“I grew up in a place that grew up around me. I always saw two-by-four framing going on,” says my dad, Will, about how he ended up as a carpenter. In the summer of 1972, seventeen with a new driver’s license, he borrowed the family car and started driving east on Hampden Avenue from his childhood home in a filing of ranch houses at the southern limit of Denver.
As he approached his high school, Cherry Creek—still half populated by the children of ranchers from the plains east of the city—the road crossed into the community of Greenwood Village, newly incorporated with a municipal charter less than a decade old, and skirted the Cherry Creek Reservoir. Where the road straightened out again and crossed into the suburb of Aurora, construction of a subdivision was underway. “I saw this place, and the guy there asked me if I could hammer nails.”
The place was a 640-acre, 3,200-home community developed by California’s Mission Viejo Corporation. It was a miniature version of the Orange County city built by the same company, with everything from home patterns to street names carbon copied. “Hammering nails,” meanwhile, was code for being a framer. Dad wasn’t one, not yet at least, but he looked the part—tall and lean, with sun-bleached hair. In California, he eventually learned, the framers wore “swimming trunks and six-inch work boots, a belt with a bag on each side, and a hammer banging the backs of your knees.” In Denver, the uniform was “waffle-stomper” hiking boots, jean shorts, and no shirt. “No one ever wore a shirt. You were out in the Denver sun, and you got super, super tan.”
From 1940 to 1980, Aurora, Colorado’s population increased nearly fifty-fold. Geographers Paul Starrs and John Wright have described the interior West during this period of postwar growth as having been “remade in the California image.” The phenomenon has been a commonsense observation for a generation and is one backed up by driver’s license statistics: For years, the largest share of transplants to Colorado and other western states came from California. But movement of people doesn’t explain the aesthetic transformation that made the sprawling suburbs of Denver, Phoenix, Salt Lake City, and Boise look so similar to one another—and so similar to Southern California, in particular.
That was the work of Southern California homebuilders. When my dad replied to the foreman that, yes, he could hammer nails, he unwittingly signed up to become a foot soldier in this process: a carpenter trained to frame faster, with new tools, and to build spacious, light-filled suburban homes whose design altered the region forever. The story of the homebuilders and their workers in the 1970s is one that helps explain how so much of today’s built environment came to be—in Denver and beyond.
BEFORE PEOPLE MOVED INLAND, they moved to California. As part of US involvement in World War II, the federal government spent $7 billion on factories, military bases, and other investments in the state, in large part because of its location near the war’s Pacific theater. In just four years, nearly eight million people relocated to the West, half of them to the Pacific Coast.
Federal subsidies continued to flow westward even after the fighting ended. Wartime industries were repurposed to produce consumer goods. Discharged soldiers, drawn to the region for the warm, sunny weather and ready employment opportunities, needed places to live. Growth soared: California’s population increased from nine million in 1945 to nineteen million in 1964. The confluence of cheap land, federal investment in mortgage insurance, novel building materials, and automobile infrastructure gave way to a building boom with defense economies of scale.
Southern California factories churned out two-by-four studs, four-by-eight sheets of plywood, particleboard, power saws, and components like windows, doors, hardware, and cabinetry. With the new prefabricated products, construction began to resemble an assembly line. It all revolved—it still revolves—around framing.
Framing itself wasn’t new, but its technique was. Previously, framers had worked upright: They put up the home’s corner posts and then built the walls by “toe-nailing” one two-by-four at a time, driving small nails at an angle through the stud and into the floor. The Californians instead lined up two-by-fours and, working on the ground, built freestanding walls they called “plates.” They stood up the plates, nailed them into the floor deck, and instantly the thing started to look like a house.
As the “California method” spread across the country, it created the template for much of what we continue to associate with American housing today—the materials, dimensions, and layouts we’ve come to see as desirable and “homey.”
They derided the old, in situ framing method as “New Jersey farmer framing,” even as they admitted that it required more skill. “Toe-nailing is working top-down, getting two little three-inch nails through the stud and not hitting your thumb or ripping the wood up and keeping it on the line and everything,” my dad says. “It’s hard. Whereas we could just get a handful of nails, line it up, put our foot on it, and boom, boom, done.”
Streamlining design was the next logical step. Builders reduced the number of breaks in exterior walls and eliminated hips in roofs, giving postwar homes their famous “little boxes” appearance. They aligned wall lengths with framing studs, standardized window and door sizes, consolidated plumbing. They kept the number of home designs to a minimum, giving buyers just a few patterns—and their mirror images—to choose from.
Architect Cliff May, who made his name designing luxury, custom, Spanish-inspired ranch homes in Southern California, coined the name for the new style: GI ranch houses. In 1947 and 1948, Good Housekeeping and House Beautiful commissioned him to create plans for demonstration homes of around a thousand square feet that were tailored to the discharged soldier’s price point—$10,000 or less. Though May didn’t build them himself—he preferred his more affluent clients—the plans were licensed to developers for “reproduction by the thousands,” in the words of historian John Mack Faragher. By 1955, subdivisions of mass-produced homes like these accounted for more than 75 percent of new housing in metropolitan areas.
These techniques for building fast and in bulk came to be known as the “California method.” As this method spread across the country, it created the template for much of what we continue to associate with American housing today—the materials, dimensions, and layouts we’ve come to see as desirable and “homey.”
MANY STORIES OF THE POSTWAR housing boom stop there. But GI ranch houses are a thing of the past: Since 1975, homes have nearly doubled in size. Americans have traded “little boxes on the hillside” for spacious cookie-cutter homes. Ranch houses clumped together in small developments by local builders have been replaced by planned communities built by national corporations.
Once again, the changes came from California. And it was this next generation of homebuilding that my dad stumbled upon the day he showed up at Mission Viejo, Aurora.
After World War II, the federal government didn’t stop investing in the West—in fact, during the Cold War, its spending in the region surpassed prior expenditures. As Los Angeles’s population continued to grow and cheap, developable land became more scarce, homebuilders moved into Orange County, then comprised of large cattle ranches and citrus farms. The county’s population multiplied tenfold from 1950 to 1987, from 200,000 people to more than two million—spurred especially by Disneyland’s opening in 1955.
Two developers competed neck and neck to dominate the county’s construction. In 1963, the Irvine family unveiled a master plan to transform their 93,000-acre ranch, whose lands had been incorporated as the Irvine Company since the 1890s, into a master-planned city that would be the largest private development in the world. That same year, Mission Viejo Corporation formed to build out the 53,000-acre Rancho Mission Viejo in the southern half of the county.
Though Mission Viejo began building slightly after construction started on the Irvine Ranch, it built faster and sold more homes than its competitor. It also did all the building itself, while the Irvine Company contracted with eight other firms, some from the Bay Area. Orange County historian Jim Sleeper attributed this success to Donald Bren, Mission Viejo’s urban planner and principal builder. “Bren’s house designs better reflected what Californian’s [sic] thought a typical dream house should be,” he noted in the 1970s. They were “more in the California ranch house tradition,” he said, while Irvine’s were more “architecturally oriented.” By fiscal year 1968, Mission Viejo had 1,300 housing starts; the Mission Viejo Reporter, the company’s weekly newspaper for residents and prospective buyers, said it was “believed to be the largest single-family residential construction program by one firm at one site in a decade.”
When Mission Viejo welcomed its initial residents in 1966, they were no longer first-time homebuyers. Most owned houses in previously developed Orange County cities like Santa Ana, Anaheim, and Garden Grove. Federal aid to veterans had increased after the Korean War, and armed with new mortgage approvals, the ex-GIs wanted an upgrade: a second bathroom, separate bedrooms for each child, lounge space in addition to the formal living room. In place of the old $10,000 price point, Mission Viejo’s homes ranged between $25,000 and $50,000.
By the start of the ’70s, California builders had begun looking further afield for their next round of profits. Lennar and Kaiser Aetna opened offices in Phoenix; Mission Viejo eyed Denver. “We went out there … and thought, well, we’ll expand and show what Mission Viejo is, repeat a community of Mission Viejo,” said Art Cook, former director of community relations for the company, in an oral history.
The Cold War was particularly good to Denver. During World War II, the city’s Rocky Mountain Arsenal employed 14,000 people making chemical weapons, and the Remington Arms Company employed 20,000 making ammunition and poisonous gases. But while the region saw a significant population increase, it grew by 15 percent, compared with California’s 72.
The real boom came belatedly. In 1952, the new Rocky Flats Plant added to the region’s chemical manufacturing capacity. Then, the federal government converted the Denver Arms Plant into the Denver Federal Center, putting more people on the federal payroll in Denver than any city outside of Washington. By 1975, military spending in Colorado had reached $1.36 billion.
As the OPEC embargo drove up oil prices in the early 1970s, the city also became the corporate center for the West’s energy development. The decade saw the construction of twenty-seven new office buildings housing an estimated 2,000 energy companies in and around the state capital.
Denver builders had started constructing GI ranch houses during the previous decade. The suburb of Northglenn, famously depicted by the photographer Robert Adams, had been built in the early 1960s by Perl-Mack, the largest of the region’s homegrown developers. The photos show simple, rectangular houses with brick exteriors, small rectangular windows, and few gables in the rooflines.
But Mission Viejo wasn’t there to build GI homes. For its first filings in the Denver suburb of Aurora, Mission Viejo reused its Granada and La Paz home series from Orange County. (A “filing” refers to a group of lots whose construction permitting is filed together.) The Reporter touted the homes as midrange in price yet boasting features like “gracious entries, large family rooms, spacious eating areas in the kitchen, formal dining rooms, indoor-outdoor kitchens, and three-car garages.” The “largest and most luxurious” of the Granada line, wrote the Reporter, was “practically zoned for adult entertaining,” with “a curving staircase and second floor balcony grac[ing] the two-story entry.”
The company broke ground on the duplicate Mission Viejo in February 1972. Part of what allowed it to build bigger homes was that framers trained in the California method had gotten even more efficient. They’d discovered a tool called a rigging axe, originally designed for building oil rigs. It had an axe blade on the back instead of a claw and a handle that was longer than normal—sixteen inches—and that “balanced perfectly,” according to my dad: thicker in the center than it was toward the ends. The large hammer face, meanwhile, was milled, or ground into a waffle pattern of notches and grooves that “grab the nail and don’t let go.”
“Once you learn to use this thing, you slam the nail the second time and it just disappears—pa-pow, pa-pow, pa-pow, pa-pow. That’s four nails. The wall is built,” he says. “Everything you do with this hammer, millions of things, is fast. You put a nail in and it bends? You can rip it out by coming in from the side with one swing.”
Nine model homes opened in November. In January 1973, Hardy Hugh Rust, a twenty-five-year-old Buick salesman, and his wife, Roxana, became the community’s first residents, choosing the three-bedroom, two-bath Cordoba model from the Granada line. By April, fifty families had moved in.
THERE WERE DIFFERENCES between California’s and Colorado’s Granada homes—the latter’s garage was downscaled to two spaces, instead of three; the roof beams were painted dark brown instead of white. For the most part, these were minor tweaks. The homes were so little tailored to the new environment—in 1972, Denver saw fourteen days with lows of zero or below, and nighttime temperatures dropped into the forties even in July—that the Federal Energy Administration responded to an environmental impact statement filed by Mission Viejo in 1976 with a request for a “more complete” discussion of what “insulation will be incorporated in the walls, ceilings and under cold floors.” (Since California-method framing built all walls, including the exterior, out of two-by-fours, the homes had just three and a half inches of space for insulation.)
The distinctions between the new homes and the rectangular ranch houses of a generation earlier were much more significant. Most eye-catching was the Mediterranean theming. Colorado had never had the “mission revival” of California or New Mexico. Stucco—a material made of a 4:1 ratio of sand and Portland cement and commonly used to evoke Mediterranean aesthetics—was practically unheard-of in the Denver area. Mission Viejo made it a distinctive selling point. The company’s press releases referred repeatedly to their homes’ “flavor of Old Spain,” pointing to “massive Spanish style archways,” “slump-stone walls,” and “mission barrel tile roofs.”
At Mission Viejo, Aurora, garages also protruded forward from the perimeter of the home, becoming one of its most visible features from the street. This wasn’t part of the original GI ranch house design. Insistent on privacy, Cliff May, the architect of California’s early GI homes, had eliminated the front porch—a key element of early American vernacular housing. The design change pushed Americans to spend time in their backyards instead of porch sitting in view of their neighbors. But the houses based on May’s ranch prototype, including those at Levittown, New York, and Northglenn, Colorado, placed the garage (always for a single car) either in line with, or set back from, the home’s flat facade. It was “only in California,” J. B. Jackson notes in Crabgrass Frontier, that “the garage itself dominate[d] the facade of the typical home.” That changed as Californian styles touched down elsewhere.
The homes were also spacious. Mission Viejo advertised its California houses as having “the most luxurious master suites ever offered in a production house” and kitchens “so spacious that you’ll say, ‘LUCKY MOM!’” It similarly advertised its Colorado houses’ “formal entryways, vaulted ceilings, and large master bedroom suites.” According to local historian Todd McMahon, among Aurora residents the extra room, called a “bonus” or “spare” in company promotional materials, quickly became known as the “California” room. Like the GI ranch house, the California room was May’s brainchild. In 1958, Sunset magazine published Western Ranch Houses, a catalog of the architect’s luxury custom residential designs that presented the modern California ranch home as a reinvention of the ranchos of the state’s early Spanish and Mexican settlers. May saw these historic dwellings as adaptable to the novel technologies of his era, like floor-to-ceiling windows and sliding doors. “If you consider the plan of early houses, you can see how ideally suited they were for glass walls,” he wrote.
California rooms, then, were meant to be sunny, glassy, indoor-outdoor spaces. But like the rest of Mission Viejo residential designs, they were a clumsy blend of Spanish revival styling and off-the-shelf building products: Instead of a sunroom encased in floor-to-ceiling glass, the builders simply doubled the number of the same prefabricated window units used throughout the homes.
At the subdivision scale, Mission Viejo shipped in its iconic streetlights with bells modeled on those found in towns along the El Camino Real. As in California, the company christened Aurora’s two major roads “Alicia” and “Marguerite,” after the matriarchs of the family that owned Rancho Mission Viejo before its development. Mission Viejo Elementary School’s 550 students were grouped into classes named after historical California missions. James Toepfer, president of Colorado operations for the company, invited the American Lutheran Church to build a replica of its Orange County worship center. A recreation facility, now closed, featured an Olympic pool, recalling the success of Mission Viejo, California’s “nadadores” swim team, which had produced multiple Olympians. There were also plans to build a lake in the center of Mission Viejo in Aurora, modeled on California’s Lake Mission Viejo, but in the end the allotted site was repurposed for another filing of houses. (The community’s California antecedent reciprocated by inaugurating an “Aurora Park.”)
The themed adornments stood in for something larger: Mission Viejo introduced the planned community to metropolitan Denver. When the company purchased its square-mile section in Aurora, the municipality had no provisions for developer-planned communities, which were an invention of California builders like Mission Viejo and its aforementioned rival, the Irvine Company. By designing master plans that incorporated schools, churches, shopping, and recreation, these builders set themselves apart in the eyes of prospective buyers by offering seemingly self-sufficient communities. Such comprehensive projects, of course, required capital that local builders often did not have. In Phoenix, too, early planned communities were financed by California companies.
Before breaking ground, Mission Viejo Corporation lobbied Aurora to amend its city code to include “planned community zone districts” and offered to write the verbiage. The resulting ordinance, still in effect, calls for the city to “avoid the sterility of rigid lot and building placement” and “achieve a more desirable and efficient utilization of land and open spaces.” (Later, sections of the Aurora Planned Community Zoning ordinance were copied verbatim by the Front Range cities of Pueblo and Louisville.)
By designing master plans that incorporated schools, churches, shopping, and recreation, these builders set themselves apart in the eyes of prospective buyers by offering seemingly self-sufficient communities.
Through their effort to conjure an idyll within, however, planned communities broke with the surrounding city. They rejected the street grid and isolated themselves with walls while nevertheless relying on wide surrounding arterials to facilitate residents’ comings-and-goings. Mission Viejo, California, for instance, was accessed through two exits off Interstate 5; Mission Viejo, Colorado, while built at a smaller scale, is surrounded by four boulevards that carry residents to and from the planned community and is enclosed by white slumpstone walls that replicate those in California. (Numerous accounts locate Orange County as the point of origin of gated communities, with some pointing to the wall around Disneyland as the developers’ inspiration—a model for creating a “‘controlled’ community, manageable and orderly, within the rather chaotic development pattern of Orange County,” writes historian Barbara Lane.)
By 1985, Douglas County, Colorado, ten miles as the crow flies southwest of Mission Viejo, had more planned communities under construction than anywhere in the United States. The CEO of the county’s Economic Development Council told the Los Angeles Times, “Some builders are calling the corridor between Denver and Colorado Springs ‘Orange County.’”
The largest of the Douglas County’s developments was—and remains—Highlands Ranch, an edge city of over 100,000 residents. Searching Zillow for homes in Highlands Ranch turns up subdivisions that are distinctly “Colorado.” On the exteriors, blue-gray, moss green, and montane earth tones predominate. Gesturing weakly at “cabin porn,” the interiors offer large gas fireplaces, plentiful stone veneer, thick wood flooring, and oak balustrades. The street names range from the Colorado-generic “Fairview” and “Canyon Crest”—one neighborhood is called “Mountain View”—to the hyperlocal “Dad Clark Drive,” after a local nineteenth-century homesteader.
But squint a little and traces of the ’70s neo-Mediterranean style come into view—though in enlarged form. Where the houses in Aurora ranged between 1,500 and 3,000 square feet, at Highlands Ranch most fall between 2,500 and 5,000. They’re fronted by enormous garages, now with space for three cars. Grandiose entrances vault into two-story living rooms. They have sunny additional rooms whose windows are still proportioned to studs. The primary suites have arches between the sitting and sleeping areas, reminiscent of the “flavor of Old Spain” advertised by Mission Viejo. Many even have stucco—if not covering the whole house, at least on the backside or the second story.
And, of course, the community relies on publicly funded automobile infrastructure—it follows the same boulevard-and-cul-de-sac model of Mission Viejo, at a larger scale. With the construction of Highlands Ranch, a ring freeway project that had been canceled in the late 1970s due to air quality and anti-sprawl activism was revived and built as Colorado State Highway 470, opening in 1991. Partaking in the idyllic lifestyle promised by the new homes required a transformation of one’s rhythms: longer drives, higher highway speeds, stop-and-go traffic.
SO SHOULD IT COME as a surprise that the entity behind Highlands Ranch was the Mission Viejo Corporation? The company purchased the 15,000-acre property in 1978, as it wrapped up its Aurora experiment, and turned it into the largest planned community in the country owned by a single developer—beating its own record from California.
My dad worked at Highlands Ranch, too, later on in the ’70s. As its developments were built, yet another innovation came along that made framing even faster: air nail guns. The new tool sent the finely honed skills of hand nailing out the window, automating the trade so much that it could be dangerous: If a pneumatically driven nail hit a knot in the wood, for instance, it could bounce off and fly back at you.
As in Aurora, working at Highlands Ranch entailed framing the same house over and over again. Homes were built as cheaply and efficiently as possible to cater to an upwardly mobile middle class, the vast majority of which was white. The plain fact of Highlands Ranch’s scale proved that Mission Viejo Corporation’s Colorado lark had been a success. “They were convinced, and they were able to convince everybody else, that that was what they wanted—this lifestyle developed in the postwar period in LA that didn’t exist in Denver,” my dad says.
By now, California design, California construction and, by extension, California lifeways are embedded in the plat of metropolitan Denver and many other cities. But the vision the California builders peddled with such success is also one whose guiding values are long outdated. Though by now it feels unthinkable that any building method would oust two-by-four framing, the twinned climate and affordable housing crises demand that we apply its efficiency in new ways: to learn to live smaller, more collectively, and in ways that rely less on cars. If we shift our aesthetic ideal of home, perhaps a politics will follow.