‘Lustron Homes’ were made of steel and built to last — and many have

PHILADELPHIA — America desperately needed new houses, and Ohio entrepreneur/inventor Carl Strandlund had a plan: Manufacture the components of compact, affordable and stylish dwellings for shipment (instructions included) to local distributors and buyers.

Unlike the popular stick-built “kit houses” Sears sold through its catalogs from 1908 to 1940, Strandlund’s “Lustron Homes” of 1948 were built mostly of steel. At least half of the nearly 2,700 houses Lustron manufactured before involuntarily declaring bankruptcy in 1950 are believed to exist, including several in the Philadelphia region.

The distinctive design and steel-paneled exterior of the Lustrons seem to have inspired the Sanctuary Hills streetscapes in the postapocalyptic “Fallout” video game series. And the actual houses have inspired fans, researchers, writers and buyers alike.

“We just loved the look of the house immediately,” said Vicky Nucci, who bought a Lustron in Woodbury, Pa., with her partner, Trevor Gulledge, last year for $250,000.

Carl Gainsborough and Karl Kernagis bought their Lustron in Haddonfield, N.J., for $210,000 in 2010 and have lived there ever since. Another Lustron, in northeast Philadelphia, is used by Congregation Beth Emanuel, a Messianic Jewish Community.

“It’s been cool to learn about the history [of Lustron Homes] as an affordable housing option for people coming back from the war,” Nucci, 28, said. “How cool is it to own a little piece of history?”

Said Gainsborough, 58: “You don’t have to remodel it. It’s fine, just the way it is.”

“Our goal is to find and document all of the Lustrons, and build a solid database,” said Virginia Faust, a Realtor in North Carolina and a volunteer with the nonprofit USModernist archive.

“We want to preserve as many as possible and keep them out of the dump,” she said. “If we find one that’s what we call endangered, we make an effort to publicize it.

“A lot of Lustrons have been repurposed as businesses — as coffee shops, for psychic readers, or medical offices.”

Constructed on concrete slabs poured at the building sites, the houses have radiant heating systems above their steel-paneled ceilings, feature built-in bookcases and primary bedroom “dressing tables,” and have an open floor plan for the living room, dining room and kitchen.

“Our house is great for parties,” Gainsborough said.

But the durability and easy upkeep of the steel panels, walls, and ceilings have retained their appeal.

“I was a contractor for 25 years building wood houses, and when I moved in here, I got rid of my tools because I didn’t need them anymore,” Kernagis said.

“At the end of World War II, America was in an unusual situation,” the writer and photographer Charles Mintz said.

“We had all this manufacturing capacity, and all this optimism, and Lustron was kind of a fantastic, optimistic thing for people who wanted to own a starter home,” he said. “These homes had a huge amount of floor space out of a [compact] footprint, and they were very livable.”

His book “Lustron Stories” was published by Trillium, an imprint of the Ohio State University Press, in 2016 and features photographs of 68 homeowners, many of them in the Midwest.

Born in Sweden late in the 19th century, Carl Gunnard Strandlund immigrated to America with his family as a boy. He spent most of his life in Minnesota, Illinois and Ohio, working for agricultural equipment companies and eventually holding 150 farming-related patents. One of his innovations strengthened tanks used in fighting World War II.

Strandlund also was a master promoter, arranging a Washington, D.C.-to-Chicago flight for a federal housing official, whom he picked up in a limousine, to a prototype Lustron that was picturesquely “situated among the trees and late-blooming mums” at a local nursery, according to “The Lustron Home,” a 2002 book written by Thomas T. Fetters and published by McFarland.

So when Strandlund obtained a total of $37.5 million in loans from the federal Reconstruction Finance Corp. to repurpose a former warplane factory in Columbus, Ohio, and fabricate parts for Lustron Homes there, “he wasn’t some carpetbagger,” said Faust.

“He had good ideas and sound engineering, and he built model Lustrons that got an enormous response” from the press and the public, she said.

The company also got 20,000 orders, but there were production delays, delivery issues, resistance from the stick-built housing industry and skepticism among some members of Congress. When the feds called back their loan — worth about $500 million in today’s dollars — Lustron was forced into bankruptcy.

“The company failed, and Carl Strandlund was depressed,” said Gainsborough.

“But I don’t consider it a failure to have provided quality housing for more than 2,500 families across the entire nation.”

Faust and other volunteers in the preservation group have a vision for repurposing Lustrons at risk of demolition or demolition by negIect.