A History of Sears Homes: The Houses That Came in KitsWhen Sears Sold Houses – GreenBuildingAdvisor

Building Matters

In the early 20th century, Sears sold homes as kits that could be built by homeowners with no carpentry experience.

Imagine opening an app on your smartphone, ­scrolling through a list of house designs, choosing your favorite, signing up for a mortgage, and then having everything (including nails and paint) delivered to you along with instructions on how to put it together. It sounds too good to be true now, so imagine what it must have felt like in the early 1900s when the kit-home movement began.

Sears, Roebuck and Co. wasn’t the only company to offer kit houses, but it was certainly the most famous, and the Sears name has become synonymous with the entire movement. Over the course of three decades the company sold tens of thousands of homes, many of which are still standing.

My own home in Connecticut is one of them, and this year marks its centennial. So in cele­bration of our beloved 1926 kit house, the Crescent model, I thought it would be a good time to look back at this era of kit houses to share what made them so special, and to shed light on why the concept essentially went extinct.

The Rise

There are a lot of reasons why Sears kit houses were a success, but the core reason was that Sears already had its foot in the door in terms of market reach.

Reportedly, one-fifth of the population of America received the Sears catalog in the mail. This publication offered more than 100,000 products, ranging from silverware to fishing tackle. Sears was essentially the early-20th-century version of Amazon, except with a binding guarantee of quality in everything the company sold.

In 1906, a Sears manager was tasked with shuttering an unprofitable building-materials department, and instead of liquidating the stock, he suggested using it to create another product offering: the Modern Homes program.

The initial release in 1908 featured 22 house…