Craftsman style and craftsman-inluenced homes are most common in that area of Lansing bordered by Willow Street on the north, Mt. Hope Blvd on the south, Verlinden Street on the west and Francis Street on the east. This area fairly represents city expansion by the 1920s. There are numerous examples of craftsman bungalows and the even more common four-square style in this area. There are also many examples of the craftsman-influenced kit homes sold in the first two decades of the 20th century. In fact, many if not most of the bungalows and four-squres were also purchased in kit form during this peirod.
Aladdin Homes of Bay City first offered kit houses in 1906. Many of these kits reflected the current popularity of the craftsman style. They contained pre-measured and numbered pieces to facilitate owner assembly. This was in keeping with the craftsman ideal of building your own home, and took into account the decline of advanced carpentry skills as people left rural areas and gravitated to urban areas.
The defining characteristics of the craftsman home included the prevalence of natural woodwork, built-in bookshelves and buffets, porches across the front, the use of stained glass as a window decoration, hardwood flooring and the inclusion of a fireplace (with windows on each side) as a center of family and social activity (rather than as a primary source of heat). The ideal craftsman home reflected the combination of simplicity, utility and elegance.
The popularity of kit homes offered by Aladdin and Sears (which began offering kits in 1911) is made apparent by their numbers in Lansing. Taking copies of the Aladdin and Sears catalogs you can walk through downtown neighborhoods and pick out houses by their kit names ("The Argyll", "The Standard", "The Ardmore", etc.).
Kit homes of this period ranged in cost from around $1000 for a small bungalow or cotttage, to around $4000 for the more elegant styles. Many of the more costly kit houses in Lansing can be found along Moores River Drive and in the westside neighborhood.
The craftsman bungalow is the most distinctive of the craftsman styles. The term bunaglow refered originally to the front-gabled, single-story houses with a cross-front veranda used by British colonials in the 19th century far east. The term is derived from Bengalese. The bungalow as deveolped by Gustav Stickley and the other Arts and Crafts designers was a far cry from these simple structures. The craftsman bungalow design is defined by a side-gabled, broadly sloping roof usually extending over a cross-front porch. A multi-windowed dormer is another defining external feature. Another less-popular variant more closely resembled the 19th century bungalow (front-gabled, with a single story).
The four-square craftsman was an adaptation of a standard style of the American vernacular built since the 1860s. This standard four-square was defined by its shape (square!), it's narrow-pitched hipped roof, usually with a small single front dormer. Craftsman modifications of this style included the addition of a multi-windowed front dormer, increasing the number of windows in general to create more natural light. The craftsman four-square is the most common style from this era in Lansing, both in it's single family and duplex versions. Craftsman and craftsman-influenced homes remained popular into the early 1920s, when they were displaced by the return to popularity of neo-colonial (particularly the Federal) building styles. However, craftsman styles continued to be built well into the 1920s, though they moved further and further from the design ideals of the Arts and Crafts Movement, including the elimination of the fireplace that was so central to those ideals.
Michael A. Kolhoff