A Systems Approach to Building Your Modern Home – Frank Lloyd Wright’s Idea, or Sears?

  |  June 29, 2017

When he founded Lindal Cedar Homes in 1945, Sir Walter Lindal offered “kit” homes that customers selected from a catalogue, and which included all the plans and materials for assembly by local contractors. Everything for the structure was figured out and delivered to the house site. This concept had been done successfully by companies like Sears Roebuck as early as 1908, but not many people know that Frank Lloyd Wright carried it further to modern homes one hundred years ago with his 1917 creation American System-Built Homes, see https://www.curbed.com/2016/12/16/13984492/frank-lloyd-wright-prefab-american-system-built.

Customers could choose from seven models, and plans and pre-cut materials (for quality control and to save waste) were delivered to the house site for construction. The homes were sold through local dealers, unlike Sears’ mail order homes. Wright’s methods and mission are strikingly similar to Lindal Cedar Homes’ modern designs, such as Lindal Elements and the Lindal Architects Collaborative (of which the Frank Lloyd Wright School of Architecture, Taliesin West, is a participating architect): open layouts, an “instinctive connection to the outdoors”, the use of many windows to bring the outside into every room (“Wright managed to fit 33 windows within the 805-square-foot B1 model”), and local dealers such as Atlantic Custom Homes. The systems approach ensured purity of design, quality of materials, and predictability of results for Wright as it does today for our Lindal homes.

Unfortunately for Mr. Wright’s company and prospective homeowners, American System-Built Homes ran into the economics and materials shortages of WWI, and only a handful were built (and much prized today). By contrast, Lindal has delivered over 50,000 homes worldwide in its 72 year history, using the same systems built approach to home construction.

To learn more about the Lindal Building System and how we can help you create and build your custom Post & Beam home, visit AtlanticCustom.Homes.

About Atlantic Custom Homes

We are Jennifer and Pascal Smith Couti, owners of Atlantic Custom Homes. We are the third-generation owners of this successful dealership started in 1983. We bought the dealership after designing and renovating homes for ourselves and our customers around Westchester County NY. We and our staff place customer service and our relationship with our customers above everything else. We have won numerous awards and recognition for our efforts and have consistently been a proud member of Lindal Cedar Home's prestigious President’s Club. Atlantic Custom Homes has served customers building locally and in many other parts of the country and the world. We are a fully-staffed, full-service dealership in Ossining, NY. We are open Monday-Friday 9AM-5PM, Saturday 10AM-5PM (appointments recommended).

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