But yeah, another house in my neighborhood, I watched a dumpster go out front. I was like, Oh no, the elderly couple is leaving it. I hope the new people take good care of it. And about two weeks after it went on the market, I got a phone call from the new owners asking if I could give them some advice. And again, yes, yes I can. I’d love to see this house that’s on my dog walk route be handled in a sensitive manner. So it is really fun. And I feel like because I’ve picked such a specific moment in architectural history to focus on, I can really dive into it very deeply. But at the same time, America’s housing stock doubled in the 20 years right after World War II. So there are a lot of these Mid-century ranch houses out there. It’s hard to know exactly how many, but some historian experts have estimated as many as 15 million.

KM: Really, 15 million. Well that’ll keep you busy. 

DH: I think so. I mean, I feel like that ought to keep me out of trouble for awhile. Me and a few friends, perhaps. 

KM: 15 million, wow. I often think when you talked about your neighborhood being built all around the same time, I think about that in my area too where it’s very densely built right now. But a lot of the houses were from 1910, 1920, 1930, and before that, they had been farms. Now people complain about all the houses going up or how the neighborhood’s changing. And I think about back then, what did those people think? There were just house, house, house, like all these new houses. It must’ve been incredible change back then that we just don’t appreciate in the same way. 

DH: Yeah. And probably it’s a little bit of like, oh, kids these days… back then they were saying, oh, this development, what’s happening? I think as architects, we can still be a little critical and say the development that’s happening now in the corn fields on the perimeters of communities is maybe not to the quality of construction or design that the Queen Anne’s in your neighborhood, or even the ranches in mine were built to. But I also think architectural historians in the fifties were grinding their teeth and saying, what are these young designers designing? This is nonsense. The famous song- little boxes, all made out of ticky tacky. A lot of people think that refers to ranches. That’s actually referring to I think a dingbat style in a particular area of the outskirts of LA, but people definitely had that feeling of- all this development, what could it possibly be good for? 

KM: And they had a one or two car garages and the American dream and living in the suburbs in their new neighborhoods.

DH: I really prefer the design to be more adventurous on a later Mid-century house, but I really kind of prefer the ones that were built first because they are denser. They’re in smaller, tighter neighborhoods. They’re closer to the center cities, sort of the up to 1955 moment, often have a little bit more of a livability to them in terms of neighborhood. And then you start to get into like, yes, it has a more jaunty roof line, but it also has this giant garage. And it’s like, What’s the acreage of that yard? And it starts to feel a little bit more wasteful and less urban. Madison isn’t a very urban city, I should say. It’s a very low city and we don’t have very good transit here, but it has features to love. It’s a walkable city, at least on the neighborhood level. 

KM: Hmm. I’ve never been there.

DH: Worth a visit, although I wouldn’t recommend it in winter. It’s a high of three today, so it’s not a great walkable city today.

KM: People think of this area, Massachusetts as being kind of snowy and cold, but it’s nothing compared to the Midwest. So you started with your father renovating the house that you now own. You must’ve learned things along the way that now you’re applying to your own work. 

DH: Oh, absolutely, so many things. It’s funny, you think you know everything as a designer, you’ve walked your clients through these things a million times, and you’re just like, why do people make these mistakes? Why do they get ahead of themselves? Why don’t they take time for design? And then I did all the same things as a first time homeowner. All the same things that I warn my clients not to do. And now of course I can just warn them a little more… emphatically, I guess. 

KM: Yeah. With more authority. Now you can say like, believe me… so what are those warnings that you would give them?

DH: Well, I made some what I would call mistakes on this house- the way I finished the basement, I had to tear out what was there and had been “finished” with knotty pine siding and this interesting wallpaper with pictures of Pilgrims on it for some reason. But it had mold behind the walls, so it had to come out. The layout was unsuccessful and the flooring was glued down asbestos tile… so there were a bunch of things I wanted to change about it, including the way everything fit together. So I demoed it back down to the studs and built it back up. But I think at that point, I wasn’t as interested, I wasn’t as far down the road of my Mid-century obsession and I did more things that made the house a little more contemporary and the basement. Whereas I think I could have brought back- I don’t take a historicist approach, I’m not trying to be a preservationist and I’m not trying to copy what was done in the Mid-century, but I do try to use materials now that are more friendly. For example, I have white painted trim in the basement and since I’ve learned how to stain things to match this honey wood color that I have in the doors upstairs. And I had some unpainted trim upstairs, which I’ve preserved whatever I had. There’s some in this room that had already been painted by the previous owner. So now if I were to go back and do it all over again, I would not put white painted trim in the basement. And it’s just like, oh well if I waited a year and thought about it a little bit more, I probably would have known that naturally. I think that a lot of the people that I work with are either DIYers actually, which is an interesting group to design for, or are going to do a little project, hire a handyman or an almost general contractor to manage. Like, let’s just do the kitchen first. And then in a year, we’ll come back and we’ll put on a little sunroom addition, a bunch of piecemeal bits. And I think many of my clients are first time home buyers. 

I really advise people to think about things and sort of have a master plan vision in mind, know where you’re trying to go to so that everything you do can fit in. And then also to think of things as like, sometimes you specifically do a task right away, you do a project that you’re going to come back and get that area again. But it’s like, you can’t live in a kitchen that’s puce, so you have to paint it white, even though you’re going to remodel the kitchen in three years. You just have to. And that I totally recommend, but what you want to do is avoid too many projects first, right off the bat that you’ll then have to come back and do again later, or retouch in a separate project. The gospel that I preach constantly in my podcast, to everyone that I’ve talked to in a consultation, to certainly all of my clients is to make as much of a long-term vision as you can, and then start chipping away at it bit by bit once you have a cohesive picture. Because you’ll just save yourself so much trouble, you’ll save yourself regret. And if you can create some overarching design decisions for the house- like I’m going to use brass for all of my metal, I’m going to pick brass door handles and cabinet poles and lamps. Then every time you have to make a decision, you don’t have to start from scratch again and look at the entire rack of everything at the plumbing supply store, you can narrow your focus. I spent a lot of time at just before closing at Home Depot thinking, Oh God. I’ve done the rough in, the plumber’s coming tomorrow to install this, I have to buy a faucet to put on there. What will it be? And to the extent that I can save any of my clients that stress, I try to do it.

KM: Yeah. I’ve been there also. 

DH: I think it’s kind of also a little bit the shoemaker’s children go barefoot. Designers have a tendency not to call timeout on our own designs. Oh, I don’t have to firm that up yet, I can keep thinking about it. 

KM: Yeah, right. Meanwhile, the construction’s already happening and it’s getting closer and closer to the absolute very last second.

DH: Yeah. And the faster and the earlier you can make a decision in the process, the better off you are. 

KM: And then stick with that Decision.

DH: Right, make a choice and stick to it. Although again, you make a choice in the first year, and then three years down the line you’ve thought about the whole house more and you’ve come to regret a lot of the choices you make first. So that’s why I actually am a big believer in, come in and do the things you have to do to live with the house, and then sit with it for a minute. So many people hope that they can buy a house and in the gap between closing and when they have to move out of their last apartment they can quickly do a few things in a few months period. And I’m like, if you mean paint the walls white then yes. If you mean do the kitchen then no, I’m sorry.

KM: Right, right. I know, I’m getting calls now people saying we closed in March and we’d like to move in by may. No! And this is for a substantial project.  

DH: One of the first ranch projects I worked on, I just threw myself into the process, just fully invited myself into the middle of it. My little sister’s friends were buying their first home and I heard through the grapevine that they had found a contractor, and that they were going to gut the ranch and remodel, and that they wanted to do all of this. And I think they were closing in January and moving in in June. And I was just like, I can’t let them just let some random contractor cottage-ify their ranch, I just can’t do it. So I just basically said, please let me help you. I promise I can do it really fast. I was so unrealistic with myself, I worked so late into the night to get the designs turned around for them, but actually their contractor hit his timeline. He did cut some corners that they weren’t pleased with in the end, but their driving principle was could they get all this done and get into the house. And it was like a full gut remodel, reconfigured the whole layout. I don’t know how he did it actually. I’m kind of impressed, even though…

KM: You’re kind of not at the same time.

DH: Yeah. But I almost use that story as the exception that proves the rule. Don’t think this can happen because it can’t happen. Or if it does, you won’t necessarily like the results. 

KM: I mean, a realistic schedule is one thing that’s… I wouldn’t even call it the luxury of time, but taking time. Cause it’s an important- you’re changing a house or remodeling the whole house or changing walls. I mean it’s a big deal in the history of the house, like from the house’s point of view. And it would be nice if people really did live with it for a minute, like you say, or really think about it ahead of time.

DH: And when you do live with it there are things you find that you thought you wanted to change, that you love. Or things that you thought were okay that drive you up the wall. And to a certain extent you only know those things by living them, even if it seems logical to do the work quickly before you move in. It always makes more sense to me to live in a space for a while. Six months at a minimum, a year, a couple of years. Once you get into the house, of course, inertia will keep you there for a while. Where’s the morning light, where’s the sound?

KM: Yeah, like maybe have your floors done before you move in. And then another thing is not living in the house during a major remodel. So moving out is the thing to do. I mean, from the air quality for one thing, there are a lot of toxins and lead in a lot of the paint. I don’t know if you find a lot of that by the Mid-century. 

DH: In the Mid-century, yeah. Absolutely you gotta check from lead paint and I had it three rooms on the inside still exposed and not the exterior outer layer, but an underlayer that was flaking up. So I painted the outside myself and had to remediate the lead with 10 feet of plastic out from the boundary all taped down and a full Tyvek suit and respirator.

KM: Yeah. Lead poisoning affects adults as well. 

DH: Mhm. It’s something to really worry about. It’s bizarre given how long we’ve known how damaging it is, but it was absolutely still being used on Mid-century era houses. Also asbestos glue and acoustic tile, and there’s always mold to worry about, especially in basements. So there are some hazardous materials to worry about, especially when you’re under construction get aerosolized.

KM: Right, so even living in a house from that point of view of the air quality isn’t a good idea, but then also just being under foot and thinking you’re going to enjoy your life during a construction, if you’re not the one doing it. I think maybe if you’re the one doing it, it’s a little less impactful maybe, but doing your dishes in the tub, that gets really old really quickly speaking from my own experience.

DH: Right? My parents definitely had their kitchen remodeled and lived in the house while it happened. Easier for my dad because he got to go away to work every day. My mom worked from home. But these days everybody’s working from home. So yeah, definitely want to clear out. Every now and then I get the original blueprints from a house that the owner had left and the new owner has, and it’s so fascinating to see them, but at the same time I look at the amount of information… In one case the owner had the full spec book for the house. So it was the floor plans and the details and all of the purchases, down to the receipts for the kitchen cabinets and everything. It was just so interesting, but it’s really information light compared to the way that we would put together information in CAD and certainly nothing like a 3d model of it. So it is interesting to think about the way we’ve incorporated technology. 

KM: Yeah, it does change things. It just changes the possibilities of what we can put out there,. and therefore we do put out different materials. We do put out different products.

DH: A decision that I’ve made is that most of the work that I do happens on a schematic level only. A lot of homeowners either actually can’t or feel they can’t afford the full services of an architectural designer. One of the ways that I’ve tried to mitigate that is to give people sort of a centralized version of design. Like if I could give people only just a little bit of design, what do I think is most important? And I think that is the first schematic pass of, how could we reimagine this space? Not just resurface every part of a kitchen, but should we reorient it? What would that do? Where would natural light come from? Ask a few of the big questions. And then also I think what’s really valuable is the last stage of material selection. And it’s hard to give people the first and the last stage together. So I ended up giving them just like a little design guide for the house of like, what if you used this type of wood and what if you used this type of metal, and pick along these lines to set them on the right road. When I prepare these schematics, I call them master plans for houses, I keep myself to a sketch method of floor plans and any interior perspectives or exterior renderings that I do, I always sketch them. Up to now it’s always been by hand, although I’ve just brought on an assistant who is just fresh out of design school and does it with his iPad. And I’m so old, I don’t know what that technology is. I don’t remember the name of the program he’s using, but it looks great and it has the same sketchy quality. And I feel like it works really well to give people a sense of possibility. If I show them three floor plan layouts in a sketch, they’ll talk to me about like, I like this little piece of this one and I like this little piece of this one. Whereas if I show people three floor plan layouts made with an AutoCAD drawing in a simple format, they’ll ask, oh dear. I don’t like this one because the doorway’s in the wrong place. And I’ll say, well, we can move that. And then they just feel like it’s so set in stone.

KM: Right, like it’s finished, cause it looks like a finished drawing. 

DH: It just seems so harsh. My first boss actually went one further than me. He used to like to draw everything in blue pen, and if he actually did it in black pen, he would have me Photoshop it to blue lines, because he felt it had some sort of connection to a dream space and an imaginative quality. Oh, bless his heart. I miss him. But I do find that to visualize and to quickly model a couple of options for layout, I always bring it back to a sketch before I show the client because it helps them feel more open-ended about things. 

KM: Yeah, I agree. It seems like you’re still in the realm of possibilities rather than, this is what I have to offer you, so people react differently to it. I can see that. Okay, so live with it for a while. What else would you- 

DH: Live with it for a little but there are some things you have to do right away, and this again is from my own experience. Behind that door, which you can see on zoom but no one can see on the podcast is my kitchen, which is accessible through this bedroom because it was the nursery bedroom of the house. It’s a wild thing. Now it’s my office, it’s very convenient, I can slip in there and refresh my tea. But that kitchen is still mint green, which is my very least favorite color. But I’m planning to remodel the kitchen. I was going to get to it second after I did the basement, but guess what? It’s been four years and I still haven’t done it. And I’m still living with that mint green kitchen and I have never painted it. So my number one recommendation is don’t live with the things that you can’t stand, do live with the house, but don’t live with the things you can’t stand. Paint the kitchen white!

KM: Paint the mint green kitchen. So is it mint green, like countertops and walls and tiles and all the rest of it? I’m imagining it to be kind of cool. 

DH: It’s mint green walls. No, it’s not. It’s like toothpaste. 

KM: That’s gonna come back Della, just stick with it for a little while it’s gonna be back.

DH: Yeah, it’s not for me. The cabinets are lovely, they’re wood framed and they’re actually in great shape. Unfortunately, they are in the classic Mid-century arrangement of sort of a U shaped mom centric kitchen, where the cook always faces a wall and a work surface. It’s very unsociable, and even as a woman living alone in the house, I find myself annoyed that I’m always facing a wall mounted cabinet and sometimes leaning in and bopping my forehead on them. So one thing that will change whenever I get to the kitchen is to introduce—in this case, it will have to be a peninsula because this is a tight layout, but if I can manage it, it’s always an island or a peninsula—somewhere where the work surface faces the room and doesn’t face a wall. It’s a major seismic shift in kitchens. And it’s funny, I’ve started to see people razzing on the open plan again, because of COVID and coming back to the idea of the kitchen triangle, which was the philosophy behind this style of kitchen. And it drives me kind of nuts because yes, it is a very efficient kitchen to cook in, but efficiency isn’t actually as important to cooking, I think, as people set it up to be, if it’s unpleasant to efficiently cook. I think this whole sort of U shaped kitchen and the work triangle and pivoting on one foot to get things done has a place. Like you don’t want to design a kitchen that’s completely illogical where the dishwasher and the refrigerator are next to each other, and the stove is on the far end of the kitchen. But at the same time, I think it’s more important to create a kitchen that more than one person can even just chop in at the same time and also a kitchen where someone can at least at some times face into a conversational grouping while they work. So what I tend to do with Mid-century kitchens is pull the wall mounted cabinets off the walls, add windows and reorient things to the center of the room. Since you do lose some storage space in that, you have to find someplace to put a full height pantry wall in. It often means taking out the original cabinetry and it will in this case too, but it’s not worth it to sort of live in mom-centric isolation. I mean, they really just created these kitchens as the place where someone went away and made things and then came back and brought it to you. And that’s not how we live now. 

KM: Yeah, no, that’s not how we like to live. At least me as a mom, I don’t like to live that, I don’t think that sounds like fun. 

DH: I don’t love it either. Even when I’m alone, it just doesn’t feel like a kitchen. I don’t hang out in my kitchen. I just prepare food in it and then go to the living room or the dining room or the office. 

KM: Y’know Della, those cabinets have been doing their thing for 70 years. Whoever paid for them, they got their money’s worth out of those cabinets.

DH: They did. With those cabinets I love that wood, I’m going to salvage it. I’ll find some other place to use it. Maybe as cabinets. Although I’ve been led to believe by other people in this area the frames are built into the wall and I won’t be able to detach them and put them somewhere else. But I can save the doors, and I will because they’re beautiful. The grain is just stunning. But yeah, the functionality, it has to go. You raised an interesting point though, 70 years is a long time for a house. Mid-century is starting to come into the historic preservation era, which is really anything over fifty years, and I think it is both an argument to keep these houses intact and an argument to give them a refresh.

KM: Yes. And so that would be your job, to delicately balance those two things. So you have a lot of information on your website for people who own these types of houses, and of course your podcast and other information that if they can’t get you personally- which, maybe they could get you personally- you have a lot of information to help people.

DH: I do. This is my day job, it’s what I do. But at the same time, it’s a passion project. I love and want to help the people that live in Mid-century ranches, but maybe even more than that, I love Mid-century ranches. And I want to see them appreciated and preserved as best they can be. So it’s definitely a goal of mine to make as many resources available to encourage people to see the value in their ranch, to maintain some of its original character wherever possible, and to avoid people kind of coming in and doing like an HGTV wipe. I see so many houses get that and I hate it. 

KM: I have to say that ranches are probably the least- at least around here, I don’t know how many typical Mid-century ranches we have, but the ranch houses around here are the least respected houses around. Because there are so many two and a half story houses around here, people just feel like, well, this is one story. I’ll just make it into a two and a half story colonial, you know? I’ve been involved in a couple projects like that, I have to admit because you know, it happens. They asked for it, what am I going to do? But in New England or at least in my area just outside of Boston, it’s disrespected as a housing type.

DH: And that has been the case everywhere for a long time. It was not an appreciated housing type, I think up until about to stretch it 15 years ago. To say definitively, I’d say about five years ago, people started to get more interested in what is Mid-century. You see it turn up first in the furniture, a lot of West Elm, CB2 that kind of interior style. Then you start to see it show up in Dwell Magazine, certainly Atomic Ranch. I would actually say the Northeast is probably the area of America that has the least Mid-century development because it was mostly built already. And that has the most prevalent other parts of history around any major city in America. And I’m sure this is true in the Northeast too, you’ll find a ring of mid-century suburbs, but you probably will only find infill within an already developed area like yours. So yeah, they won’t have been appreciated. Shortly after they were built when they were like the cool new thing, ooh, one story. ooh, open plan. Suddenly they were dated and not cool, and then they started to be erased. It’s frustrating to me to see them go that way because when you play to their strengths, they have great strengths. They’re very livable. Part of the reason that so many of them are just coming on the market now is that people have literally been raising four to six kid families, and then staying in the house until their nineties, and that same building perfectly accommodated their whole lifespan. 

KM: Yeah, that’s true. I hadn’t thought about that before.

DH: They’re great for aging in place. They’re very kid-friendly, they’re very young family-friendly and yet they’re very elder-friendly, and that is kind of an amazing feature. So if you make it into a two and a half story you’ve given that up. Not that there’s anything wrong with it with a two and a half story house, but I just feel you have to do a really aggressive remodel to turn a ranch into something it’s not. 

KM: That’s true. It’s a completely aggressive remodel. I don’t even think it would be a remodel. That’s just a reconstruction. 

DH: You can put a new house on the foundation of a ranch and make it something else. But if you’re just sort of going in and touching the surfaces of things, you’re not going to fool anyone. You’re not going to make a ranch into a cottage. You’re not gonna make a ranch into a Victorian. It ends up just looking kind of cheesy. And then you’ve erased whatever was there to begin with. A project that I’m working on this week is in Boise, Idaho, a young couple who just bought a house. They love the Mid-century neighborhood they’re in, and their particular house has been- it’s not a flip job because I think the previous owners had been there for 10 years, but they had very carefully DIYed onto this house. So all these beadboard chair rail lines and little bits of built-in furniture. They of course painted the brick fireplace white… why?… And just all of the sort of HGTV “updates”, basically putting historicist details on this ranch that were from the wrong era. So they have hired me to advise them, to basically unwind each one of these little projects and bring it back to a clean Mid-century, or at least a modern, contemporary referencing Mid-century variation. And we’re literally like, item by item. We’re gonna sandblast the fireplace back to its original color and put on a new Mid-century mantle that will wrap around. We’re going to take off the little mudroom entry bench that’s beadboard up to a little cornice at the ceiling and put in [?] they could still have a place to take off their shoes and hang their coats. Just item by item unwinding the mistakes that the previous owner had made. Clearly that person wished they lived in a cottage, and what I would have said to them is, go get yourself a cottage. They exist! You can put all the charm onto it that you want, but you’re never gonna make your ranch look like that. My quest is just to persuade people. If you love Mid-century design, if you like CB2 furniture, if you like West Elm, if you like Joybird, go get yourself a ranch and revel in it. And if you don’t really like that, get a different kind of house.

KM: That in a nutshell is just an awesome piece of advice right there, Della. Just get what you actually like, cause it’s out there. How can people look at your Instagram and your website and your podcast? Let’s just recap that. 

DH: So you can find me at various versions of MidMod Midwest or MidMod Remodel. The podcast is Mid Mod Remodel, and you can find it I think anywhere you listen to podcasts. My website is midmod-midwest.com. I have blog posts, links to the podcasts, all sorts of helpful tips and free downloads of advice on how to update a ranch, either yourself or with a designer. And then frankly, the best place to see what I’m up to lately is my Instagram, which is just @midmodmidwest. I use it to talk about design and to feature mostly Madisonian, but also other places around the country that are doing great Mid-century things.

KM: Well that is very exciting, thank you. Thanks for sharing your time today, Della, and your experience and everything. I would love to see a picture of your mint color kitchen.

DH: And the thing is like, now it’s also sort of like partially demoed and I filled in a window. So it’s got like, kind of plaster… It’s not in good condition. 

KM: Okay. It’s not pristine, I get it. 

DH: It’s just not done. Any weekend I could just get a campaign and paint it white and feel happier about it.

KM: Tonight even! 

DH: One of these days.

KM: Other things to do.

DH: I think the transition from working on the house with my dad to buying it has definitely changed my timeline, now the kitchen remodel has gone even further away, so the time has probably come to make the green color go away for the meantime. 

KM: Well, maybe you’ll be as inspired as I am, because now I feel like I kind of wish I had a ranch to preserve.

DH: Oh, that’s wonderful. They’re wonderfully livable houses. And they’re very DIY-able too. Even as simple a thing as- it’s only one story, so if you want to scrape the lead paint off the outside of the house and repaint it yourself, you can do that on any summer day. You don’t need scaffolding, you don’t need to tie yourself to the roof line or anything like that. It’s manageable. 

KM: Yeah. Thank you so much. 

DH: Yeah, it’s been lovely. It’s fun to talk to another designer. I think sometimes in general designers are islands, and certainly in COVID we’ve all been sort of hunkered down.