"The House Americas Been Waiting For"
"Because of the war and the 12-year depression preceding it, very few new homes had been built since 1929, resulting in a severe housing shortage for soldiers returning from WWII. The federal government quickly passed legislation banning non-essential construction so that all materials and labor could be diverted to the immediate need of supplying new housing.
The watchwords of this postwar time were science, technology and know-how. It was inevitable that the hunger for new technologies and scientific ways would hit the architectural scene and create a radically new house.
Ohio businessman Carl Strandlund believed he had the just the solution. Prefabricated of porcelain-enameled steel components, the Lustron home could be mass produced like the automobile and marketed through an automobile-style dealer system to individual consumers who could then erect the home on site.
Strandlund didnt start out to build houses. Originally he hoped to obtain enough steel to start construction on millions of dollars worth of steel-paneled gas stations for Standard Oil and other corporate clients. But wartime restrictions on steel were still in place and federal regulators turned down Strandlunds request in 1946.
Strandlund then turned his energies to demonstrating that houses could be built quickly, efficiently and economically with these same steel panels.
Working with Strandlund, Chicago architects Roy Burton Blass and Morris H. Beckman sketched out some ideas for an all-steel, prefabricated, bungalow-flavored home.
Their architectural prototype was a two-bedroom, 1,000-square foot home with an exterior sheathing made of 2-foot square steel panels. (In later years, Lustron also offered one bedroom and three bedroom homes and alternate floor plans for the two bedroom.)
The entire structure would be steel framing, interior and exterior walls, roof trusses and roof tiles. The exposed steel (interior and exterior walls and roof) would have a porcelain-enamel finish, a hard, glass finish baked onto the steel panels and roof shingles. The exterior color options were pink, tan, yellow, aqua, blue, green and gray. Interiors were beige or gray." Taken from Old House Web: (
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As you can see in the photos, there is a detached garage behind the house, but it is not a Lustron garage.