Back to the Future
Gary Mitchell’s abode was, and may still be, ahead of its time
By Leslie Wylie
Photography by Shannon Stanfield
If you didn't know better, you'd think Gary Mitchell's home was a preview of the future of suburban life. With its solid steel construction and modular floor-plan, sputnik-inspired mailbox and pewter exterior accents, the house exudes a space-age sophistication that even the Jetsons would admire.
But, au contraire, the house is actually a relic of the past. It was built on this corner in Sequoyah Hills in 1948 and exists today as an increasingly rare example of the Lustron Home, a brand of solid-steel, prefabricated housing invented and marketed in the wake of World War II. “There was a huge housing shortage right after the war,” explains homeowner Mitchell, standing in his bright, airy living room. “You had thousands of men coming back home, marrying, starting families, and there weren't enough homes to go around.”
Enter Chicago-based entrepreneur Carl Strandlund, whose manufacturing firm began mass-producing an alternative to traditional houses dubbed the Lustron Steel Home. The sturdy homes were designed to be maintenance-free, rust-proof, fire-proof, space-efficient and three times stronger than traditionally built homes. The inexpensive homes cost between $6,000 and $10,000, not including the lot. For the young American family on a shoestring budget, they were a logical choice.
Targeting that market, Lustron received orders for 20,000 homes between the years 1946 and 1948 and managed to fill 2,498 of them before the corporation declared bankruptcy in 1950. Some say it was Lustron's inability to handle the high volume of orders that led to its premature demise, but others blame the protestation of trade unions. After the home was shipped to its destination on a flatbed, it took workers only about 30 hours to piece it together, leaving little opportunity for laborers to turn a profit. It didn't take long before the government intervened.
When Mitchell bought his Lustron home around three-and-a-half years ago, though, he wasn't impressed by its historical quirks. He admits, “I bought the lot, not the house.” His initial plan was to bulldoze it and build a new one in its place, but when the home started to grow on him, he had a change of heart. “I began to look at the situation as a chance to preserve it,” he says.
These days, Mitchell seems proud of the home's oddities—like the fact that, since you can't drive a nail into the all-steel walls, he has to hang his art by way of magnets or braces instead. “There's not a scrap of wood in this whole house,” he says. “Everything is steel.”
Mitchell's taste in interior décor reflects his own colorful personality—everywhere you look, there's something aesthetically interesting to take in, be it whimsically-shaped furniture or a giant, glowing aquarium, a floor rug inlaid with bold geometrical patterns or a vibrantly-hued canvas he painted himself. But he notes that the lively color and design scheme is necessary considering the gray pallor of the walls: “This could be a really drab and dingy house if you were using it to meet the utilitarian needs they were designed for,” he says.
The exterior, which retains its original “Surf Blue” porcelain-coated panels (Lustron Homes were also available in “Desert Tan,” “Maize Yellow” and “Dove Gray”), is even more cheerful. Not to mention futuristic—if a robot wheeled its way down the driveway every morning to fetch the newspaper, the neighbors probably wouldn't be surprised. On the flipside, it stands out from the more demure and traditional houses surrounding it like the new Apple MacBook Pro in a room full of typewriters. Mitchell recalls that when he first started work renovating the house, “Nobody could figure out what was going on. Now that it's come together, people just stop and stare at it.” In a good way, of course.
A 1949 advertisement for Lustron Homes in The Saturday Evening Post read, “Never Before in America a House Like This.” In retrospect, it might as well have read, “Never Again in America a House Like This.” Today's Lustron exists as a postcard from an era that looked to science for innovative solutions to its problems, with a result that was as forward-thinking as it was practical.
For Mitchell, it's the perfect fit. And who knows? Maybe Lustron Homes will come back in fashion yet.
