Hobby Hills Farms and Fernleigh, Traylor Estates and
Wayland. You don’t hear these names very
often, but these are Richmond neighborhoods in what was once north
Chesterfield. Today they are in the
south-west corner of the City of Richmond.
Out beyond the crossroads of old Bon Air, these neighborhoods were the
products of the great American automobile commuter culture, of Baby Boom
America, and the spread of the city out from what in the late 1950s and 1960s
was a declining urban core.
Broadly speaking, the architectural program along the winding
streets of these Richmond suburbs were variations on one of two plans: the
Ranch-style house, and the Tri-level (sometimes called a “Split Level”). As two style houses covered what had been the
forest, the driveways filled with station wagons and sedans with fins and only
the curving roads and oak trees broke up the relentless vista of Ranches and
Tri-levels stretching down to the James River.
There are a few bold exceptions to this architectural norm. One unconventional Richmond home was the Half
Moon House, owned by Howard H. Hughes, who operated a successful used car
business on Broad Street under the name, “Mad Man Dapper Dan.” It was designed in 1965 by a Richmond architect, Haigh Jamogachian, who
also designed the round Markel Building near Willow Lawn. Sadly, Mad Man Dapper Dan’s crescent-shaped
home was demolished in 2005 and some oversized mediocrity has taken its place
on the banks of the James.
Counter to the usual styles of the Richmond suburbs, a house with
unusual styling and materials was constructed on Cedar Grove Road by the
Aluminum Company of America (Alcoa).
This manufacturing giant was buoyed by increasing development of
light-weight building materials. Their
aluminum-clad corporate headquarters, Pittsburgh’s 1953 Alcoa Building, was
considered a great success and a showplace of the use of the metal. In a grand campaign to introduce Americans to
the advantages of aluminum as a
residential housing material, twenty-five examples of an aluminum house would
eventually be built in locations across the country.
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| A view of the original Alcoa Care-free home from the original sales brochure. |
Alcoa hired Washington, D.C. architect Charles Goodman to design
a house that would free the owner from of the high-maintenance of shingled and
painted houses. Goodman had a long
record of innovative design in what became known as the Mid-Century Style,
having designed Hollin Hills in Northern Virginia in the late 1940s. VCU student Kimberly Sacra, writing in 2006,
noted that that houses of Hollin Hills and the design commissioned by Alcoa
shared several common design features, such as large expanses of glass,
carefully planned vistas, and similar patterns of interior arrangement.
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| The gable end of the Care-free home. |
Charles Goodman is also credited with the design of Highland
Hills, a neighborhood adjacent to the older section of Bon Air. With their open gables and airy floor plans,
carports and wooded setting, the entire neighborhood looks like it is populated
by smaller versions of the Care-free house.
These houses were available as prefabricated kits from a company called
National Homes, whose Goodman designs could be mixed and matched according to
the customer’s needs and the site. To
place the Care-free home campaign in Goodman’s work during this period, his
development called Hollin Hills began in 1946, Bon Air’s Highland Hills was
created in 1955, and the Care-free house on Cedar Grove Road is 1958.
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| This is the house that Alcoa built in the
Richmond suburbs near Bon Air. |
For the Alcoa commission, Goodman was also said to have drawn on
surveys and advice from the 1956 Woman’s Congress on Housing, in order to
fine-tune his planning on living spaces, privacy, social spaces and private
rooms.
In addition to simplicity of floor plan, the Congress
determined that a house should lend itself to both private and semi-public
family living. The dining area should be
equally accessible to living room, family room, and kitchen so that children
may be familiarized with the polite
forms of social living. The 1,900 square
foot Alcoa Care-free Home satisfies these requirements. It has a living room and family room
separated by the dining area, plus a central kitchen, three bedrooms, two
baths, heater room, a 288 square foot storage-workroom, and a two-car carport.
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Floor plan of the Alcoa Care-free home.
|
For the stay-at-home mothers of the 1960s, managing and cleaning
the house became more and more of a chore as families moved from post-World War
II housing into a comparatively sprawling suburban home. The house was clearly marketed toward this
increasingly affluent demographic with the lure of modern living that carried
freedom from the tasks of the housewife:
Freedom from backbreaking home maintenance - long the dream of
the housewife - comes closer to reality Sunday with the opening of the Alcoa
Care-Free Home…More than 80 per cent of this structure can be kept clean with a
damp cloth, due to architect Charles M. Goodman’s careful selection of
materials and the development of new ideas and products by Aluminum Company of
America.
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| Detail of decorative aluminum screen on the windows of the Care-free home. |
The Care-free house campaign was begun in 1957 with much fanfare,
and Alcoa vowed the house design would be “the most talked about home in
America this fall.” The company lavished
promotional money on the campaign, starting with a four-page advertisement that
ran in House Beautiful and Better Homes and Gardens. Artwork of the house and photographs were
distributed to hand out. Thirty
decorative aluminum butterflies “of assorted sizes” were distributed for
eye-catching window dressing in department stores and a hundred thousand color
brochures were printed extolling the virtues of aluminum and the stylish house
the metal could produce.
 |
Instead of high-maintenance gutters, the
Care-free
home has aluminum rain diverters along the roof edge.
|
Relatively rare in most Richmond homes but a tantalizing element
of care-free life in summertime Virginia was central air conditioning in the
Alcoa homes. In contrast to an era where
electric fans were the principal weapon against summer heat, the General
Electric Corporation and architect Goodman named central air as an essential
part of “good living” in the Eisenhower era:
G. E. Year-Round Air Conditioner, made by the Home Heating and
Cooling Department in Tyler, Texas, is featured in the twenty-five Alcoa
Care-Free Homes that are being shown this September and October in selected
cities through the country…considered to be a necessity in finer homes today,
Year-Round Air Conditioning is demanded by the public as one of the requisites
to good living according to Charles M. Goodman, architect for the Alcoa
Care-Free Homes.
Richmond housewives toured the Care-free house and Kimberly Sacra
reported the reactions of members of organizations like the Three Chopt Woman’s
Club when the low, modern house was open for inspection. Many of the ladies were taken aback by the
deep purple and gold anodized aluminum panels, but even the most conservative
Richmond housewife could appreciate the easily cleaned surfaces and convenience
of the galley-style kitchen. The very
latest electrical appliances were used in the Alcoa house, and the women who
toured the house marveled at the high-tech, push-button conveniences.
 |
| An interior view of the Care-free home
from the original sales brochure produced by Alcoa. |
The distinctive Alcoa house was a landmark on Cedar Grove Road
and universally known in the neighborhood as “the aluminum house.” Like the surrounding neighborhood, the
Richmond example of the Alcoa Care-free house is well preserved and has changed
little. In fact, comparing the Richmond example to images the original sales
material shows very few modifications to the house since it was built. In contrast, changes have been observed in
other examples of the Alcoa design, such as the completely understandable
conversion of the carport into a garage in the Minnesota house. The house built in the state of Washington
has enclosed the “garden court” with skylights, perhaps another regional
adaptation for rainy Portland.
 |
The carports of the Care-free house in
Minneapolis
have been converted to garages because of the Minnesota winters.
|
Ten years after the campaign ended and twenty-three houses had
been built all over America, Alcoa returned to the subject of the Care-free
home in another ad campaign. The
advertisement extolled the timeless of the design and the durable material from
so much of it had been constructed.
Alcoa said the design had proven the application of aluminum for
building materials and had led to a world of new uses for the metal. Nevertheless, the Richmond house and the
other twenty-two identical homes may have helped develop and shepherd
applications of aluminum for building materials such as siding and gutters and
roofing.
 |
This Alcoa ad, still extolling the design
and modern
materials, ran ten years after the Care-free houses were built.
|
Richmond’s “aluminum house” has remained little more than an
architectural curiosity for sixty years, but never heralded the coming of a new
wave of Mid-Century housing in stoutly Colonial Revival Richmond as we clung to
our Ranches and Tri-levels. Even today, the house’s purple aluminum panels and
modern design still speak seductively of a more innocent age, and the lure of an illusive, “care-free” life in the
Richmond suburbs.
- Selden.
NOTE: the Alcoa house on Cedar Grove Road is a private residence
and not open to the public.
