During its heyday in the 1950s through the 1970s, the split-level was the height of hip, designed to offer more square feet than the ranch at a lower price than a two-story.
Yet nowadays many home buyers would prefer to call it splitsville with the split-level, associating it with shag carpeting, avocado countertops and a floor plan that doesn’t jibe with their visions of open layouts, huge kitchens and spacious master bedroom suites.
Typically, the split-level, also called tri-level, has three levels, each a half-flight up from the last. However, its square footage tends to be generous where the average home buyer doesn’t want it–the formal living room–and skimpy where the buyer does want it–the kitchen, bedrooms and bathrooms.The tri-level was built in a variety of styles, from Colonial to contemporary, but a Plain Jane facade was the norm. “There’s nothing charming about it,” says Andy Poticha, principal of Design Construction Concepts Ltd. in Northbrook, which has remodeled many a tri-level. “It was built to last, but without the details of other houses of that era like Cape Cods.”
But there it is, sitting on valuable properties in the post-World War II suburbs that ring Chicago and other large cities. Now, if buyers want a house in an established neighborhood, close to transportation and within walking distance of the town square, the tri-level is one of their choices. Buyers with large enough budgets are tearing down old tri-levels and building new houses in their places. But, many are taking the less expensive route–remodeling.
Compared to other house types, the tri-level is the builder’s bugaboo. Unlike the two-story house that easily accepts an addition at the rear or the ranch that can be doubled with a second-story addition, the tri-level offers several obstacles. It has multiple rooflines and usually sits on a lot that slopes down to the garage door and up to the front door.
Still, for Faith Avner, remodeling was the solution for her 35-year-old Glenview tri-level. It didn’t meet the needs of her family of four–husband, Miles, and children, ages 18 and 21–but had intrinsic value. “I grew up in this house,” says Avner. “I’m attached to it and love the neighborhood.”
Like many tri-levels, the Avners’ house is on a wide lot with a generous yard. In front, says Avner, are “mature trees that I remember being little twigs in the 1970s.”
So Avner hired Palatine-based Sevvonco Inc. to add 900 square feet to the house’s original 2,300 and blend the old with the new.
Over the Avners’ kitchen/living room/dining level, the Sevvonco crew built a new master bedroom. The old master bedroom became a new master bathroom. From the rear of the kitchen level, they added a new, vaulted great room with a theater room below.
“Most of the added room is in the back of the house,” says Avner. “We didn’t want the house to stick out like a sore thumb.”
Sevvonco updated the house’s facade by replacing the original Masonsite clapboards with vinyl siding. They pressure-washed the old brickwork in the rear so new bricks would match. By extending the roof over the front another 8 feet, they created a front porch.
They gave the interior a fresh look by installing new kitchen cabinets, replacing its wrought-iron railings with wooden ones and replacing the original carpeting with new carpeted, tile and laminate-wood floors.
The result: The Avners have a 21st Century house in a 20th Century neighborhood.
The Avners’ house is typical of the tri-level remodels Sevvonco has done, says its president, Scott Sevon. “In addition to adding room, it needed new, energy-efficiency windows and mechanical systems,” he says. “The old tri-levels were energy pigs.”
The older tri-levels not only have old HVAC equipment, say the builders, but have designs that minimize their efficiency. Heat rises, so the bedrooms are too hot and the family room is too cold. A quick fix, they say, is to keep the furnace fan on to circulate the air. A better, albeit more costly, solution is zoned heating/cooling.
Even tri-levels that have enough square footage usually need work, says Rick Ruzanski, co-owner of Distinctive Home Repairs in Roselle, which has remodeled tri-levels. The two areas that need the most updating, he says, are the lower-level family room and the main living level. “Today, people want the family room to include a computer center, project tables or a wet bar, which means plumbing and electrical upgrades,” he says.
To update the main living level without adding on, Ruzanski says some tri-level owners remove walls that separate the kitchen, dining room and living room. They link this level to outdoor decks and patios by adding back doors, which were omitted in many original tri-levels. “People don’t live formally anymore, so they usually want to open up this level for informal living and forget the formal dining room table,” says Ruzanski.
Foundation is a major portion of a remodeling budget, say the builders. Homeowners can save money by adding over an existing level of the tri-level or, if possible, extending out from the one-level portion of the house.
While Ruzanski, Sevon and Poticha have made tri-level remodeling a specialty, a Minnesota architect has taken this one step further. To compensate for the few plan books on the market that include tri-levels, Robert Gerloff wrote “Split Visions.” The book was commissioned by a consortium of 15 Minneapolis suburbs to encourage owners of old tri-levels and their cousin, the raised ranch, to remodel them instead of leaving them for newer subdivisions on the suburban fringes.
“Some of these communities have concentrations as high as 50 percent of the split-levels,” reports Gerloff, who estimates there are millions of split-levels nationwide. “By encouraging people to remodel, they will keep homeowners who will stay and put down roots here. That benefits the whole community.”
In the book, Gerloff addresses the pros and cons of split-levels, collected from home owners who shared their likes and dislike at a Web site that preceded the book, www.split-level.com. The pros, say the been-there, done-that homeowners, include distinct levels and a basement that doesn’t seem like a basement. The cons: lack of storage, no curb appeal and too-small kitchen, entry and bathroom. Using “before” and “after” pictures, Gerloff suggests how to remedy the cons.
For the homeowner suffering through the remodeling of a tri-level, though, the inconveniences are no different than those of any remodel. You live with dust and noise and count the number of days until the drywall hangers are outta there.
To these brave souls, Gerloff offers this promise: ” . . . keep your sense of humor, and remember that this, too, shall pass. And, in the end, your home will be fresh and new, ready for decades more of living.”
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Remodeling resources
For more information about tri-levels, try:
– “Split Visions” by Robert Gerloff and Jeremiah Battles offers ideas for updating split-level houses and includes floor plans, facade treatments and even landscaping suggestions. A download is free from www.split-level.com or hard copy is $15 from City of Brooklyn Park, 5200 85th Ave. N, Brooklyn Park, MN 55443.
– Other than “Split Visions,” plan books that include tri-level additions are few. But “Architectural Plans for Adding on or Remodeling” by Jerold L. Axelrod (TAB Books, $19.95) includes several blueprints for tri-level additions, including one with a new master bedroom over the existing living room/dining room/kitchen and one with a garage/master bedroom addition.
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Whose bright idea was this?
Who invented the split-level? No one knows for sure. But some say it has its roots in Chicago.
Although linked in Baby Boomers’ minds with the Brady Bunch and 1960s suburbia, split-level designs were offered in 1930s in the Chicago-based Sears Roebuck and Co. catalogs, says catalog house expert Rebecca Hunter of Elgin.
Sears had six split-level plans, ranging from the brick Normandy model with a turret that added a bit of flair to its tiny, attached foyer, to the flat-roofed Bryant model that looked like a cross between a gas station and cheap roadside motel. None, says Hunter, was among Sears’ greatest hits.
The fact that the split-level appeared in the house catalogs is evidence that they existed before then, adds Hunter. “[The catalogs] just copied plans that were already out there,” she says.
Then there’s the Frank Lloyd Wright connection. Elwin Robison, an architectural historian with Kent State University, says the split-level concept grew out of the designs of Wright’s Prairie Style of architecture. Wright-designed homes built in the early 1900s included broad, overhanging eaves, hip roofs and casement windows–elements common in the split-level layout.
In fact, Robison, who lives in a split-level, jokes, “When I want to be pretentious, I tell people I live in a neo-Wrightian.”
Robison notes, however, that the split-level layout wasn’t driven by pretention but by practicality. During the post-WW II housing boom, builders hit upon the split-level design as a low-cost way to maximize living space in a small area and combine the best features of the ranch and two-story living.
Most split-level designs have two wings with a half-story difference creating three levels. Although having rooms on several levels added to a sense of privacy, the half-flight of stairs made everything seem more accessible. “All you had to do to get to one level to another was go up four or five steps, never a full flight,” Robison says.
When TV burst into the scene in the 1950s, having the formal areas split from the informal ones may have fueled the popularity of the design. “No one ever put the TV in the living room back in [the 1950s],” Robison says. “The living room was too formal for that. The finished basement was the perfect spot for it.”
Of course, other factors fed the popularity of split-levels. For one, they were easily mass-produced by builders in an era when housing was becoming a commodity, Robison says. But he also suspects they were popular because of their modern look. “In the ’50 and ’60s, the past was bad and the future was wonderful,” Robison says. “The split-level was the first jump (in mass-produced housing) beyond the simple cracker box to something that had futuristic pretentions.”By the 1980s, buyers’ tastes moved to more traditional-looking styles and more space in new home architecture. So, while other house types get their own magazines (“Atomic Ranch”) and fan clubs (The Historic Chicago Bungalow Association), the split-level soldiers on, continuing to deliver what buyers really want: more square footage for fewer dollars.
— Leslie Mann and Carol Monaghan
