Major Architectural Expansions
When builders were putting up bungalows, Dutch Colonials, English Tudors, Georgian Colonials and raised ranches in Gladstone Park in the early- to mid-1900s, there was no such thing as “the starter house.” The original homes, with their formal living and dining rooms, ample working kitchens and at least two good-sized bedrooms and a bath were considered spacious.
How times have changed. We no longer pile two, three, even four children in one bedroom. We can’t fathom how a whole family can share one bathroom. We need more room for chopping vegetables, making coffee, microwaving. We want space for recreation, office work, and hobbies. And thus arises the itch to expand the home for more modern sensibilities.
Homeowners in Chicago started scratching out more space when they brought their iceboxes into their kitchens from their back porches and turned what had been an attached shed into a screened porch. This later became a three-season sunporch or, if insulated better, a year-around den/family room on piling supports. They carved out extra bedrooms in their sloped-roof attics. They finished their basements for TV rooms, playrooms, and laundries. When that wasn’t enough space, they would enclose their front porches, adding perhaps six feet of indoor living space the whole length of the house front. They could do all that without altering the exterior walls of the home.
When that wasn’t enough, homeowners called the big boys in. For modest expansions, builders opened one or the other (or both) sides of the roof to erect dormers for more ceiling height. By increasing headroom, this small renovation provided additional usable floor space that could easily double the number of bedrooms in the house as well as provide an area for a second bath.
None of those efforts are pictured here. This section is reserved for major expansions where the whole roof came off for full second story additions. You will see that in some cases homeowners tried to maintain the look of the original house, say by mimicking a half hexagonal brick first story with a second story of the same shape and materials. Others went straight up, hybridizing styles with colonial or even modern features. Others obliterated every remnant of the past with entirely new finished shapes. You can judge for yourself how artful you think the expansions are.
Sometimes it was hard for the photographer to tell if a home had been the product of an expansion or had just been built the way it was. A telltale sign was looking for the original brick on house sides, which would have been prohibitively expensive to alter. She also researched the age of each house in order to verify its roots. Still, in some cases she had to guess when she labeled how she thought they started out.
Obviously only a small number of Gladstone Park homes with major additions are shown here. They were chosen because they are all very different from one another, displaying vast design choices homeowners made in enlarging their houses. In deference to the Chicago Bungalow Association in its efforts to encourage homeowners to preserve the historic shapes of their bungalows when expanding, no pictures of “poptops” with their flyaway roof dormers appear here.
For more on how Gladstone Park’s standout stock of homes were built and serve to enhance residential life in the neighborhood, see Development and Vintage Home Living.
Click on a photo to enlarge and visit the gallery. Please be patient as they load in the size and quality necessary to view their architectural features in detail.
