A fine bungalow of 1922 in Drehr Place

On the SW corner of Drehr and Wisteria

A bungalow is a genre, not a style

The true bungalows (by "true" meaning the ones that like those in Alexandria, VA, are called California bungalows) built when the opening of Drehr Place was still recent are uncommonly fine.  This one has an L porch at south and a nicely designed porte cochère north that are both continuous with the broad porch and both original (only an addition at the back, which reaches the NS utilities alley, is a later addition).   Its bungalow design governs all sides, not just that facing the street, bearing out what the Wikipedia article, s.v. Bungalow, says of the type (as of the Prairie House), that it does demand a lot much larger than the interior spaces of the house require, so that "Chicago bungalows" have bedrooms above in order to be crammed onto 40-foot lots (or even narrower).  Its spreading plan is true to its Bengali origin, and it is a perfect type for semi-tropical Louisiana.  After three months study, I realize that the Wikipedia article is actually the very best one.  It recognizes that a 'bungalow' is a genre, not a style, whether for its style it resorts to Craftsman brackets, or chooses to buy some "Colonial" Tuscan columns to give it perhaps a less suburban character; in adobe territory, it may even be heavily stuccoed with some "mission" traits.  On this corner lot, besides space for a garden, it has as large a footprint as most of the taller corner-lot houses in our Garden District.  So far, I haven't found another such "four-sided" bungalow here, though the blue-painted one facing it comes close.

Noteworthy is the very low gable (no need to shed snow here), which permits a full set of five sturdy brackets: permits, because they all can be anchored top and bottom, from the gable cap at the top to the center of the 3 windows, aligned with the center porch pillar.  All three pillars have brick pedestals splayed at the bottom.

The splayed profile of the brick chimney's base repeats that of the righthand porch pedestal.  The owners of this house (who, of course, as such possess the data given every time they are sent a property-tax assessment) informed me that the house was built in 1922.

A whole album of this house, 608 Drehr, is provided.

Two blocks to the east, at 2332 Wisteria is the Sanders house, already presented in the blog post of March 15.  Here the original parts of the house date from 1921.  Its splayed brick pedestals and general proportions are similar, though, besides the square brackets, emphasizing their sturdiness, its pillars (and their pi motif) are very short and the brick pedestals are taller, twice as tall as the pillars.

Blocks away, two lots south of the Reiley-Reeves house on Park Boulevard where we found the earliest Craftsman elements in Roseland Terrace, we noticed 840 Park Blvd nearly a twin to the Sanders house, with the same brick parts and splayed bases (as well as square brackets and short pillars) certainly date its design (and probably construction) also c. 1921.  I take these, tentatively, as the earliest Garden District bungalows, if the similarity of 840 Park to 2332 Wisteria is not partly due to restoration...  Or is it only the same brand of paint?

The house I added as "A-prime" at 2147 Oleander Street (see post of 10 February) combines the three-window vent in the gable with brackets that look like many early-1920s ones, but triangular (it is the square ones that as brackets are exceptional), but its roof is a little steeper and so deeper, so only three brackets are logical; the intermediate ones would not reach.  In any case, this house is a good example of assorted accoutrements.  

In its very low proportions and wide eaves, on the other hand, it is the picket-fenced house, no. 603, on the NE corner of Drehr and Wisteria, once grey, now blue (already posted in one photo on Mar. 15), directly opposite the the pale terre verte bungalow heading this post, that most truly resembles our 608 Drehr, though the blue house has neither an L shaped porch nor a porte cochère.  It is so truly a bungalow, notwithstanding.

By the way, turning the corner onto Wisteria, you see something original doubtless to many but usually enclosed now (for a kitchen toilet and shower), an open back porch.  Actually, I took the picture because I thought that Richard Diebenkorn would like to look at its composition and think about it.

Another bungalow, that same brand of blue paint (!), is up on Government Street, also less than a block away.  This has the same low, broad proportions and, this time, with an ample L porch.  I doubt that it ever had brackets.  No need to have any.  But it has the triple-window vents in the low gable.

Finally, another repetition, but here in proper context.  Again, this house is not "in an Order" or "in Neo-Colonial 'style'", merely by using pillars with capitals.  Sitting right next to the blue one, you could build it on pretty much the same foundations and would have chosen  its suitability to our climate and lifestyle for the same reasons.  I guess that both of these houses are from the early 1920s, too.

********

Back in the years when I taught survey courses, I made the class memorize, "A capital does not an Order make" (so that when, on a test, I asked them to draw one of the orders they would know that I meant the total design system, or syntax, of Doric, say, or Ionic.  I never ventured asking them to draw Corinthian).

To make the point, I took a slide of a brick-faced block with white trim and some readymade columns disguising its front and said that jerrybuilt branches of local banks only advertise the respectability of our Nation's Founders, and a well operated branch in a cinderblock garage might well be equally honest.

By the way, let me add that there are many various bungalows in both Roseland Terrace and Drehr Place that are all or mostly original that I have not discussed.  An example is 632 Drehr Street, which has unique brackets (but whether 'Victorian' or Japanese I do not know) in combination with columns, though it is not a very large house.  However, I know that its owners are far better qualified to write it up than I am, and here I am more concerned with quasi-Aristotelian 'categories', such as 'style' and 'Order' and 'genre' than with trying to account fully for every single house.

"Mrs. Borck's House" Roseland Terrace's 1912 Craftsman

Best view of "Mrs. Borck's House", from the NE, showing wooden sidewalks on Camellia, at left, and Government, at right.  In the pale distance, that is surely the Reiley-Reeves house, at far left.
Cazadessus 1912 EBRLibr Baton Rouge Room

516 Camellia "Mrs Borck's House" from east.

"Mrs. Borck's House"

For about two months, after my friend dp had directed me to the Cazadessus collection of photos at the East Baton Rouge Library, to see the Reiley-Reeves house as newly completed (both the contractor’s record and the date given to the photos, in 1912), I had tried to find, after the “Boehringer”, the third rather distinctive one, “Mrs. Borck’s", which a scan of survivors facing Government St. failed to discover.  In fact, only when I went to take a picture of the beautifully restored, and gardened, pink house, no. 516,  facing Camellia Street at Government did I recognize “Mrs. Borck’s” and, with help from its owners, identify it as a true specimen of the Craftsman movement (otherwise not represented in Roseland Terrace).  For that matter, I haven’t seen real Craftsman in Drehr Place, either, not surprisingly since as a leading style it was being supplanted by 1915.  Knowing only the California masters, Greene & Greene in Pasadena and Bernard Maybeck, with his disciple Julia Morgan, in the Berkeley area, I tried to determine which representatives of Craftsman “Mrs. Borck’s House” represented.  But the domination of Chicago in this decade by the Prairie type and the small and smudgy photographs of houses in the reprints from Gustav Stickley’s The Craftsman left me far better informed than from the McAlesters alone but hardly well enough.  The beginning of searches undertaken north of Government Street and especially in Beauregard Town, both north and south of Government, for comparanda related to any of the exceptional and early houses in Roseland Terrace, showed that the Craftsman movement was not unexampled in Baton Rouge, but “Mrs. Borck’s House”, pretty surely finished by 1912, remains unequaled by the following sequence of criteria, by which “Craftsman” needs to be understood.

(1) Inspired by European, especially U.K., work, and beginning rather with art mobilier than with architecture, American architects about the same time as F. L. Wright’s Robie House (1905) forged American styles of Arts and Crafts architecture (the epithet Craftsman seems not to have been embraced in the U.K.), especially when Stickley started publishing one each month in The Craftsman.  These were indeed Handwerke, using carefully chosen, often deliberately regional or (the inverse) exotic woods, each unique and expensive.

(2) Houses uniquely designed, or at least not sold as patterns, maintaining the intellectual and artisanal principles of the great “textbook” examples.  They show that the Craftsman type of house was established and understood by thoughtful designers and customers.  Good examples often also incorporate original ideas.  The house built in 1912 for Mrs. Borck seems to me to belong to this group.  I should think that men and women (this was an important period for female architects, as Stickley’s periodical shows, even allowing that Julia Morgan was exceptional) formed as draughtsmen in the masters’ studios spread this movement, in which contemporary arts and crafts accessories looked and worked so beautifully.  Also, like good post-1950s Modern, Craftsman provided a great setting for well chosen works of art in almost any ethnic or period style.

(3) Houses that at heart might be bungalows or almost any of the traditional house forms whose fronts, usually porches, have a whole suite of Craftsman motifs.  Yes, most of these are pattern houses and many were available as kits (not that coming pre-cut prejudices anything but the likelihood of error or waste).  Are these not part of the Craftsman movement?   Those illustrated in the post for March15 all seem to date between the end of WW I and the market crash of 1929 and are located on lots that in the Garden District were purchased relatively early.  Bungalows otherwise like them usually have no obviously Craftsman traits, except that they correspond to the useful chart in the McAlester’s book (op. cit., p. 455) with respect to porch supports and non-supporting gable brackets not derived from Late Victorian.

This house in the 300 block of Royal Street in the northern part of Beauregard Town, even on the ends of the gable rafters and certainly in the 'pergola architraves' properly jointed and supporting the shallow porch, to me is Craftsman-lite, so to speak.   Its flanks, however,  are generic.

But it is not confined to the heart of Beauregard Town.

A pair of houses on the east side of East Blvd and barely a short block south of Government have the same formula, though skimpy.

And one less than a block from the original Dufrocq Elementary of 1906, on S 19th, is obviously of the same kind:

For the tau motifs, see also the fine porch at 2147 Oleander Street, added as A-prime to the Feb 10 post, above.

These three all have the "pergola architrave" but all three also have full sets of tau motifs (like two of the houses on Wisteria Street, which latter, however, do not have the paired posts supporting the 

pergola architrave. [The term 'pergola architrave' seems indefensible, but throughout the 20c pergolas were made in this way––not like the Italian ones that gave pergolas their name]

Finally, under (3), there are some very fine bungalows of Craftsman character that have none of these earmarks.  Here is my favorite, on the corner of Drehr and Wisteria.  

15 Feb 2013 At Wisteria & Drehr.  This house is on a double lot, and in 1986, when I came here, the house was gray and south of it, in the otherwise empty yard, was a playhouse almost a miniature of this one, painted to match.  People spoke of a criminal tragedy here, and for years the house seemed to be empty.  No longer.  One of the nice bungalows with a porch of paired pillars.

(4) Ordinary bungalows without a suite of Craftsman motifs that would not be as they are absent the Craftsman movement.  Examples even include three-room single shotguns that not only are non-New Orleanian (with a tall rectangular false front) but have a gable shape and roof slope of a 1920s bungalow and maybe a single pair of rather plain brackets.  I have not seen one preserved in Roseland Terrace but on the eastern edge of southern Beauregard Town, one has been nicely restored, and many in neighborhoods in transition (meaning that the lot is worth much more than the house) simply disappear, or at least their porches disappear.

The neighborhood of the last does seem to be in transition, since there is evidence that the city is busy building new and more truly habitable houses than this six-roomer, which I think is about 90 years old.

*********

It would be foolish to say that Beauregard Town, both earlier and more varied and larger than Roseland Terrace, even including Drehr Place, will not yield another house such as “Mrs. Borck’s House”, since I have only begun to look at it in the light of what I have learned in Roseland Terrace.  Beauregard Town does have a number of houses with wrap-around porches that it is interesting to compare with Park Blvd’s “Boehringer House” of 1912, of which more later; it might even have a house like 1103 Park Blvd, my other “exceptional” choice.

Here I shall just discuss 516 Camellia, with some images of details, since “Craftsman” was not a predominant style of choice in the gulf-coast South east of Texas (and even there, and without plantation fixation, not in Galveston).

First, let us consider the evidence for the porch facing south at 516 Camellia, which in the intervening decades was substantially lost but for which primary evidence is conserved almost in situ.

Here, with the wonderful chimneys (barring different focal lengths of the old and new cameras) you see that only the south end of the house has been altered (the use of a pale color for the body of the house is well within the rules, especially since the matching cedar frames of the principal windows and the door are so perfectly within them).  I do not know what powder-post beetle, what storm or falling tree, what neglected leak compromised that porch in the half century between its building and the present owners' acquiring it.  What they preserved and showed me was the great cypress boards that once faced the four pillars, cleaned and dry safely used as wainscoting in the new room, as crisp as newly carved.  The relief is flat and consists of arrows pointing down, but as if bound (I think of flat metal) at the top, as if supporting the long pergola architrave above them.  The architrave ends in pergola (Japanese-like) shapes as on the Royal Street house above, and the gable (of this cross-gabled house) is 'supported' by Craftsman brackets.  As built, the south face was at least as "Craftsman" as the east face.  The arrow shapes do not really look like spears or like flat barn hinges; they are emphatically flat and straight sided.  They remind me of the equally flat and simplified reliefs on the front door of the Thorsen House by Greene and Greene in Berkeley (see the last post, but not all photos show the shapes very well; they look like cricket bats, but the ancestry of Mr. Thorsen was Norwegian and the house has a number of ship's-captain motifs, so they may be oars or rudders).  In the case of Mrs. Borck, we do not know if any family allusions are to be sought.  Personally, I read the big, flat arrows (of which the body is about 9 or 10 inches wide) just as they work effectively; they hold down the whole pilaster order wonderfully.

No doubt the joinery is real, since even on the cheaper houses above it is, and note the 'pergola' profile of the porch eave.  The metal capping (against end rot) is seen also on some Beauregard Town houses. 

These are not window boxes, but the row of little bracket supports to hold them visually can be seen on some Victorian antecedents.  I'm still looking for some under window-groups in Baton Rouge.

Suitably ornamented chimneys may occur on all arts and crafts houses, but, as with these, it was expected that they be specially designed.

The north wing from behind (with its slat-screened enclosure) itself has an architectural order,

of which here is a detail.

There are additional details in the album: image 331, ff. in the 2013 STUDY album.
This is enough for one post, and I still have work to do, but I thought it urgent to follow the preface post as soon as possible.
Please post comments (if you have a Google connection) or e-mail otherwise if I need to be corrected.

After all those Bungalows

At the intersection of Drehr and Wisteria; the house in the center has a bungalow porch; the one at the right is a recent 'ranch' style that tries to harmonize

The Results of a Research Project involving Bungalows

I.

In memoriam, H. W. Janson 1913–1982

In  the year when, back at UC Berkeley, I was in my last year (to finish my dissertation and get a teaching position) H. W. Janson came in the Spring semester as a visiting professor.  I audited the course and still have my notes.  But Janson was very friendly with graduate students.  Once when he invited us to his rented apartment (in our own neighborhood, too) he had the page proofs of his new textbook, the famous History of Art (Prentice-Hall / Abrams, NY, 1962).  The first edition was reprinted through the 1960s, and I still have mine, good as new.  It was printed in West Germany and bound in Holland.  The page proofs were quires each wrapped in two sheets of plate paper for four colorplates; there were 79 colorplates, the 849 black-and-white illustrations being in the text.  The joint publication in half a dozen languages (many more later) also engaged preeminently the Hirmer Verlag (but they even had managed to get a couple of plates from Skira), and the “trade” edition differed only by coming in a box.  We had never seen such a textbook, and none of the succeeding editions was so well sewn and well bound; their history, being printed in various Asian nations and eventually with the availability of color offset printing with all the illustrations in color (but none full colorplates) is that of the death of the printer’s trade in the West, and a couple of them tended to fall apart after a semester in a book bag.  (If you want Janson, buy a 1^st editon, any printing, even ex-library, even well worn, not only for the plates and binding but because it is what Janson himself actually wrote).

It was not long before the textbook industry and instructors in some colleges pressed for breaking up the text into topic paragraphs with headings, also for less demanding extended reasoning: in other words for a typical textbook.  Janson had spent years creating a book lucid enough for a high school graduate and worth reading by his peers, a book to educate the reader.  For young people he and his wife Dora (who had also helped on the big book, but less substantially) wrote another book.  I still believe that the 1^st edition of History of Art is a masterpiece.  Succinctly but lucidly, seemingly easily, he develops and connects ideas, always based on the fewer than a thousand illustrations that could be allowed.  It is a book to re-read many times, and I assigned it for courses until, after his death, it was so compromised that for a while I went back to a boxful of University Prints and offset text, locally produced, to go with them.

All that to lead to the chapter most formative for me.  Part Four, the Modern World, pp. 453–464, Neoclassicism and Romanticism, unfolds the importance of considering them together, as the whole period c. 1750–1850, as fundamentally Romantic, beginning as a reaction from late Baroque, from Rococo.  Resorting to Nature, to Reason, to reform, to sincerity as ideals, to embody all of this any of the existing styles could be employed.  Latrobe’s idiosyncratic classical and neo-Gothic submissions for Baltimore Cathedral, Monticello and the Houses of Parliament and Labrouste’s expression of honesty in baring and managing cast iron in the Bibliothèque Ste-Geneviève, as Janson carefully elucidates them, do belong together.  And the music and literature of their time go with them, too (Janson assumes some literacy in his students).  You will have to read this for yourself.  It was the modern chapters, beginning here, that Prentice-Hall and the teaching profession had trouble with, especially, I daresay, in producing the Teachers’ Guides, with tests provided, that were demanded.  Wasn’t the big book a guide for the teacher?  If one disagreed with it, wouldn’t it be good to wrestle with it in discussion sections?

For all the years when I taught the survey end to end, a full year, I kept re-reading it and endorsing it to my students.

The other day I realized how deeply engrained it was in my own thinking.

A broadly sprawling beautifully maintained house with that broad, low arch that even in India is seen on bungalows and emphasizes their attachment to the ground.  But its details are neocolonial and as such the Drehr Place list labels it.  But I say that this is basically, by Los Angeles standards, a bungalow house.

II.

On the other hand, the books that I bought after I came to teach in the South, when I had more spending money but usually no teaching assistant and much less time, did all get read, but not as I had read two decades earlier.  I used to go to the LSU bookstore and buy the books ordered for courses that I wished I could take.  I did read the McAlesters, but usually only used it as a Field Guide.  When Barnes & Noble opened a big store here, I went and replaced all the books that I had not recovered from lending or had given away, and, as a new bookstore has a wonderful array of standard sets, I bought most of the World of Art books that I didn’t have already.  I did read Primitivism and Modern Art, (the Romanticism of the last fin de siècle) but (I tend to use sales slips as bookmarks) I had only looked at The Arts & Crafts Movement, by Elizabeth Cumming (for England) and Wendy Kaplan (for America).  Now, in the latter, when I went looking for something else, I found the approach that I had learned from Janson fulfilled.  I mean, Pevsner does just architecture and loves only Voysey, and the handsome coffee-table catalog from the Los Angeles County Museum of Art, American Arts & Crafts: Virtue in Design is all mobilier, as if architecture itself weren’t an art and a craft, as Stickley and the whole arts and crafts movement realized, had tended to keep my mind in a rut.  From William Morris to van de Velde and Behrens and Wright finally that whole fulfillment of sincerity in workmanship and truth in design fell into place, that whole romance of society and its arts, the continuity of Revolution-born art, including most (all?) of modernism.  In this comprehensive picture I found a place for all the bungalows.

For the ones that I love best are indeed the California kind that are linked with Craftsman, but they aren’t the only ones.  Also, those English cottage kinds come from the Garden Cities like Richard Norman Shaw’s at Leyswood, and the neo-Tudor is analogous to pre-Raphaelite renderings of pseudo-medieval tales, not to mention Victorian fairy tales.  And so on.  My hands-down favorite Arts & Crafts house is (or was) McKim, Meade, and White’s Low House, Bristol, Rhode Island.  The McAlesters just call it Victorian Shingle!  It is not an accident that the little virtuously fireproof house that Wright contributed to Bok’s Ladies’ Home Journal has the same rooms in a square sort of plan as that woodcraft puzzle where you have to move the piano from one corner to the opposite one, which also little bungalows have that aren’t the two rooms by three rooms under a single gable, a single ridgepole.  Fireproof: that’s thinking like “green” today, and Pasadena’s Wilson touted concrete, too.  And there sits the prairie-hugging Robie House at the University of Chicago and a whole new suburb of flat-loving Wright-influenced houses in Amsterdam.  Our Garden District can be taken as the salaried man’s equivalent.  The japonoiserie of even our 1920s bungalows is the last chapter of orientalism, and other bungalows need not participate in it.  On the other hand, the array in Wikipedia Commons, if you go to it for bungalows, seems to have been culled from the Realty trade.  Some don’t even say what city the house is in, and some only use the name bungalow for sentiment.  Why, a couple of blocks from where I live there’s a cinderblock box called Honeymoon Bungalow, painted in pastel colors, and I think it may be practically a whorehouse. 

On our side (the south side) of Government Street I was surprised to see a large and healthy bottlebrush tree, so common in California, rare here, in full bloom

III.

So why keep the term “Bungalow”? 

First, though doubtless even in the suburbs of Bangalore itself, more than a century ago, there was the easy variety of styling that relatively expensive houses usually display; though certainly in Henry L. Wilson’s Bungalow Book there are houses that just look like sprawling Hollywood life style such as greeted expatriate Europeans in the 1920s and 1930s as much as like anything in The Craftsman (and the latter itself featured quite a variety of houses designed by Stickley’s friends, I daresay), though most of the one-storey houses or one storey with a bedroom dormer or a camel back in the Baton Rouge Garden District represent every variety of house we think of as bungalows, the fact is, no matter what kind of facing they have, they have an overall shape and character that we see and think ‘bungalow’. 

So what is the McAlesters’ problem?  Take the last seven lines on their p. 454 (overlooking the questionable assertion that they were inspired primarily by Greene and Greene and admitting the importance of ‘extensive publicity in such magazines as [most of them women’s magazines]’; thus familiarizing the rest of the nation with the style "a flood of pattern books appeared, offering plans for Craftsman bungalows; some even offered completely pre-cut packages of lumber and detailing to be assembled by local labor.”  How shocking!  It meant that even without adequate local resources you could build the house you wanted.  Just as Sears offered the same kind of children’s clothes as big-town children had, and the same kind of red wagons, and…you name it.  How shocking to build your home from a pattern book!  How shocking if you could even get an English Garden Cottage that way.  ‘High-style interpretations are rare except in California…One-story vernacular examples are often called simply bungalows or the Bunglaloid style”.  What can a Californian, like me, expect of an author who uses  a “speedometer” illiteracy like “bungaloid”? 

I say that a bungalow is a vernacular concept in the first place.  That salaried Americans like them very much.  That it is OK to like red roses (my grandparents had American Beauty red roses on trellises in front of their house).  That it is OK also to grow up in a Council House and call it by that name, if you live in England.  After all, honesty of many kinds was at the root of all Arts & Crafts, though the movements were founded by and driven by the classes that had the means and leisure for them.  Ask William Morris if that isn’t so.  If America can use its railroads and rivers and Sears and Roebuck entrepreneurial drive to ship Kit Houses, yea, even in Colonial styles, all over the country, that is a kind of exceptionalism that I can rejoice in.  Besides, my 85-year-old house cost very little and is still in good condition, and I like it.  I can use its spaces as my own life style requires, a claim that “Falling Water”, for example, cannot make.

With thanks to my friends in Missouri.

And on Park Blvd, here is a really pretty English Cottage, across Cherokee from the Reiley-Reeves house; most of ours with such a profile and massing are Tudorized.

Go to the album for other images, and click on an image here to zoom the set.

The Big, Colonial-Revival Houses: I

Baton Rouge, Government Street, south side, just east of S. 22nd Street.  I suppose that this house dates from the 1920s, since the Drehr Place part of the Garden District lies right behind it.
Actually, the GDCA's list of houses in Drehr Place reports that this house was brought from downtown decades ago and can be dated c, 1910, and consents in calling the windows Palladian.  No wonder it is uncomfortable beside the anomalous building at 2202 Government: it would be more comfortable next to the Boehringer house at 614 Park, since each adheres purely to an early 20c revival style.

The Big, Colonial-Revival Houses in Roseland Terrace
I am learning how to make better use of the McAlesters' Field Guide.  I must give myself the same advice as I gave undergraduate students: just read every sentence, in context, too, carefully (the authors already have pared it to the bone in editing).  The date-spans that they give are important.  So, while I look in the Victorian chapter for "Queen Anne" (which they, too, p, 268, dub "rather inappropriate" as a label), I look in the chapter, Eclectic Houses, Colonial Revival, c. 1880–1955, (but mostly pre-WW II) for the houses we have here.  And there are good reasons for the difficulty of dating them, without going to the State Archives to check the contractors' records, which I shall not do.  I mean, in the first quarter of the 20c it is perfectly plain which elements are taken from "Queen Anne", in quotation marks, whatever the original appropriateness of the label may have been.
As I have said, this topic has been a new one for me, allowing me to work my way to what I had never realized before, since choosing labels for a data base is really NOT what study is all about, and I like to imagine students reading these posts not to classify the houses in a Linnaeus sort of way but to follow an old student in self-imposed exploration.  What I do know is that nothing can be assumed to be true simply because everyone knows it.  For example, every ancient Greek knew the Trojan War...
The underlying socio-economic and technical history of my entire subject is the same for the history of Sears Roebuck, et al., for factory manufacture of readymade clothing, for the rapid development of automobiles and highways, for machine printing of newspapers, including rotogravure, etc., for the integration of railway networks and postal networks, for the migration (as always) of farm workers and younger sons to the towns, making them cities where they weren't before: all these require all the others.  All was accelerated by the first world war, too, even if America was less affected by it.

Now, practically any house might be a "kit house".  Here is a 1916 page from the Sterling catalogue for a model they call the "Vernon".  It is a kit in the sense that all the materials, pre-cut and cut to exact measurement, including the hardware and most of the fixtures, as well as the plans and specifications, will be assembled and shipped to the lumberyard of your choice, in one or more box cars.  Sears, which we can thank for publishing the most and the most re-printed catalogues, baldly advertises that you don't need to hire an architect or hunt down all the fixtures needed, or get a lot of expensive (and perhaps misleading) estimates, or worry about things not fitting or not working, since Sears will do all that and more 'at no extra cost' for you.  Sears also, of course (but so have the larger mills locally and nationally), has the whole range of manufactured options, such as windows and doors and machine-carved swags and dentils and cornices and capitals, that you require to make your house your own.  The photos (in the 1926 catalogue) of their mills and warehouses and customer-service installations, with lots of phone operators, make us better understand Grand Rapids and even Dearborn.  They guarantee their shipment down to the last joint and hinge.  My own family's experience with Sears and Montgomery Ward in the 1930s, as I recall it, endorses that claim, if only in a small way.
You cannot tell a kit house, I am quite certain, from a non-kit house.  Even Sears is happy to sell you the specifications and plans and supply lists for the house of your choice for $10.  Options included.  Studying one of the simplest 'bungalows', I can see no reason why a family with several brothers and brothers in law and uncles, such as could raise a barn, could not build their own kit house, but equally I am sure that most hired local contractors.  I used to think that the Baton Rouge houses were built by local companies, but not necessarily, since Sears and several other companies supplied cypress window and door frames (for hardness and freedom from warping) and likewise all the other components in recommended woods.  In either case, windows could be bought at the mill, along with all the other sorts of millwork, and might or might not be of regional origin.
When you look through the architects' publications and through the re-prints of The Craftsman you see the minds of real architects, striving and competing to do something special, and their houses, as much as a dress by Worth or a car by Dusenberg or Bugatti, could not be machine-cut (like J. C. Penney or Marks & Spenser clothes or the body of a Ford Model A).  Now, I'm not sure, and short of proving that a house was unpublished—or, on the other hand, is in some catalogue that I haven't seen–I can only say that I have not yet found a pre-WW II house, no matter how large and expensive or small and cheap, that cannot have been built from commonly available published plans and specs.  Even as early as Wilson's 1910 catalogue, the option of pre-cut and kitted out, or in plans and specs only, was offered.
Just as the sub-Vogue gowns had to be simplified and otherwise economized to be sold by Sears and its competitors, so did the sub-McKim, sub-Craftsman, et al., to be profitable and practicable as kit houses.  And one of Chanel's little dresses and today one by Ralph Lauren are distinguishable from the fads that they inspired as surely as a real Queen Anne chair is distinguishable for a Grand Rapids knock-off made of ash, or worse.
The Baton Rougeans who owned our big houses in the Garden District may have driven Packards, of course, and the bungalow drivers (naturally) had Model A or even an inherited Model T.
It is one of the secrets of the Garden District's enduring success that they lived side by side in every block.  Post-war developers' tracts, as I think I said already, were doomed to be Watts (and in Oakland, CA, Brookfied Village, q.v).