• The Best Bungalow Communities in Southern California

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    The humble bungalow in all of its various iterations is easily one of the most popular home styles found throughout southern California. Thanks to their sloping roofs, dormer windows, and exposed rafters, they boast a distinctive look that's pleasing to the eye. Here are a few great places to score a bungalow in Southern California that you will love.

    San Marcos

    One of the most attractive communities in the North County area, San Marcos is just 40 minutes away from San Diego's Gaslamp Quarter. You'll find plenty of Craftsman bungalows along its quiet streets at a variety of price points. Like most communities in Southern California, the average price of housing in San Marcos is higher than the national average. What’s more, homes for sale get sold fast. With this in mind, those buying a bungalow should seek out credit unions in San Marcos instead of a traditional bank This ensures the best mortgage possible. This is recommended for other communities listed below.

    North Park, San Diego

    Like most neighborhoods around Balboa Park, North Park is a treasure trove of Craftsman and California bungalows. The Dryden Historic District, in particular, is stacked to the rafters with turn-of-the-century houses that have been meticulously maintained. Buying a vintage bungalow in this zip code is sure to be a winning investment if you can secure a deal on an older model.

    Mission Hills, San Diego

    Located just north of downtown San Diego, Mission Hills still retains much of its historic look despite urban renewal projects. This neighborhood is so in love with bungalows that their latest library boasts a Craftsman-style aesthetic. If you love bungalows, Mission Hills is a prime hunting ground for quality Craftsman cottages that have stood the test of time.

    Woods Streets, Riverside

    Developed around 1913 when Riverside was expanding rapidly, the Woods Streets community has a number of period homes worth considering. Many old Craftsman and California bungalows dot the local streets, imbuing the neighborhood with a unique feel that's unrivaled throughout southern California. What's more, the average home price in this zip code will make central Los Angeles residents envious.

    Bungalow Heaven, Pasadena

    Centered around McDonald Park, this residential enclave originally featured as many as 800 bungalows of all shapes and sizes. Bungalow lovers continue to flock to this landmark district to partake in tours of the most prominent houses in the area. Located less than 10 minutes from Old Pasadena, Bungalow Heaven offers quick access to a slew of recreational options.

    Belmont Heights, Long Beach

    Along with Bungalow Heaven, Belmont Heights has one of the highest concentrations of Craftsman homes in all of Southern California. Once an independent city, this community is one of the most desirable neighborhoods in Long Beach. The Belmont Heights Historic District and the Eliot Lane Historic District are top destinations for bungalow fanatics that prioritize proximity to the beach.

    Eagle Rock

    While Eagle Rock tends to fly under the radar when it comes to Los Angeles neighborhoods, this area is a bungalow lover's dream thanks to a bevy of historic buildings. Due to rapid gentrification, Eagle Rock is now one of the most popular neighborhoods in the entire city. If you can find a bungalow up for sale, it's best to make an offer quickly.

    Finding the Best Deal on Your Ideal Bungalow

    Getting the most out of your southern California bungalow hinges on two factors. First, you need to make sure that the house has good bones. Second, you'll need to locate a lender that can finance your mortgage at a favorable rate. In any event, there's no shortage of fine bungalows in the locales mentioned here.

    brought to you by our site supporters • cc-licensed image by Dick Whittington

  • Pasadena’s Bungalow Heaven in Photographs

    Pasadena, like Santa Barbara and a few other communities in southern California, has a very large number of beautiful, well-preserved Craftsman homes. Home to several Greene & Greene masterworks, the town also hosts an annual Craftsman Heritage Weekend (this year's just ended) which is always worth a visit should you be in the area.

    With its combination of typical Southern California sun, wide streets and the overhanging canopy of huge old trees, Pasadena is also a photographer's heaven. Here's a little gallery I'm in the process of building on Flickr.

  • for sale: restored Knoxville shingle bungalow, $289,000

    Knoxville is a great town with some really terrific old neighborhoods, and for the most part, citizens who delight in historic preservation and are trying consistently to keep chains, strip-malls, big boxes and other detritus out of historic districts full of pretty old homes.

    Knox Heritage is the most active of the city-wide architecture rejuvenation and conservation development companies, regularly buying old properties and cleaning them up for resale as part of their Vintage Homes Program. They also regularly offer neighborhood tours, raise money to preserve endangered properties and keep track of threatened structures throughout the region.

    Metro Pulse, Knoxville’s alt weekly, recently ran a note & listing for one such home that has to change hands due to an unfortunate job relocation – the owner, Amy Quimby (who knows old homes – she’s an executive at Home & Garden Television) – is very sad to leave it, but she’s got to move on to Denver.

    The 2650 sq ft, 4 bed, 2.5 bath home – at 321 E. Oklahoma in Knoxville – is going for $289,000, and it’s gorgeous inside and out.

  • South Buffalo’s “bungalow belt”

    After reading our recent note on a modest but pretty bungalow going for a half-million dollars in Sacramento, reader Jean Emery sends us this article from Buffalo Rising on that town’s own "bungalow belt." Read the complete article on their site. There are plenty of good photos as well, and Jean notes that she "can guarantee these don’t cost half a million dollars like the one in Sacramento!"

    One of Buffalo’s most charming neighborhoods is centered on a
    cluster of streets running off Abbott between Lakewood and Hubbell on
    the South Side. The streets stand out from their surroundings as they
    are lined with distinctive bungalow style houses. The bungalow,
    sometimes referred to as craftsman style, was popular in the early 20th
    century. It is a derivation of an Indian house type with rustic
    detailing and broad porches. Common features include low rooflines on a
    gabled or hipped roof, deeply overhanging eaves, exposed rafters, and
    decorative brackets. The front porch is often formed by extending the
    main roof out past the front wall.

    The craftsman style of design became popular as people started
    yearning for a simpler time. The 20th century was a period of major
    change. Rapidly developing technology and a shift to urban living
    brought new wealth and convenience along with a sometimes stressful and
    unfamiliar way of life to many people. Design, with an emphasis on hand
    craft and natural materials, was a way to capture the nostalgia of a
    simpler America. The Roycrofters in nearby East Aurora, led by Elbert
    Hubbard, were leaders in this movement. Even the work of Frank Lloyd
    Wright could be included as a part of this movement (if peripherally
    so). His Connection to Darwin Martin and subsequent commissions in
    Buffalo came through Hubbard.

  • gorgeous 1400 sq ft bungalow in Sacramento: $595k

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    Yes, the price is obscene. But the house is gorgeous. Beautifull restored kitchen & bath, great (small) backyard, lots of light and in one of Sacramento’s three nicest neighborhoods, this Curtis Park bungalow can be yours for just a bit over a half million dollars:

    Beautifully restored shingle Craftsman on idyllic West Curtis Park
    street. A large lot with 3 car garage and alley access – this home has
    been meticulously restored. The period appropriate kitchen renovation is
    complete with handmade shaker style cabinetry with inset doors and
    solid wood construction. The ’50s era Wedgewood stove is also restored,
    and the rest of the appliances, including a Bosch dishwasher, are
    completely integrated into the design of the kitchen. Soapstone
    countertops, a full pantry, and plenty of open shelving throughout. A
    central vacuum system makes cleaning a breeze!

    3 bedrooms, 1 bath, approx. 1460 square feet. Newly refinished
    hardwood floors throughout, along with a new 30 year composition roof,
    new copper plumbing, restored original windows, automatic irrigation,
    new HVAC, and more!! There is a partial basement which is great for
    storage. The 3 car garage is currently set up for a woodworking shop-
    the garage door is for a 2 car garage, but there’s plenty of extra
    space inside!!

    Many custom touches including master bedroom with built-in maple closet
    cabinetry and pull-out ironing board- sliding barn doors for the closet
    too!

    Front and backyards are completely landscaped, there’s even an
    outdoor kitchen! Cook and dine outside next to the gentle sound of the
    koi pond waterfall. Much, Much, More… Call for more details!!

  • real estate listings: MLS to RSS

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    So, obviously I’ve become a bit addicted to Yahoo Pipes. This free tool lets you aggregate, organize, and filter data from an unlimited number of RSS feeds and databases and present it in almost any kind of electronic form you can imagine.

    I’ve found a really good use for it, one which is – amazingly – missing from the vast majority of real estate listing sites. Redfin, Zillow, Realtor.com and all the others: you are really letting the entire industry down by not having raw MLS data available as an RSS feed! I just could not believe that in an age when so many of us get our data on mobile devices and from feed readers that these firms wouldn’t have easily-configurable custom RSS feeds of their listings, but sure enough they don’t. Ziprealty is one of the very few to have such a useful feature, and more power to them for it.

    Using Ziprealty’s listings, house-for-sale posts on Craigslists in a dozen markets and a few other small sites here and there, I’ve created a Yahoo Pipe that includes only listings self-described as "Craftsman," "Mission," "Prairie," or "bungalow." Now, if I can only figure out how to include photos of each property…

    http://pipes.yahoo.com/hewnandhammered/homesforsale

    If you are an agent, a broker or an MLS firm, please publish your data as a configurable / custom RSS feed. This way, searches that could take hours can be finished in just a minute or two, and users don’t need to revisit the sites every single day – using a service like feedburner or one of the many rss-to-email services, we can be notified only when our search criteria pop up in a market we are interested in, in our price range.

    And if you know of any listings services that do issue their data as an RSS feed, please share that info in the comments section below – I’d love to add them to the pipe. Also, let me know if you’d like me to include other cities’ Craigslist posts, I can do that pretty easily.

    If this tool is useful to you and if you think other folks might find it interesting, please digg it:


  • Stickley on Craigslist part 2 – and more

    I got over a dozen emails from those of you who found our Stickley-on-Craigslist aggregator (a page that lists all the Stickley items for sale in 15 major American cities’ Craigslists, filtered for those that include photographs), so I not only wanted to remind those of you who may be shopping for a major holiday gift for your Craftsman furniture loving spouse, but also to introduce something new…

    I’ve made variants of the same pipe for a few other search terms. Remember to bookmark this page, as these aggregators will always show the most recent entries for these terms, whether you check them today or next year:

    And remember, if you use Firefox or Safari (now available for Windows, too!) or another browser that lets you use live bookmarks, you can simply drag the rss feed right into your menu bar – or add it to your favorite newsreader or start page.

    Also, while I was playing around with Yahoo Pipes, I created a news aggregator – similar to Google News, but this one not only pulls in news stories, it also illustrates them with new and hopefully related photographs from Flickr:

  • finding arts & crafts in unexpected places

    One thing we talk about regularly is finding Arts & Crafts vernacular in what can only be called unexpected places. Sometimes the use might be inappropriate but still well-executed; sometimes neither. Reader Jean Emery wrote to tell us about her own experience at finding Spanish Colonial architecture in the last place you’d expect – upstate New York:

    This is a visual response to the post about transplanting or recreating the arts and crafts vernacular. I hope this picture comes through. I’m a fourth generation San Diegan transplanted to upstate New York and I’ve always taken a great interest in a group of about twenty or so Spanish colonial homes built in Albany, probably in the 1920s or so. They’re so California!  But, as you can see, they haven’t fared very well here. I would love to buy one, but they generally are in pretty poor shape, have been terribly re-muddled. The stucco doesn’t take well to repeated freezing and thawing, and the original windows weren’t at all energy efficient so have been replaced with ugly double-panes.

    Also, the new Stickley arts and crafts reproductions are big here in town because we’re near the manufacturer in Syracuse, but they just don’t have the soul and the patina of the originals. And American Bungalow has recently had some vulgar, expensive houses with customized woodwork run amuck!

    I’m not really sure what the moral of all this is. I do love these bits of Mediterrean architecture plunked down in the snow belt!

    Jean notes that one such home – 17 Rosemont Street in Albany (pics) – is for sale at an asking price of $178,900.

    Thanks for sharing these, Jean. We do love to see this kind of thing, so if other readers have pictures to share, please do send them in!

  • What do you do when your house blows up?

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    You rebuild, of course. Dave Premer, of Huntington NY, rebuilt his 1830s farmhouse – leveled by a gas explosion and fire caused by a contractor who severed a gas line – as a very attractive Craftsman bungalow. Energy efficiency and other modern touches were important to Premer, whose 4 bed / 3 bath home should be ready next month, just about one month after the blast.

    The story itself is not especially noteworthy, although we certainly wish Mr. Premer the best. It is interesting to note, though, that he was able to cut the energy footprint of this rather large house – at 2,600 square feet, it’s almost double the side of my perfectly livable Mission Revival bungalow here in Sacramento – by half, without going over budget. You can indeed build "green" – as long as you have some sort of focus – without breaking the bank.

    The bungalow concept with energy-saving features began to take shape in
    late February, after his insurance company, Allstate, referred several
    contractors for the project. Armed with a set of plans from a local
    architect, Premer selected a project bid from a national firm with a
    franchise in Brentwood. Mark Gunthner, owner of Paul Davis Restoration
    & Remodeling of Long Island, Huntington architect Pete Smith and
    Premer worked together to revise the original house plans.

    The result will be a residence using about 50 percent less energy than a traditional home its size, about 2,600 square feet.

    read the full article at Newsday

  • preservation status debated in Decatur

    Paul Donsky has an article in the Atlanta Journal-Constitution on the seemingly endless conflict between preservationists and those who fear that historic status will restrict their ability to alter their own property:

    Residents in the Oakhurst section of Decatur are proud of the tidy bungalows that line the neighborhood’s streets.

    Run-down homes, many dating to the early 20th century, have been
    painstakingly restored, preserving the clean lines and sturdy porches
    that typify the Craftsman bungalow style.

    Some residents say the
    modest, boxy houses are such an integral part of the neighborhood’s
    character that they must be protected, particularly at a time when
    "teardowns" and "McMansions" have become part of the real estate
    lexicon.

    Now, three residents have filed papers asking Decatur’s Historic
    Preservation Commission to make part of Oakhurst a historic district,
    which would prevent most of the older homes in the area from being
    knocked down. Several old homes have already been bulldozed, they say,
    and many others are at risk.

    But others in the neighborhood say the protection would come at too
    high a price. They worry that new rules might prevent them from
    expanding their homes as their families grow, and they grouse about the
    prospect of having to get approval for run-of-the-mill home improvement
    projects.

    read the entire article