Familiarity may breed contempt, but that’s not true for Stacy White. A Waukegan native, White grew up in the split-level house her parents still call home. With warm childhood memories guiding her, White was drawn to the same kind of house — the split-level Galway design at Shepherd’s Crossing in Zion — for her first new-home purchase.
She and her 7-year-old son moved into the three-bedroom, 2 1/2-bath home in July, after shopping several Deer Point Homes models. Extra space was a big factor in their choice. “It allows me to have my own space, and my son to have his space, as well as giving us our space,” she said. “This model was perfect for me.”
Thanks to enthusiastic buyers like White, the split-level has been on something of a comeback trail in recent years, after having fallen from fashion for decades.
Split-level refers to a house having the floor levels of adjoining rooms separated by about half a story. The concept is offered by a number of Chicago-area new home communities, among them Distinctive Cos.’ Butternut Ridge in Manhattan, Deer Point Homes’ Shepherd’s Crossing in Zion and Ponds of Bull Valley in Woodstock, and Cambridge Homes’ Heatherstone in Beach Park and Cambridge Lakes in Pingree Grove.
At all these communities, the split-levels seem most popular with the same buyers drawn to the first splits back in the mid-1950s — young parents with children.
It probably wouldn’t be an exaggeration to say the split-level was a key catalyst behind post-war suburban expansion. When millions of GIs returning home from World War II fled from city neighborhoods to the suburbs to raise families, many settled for the only homes they could afford: tiny ranches. As their families and savings grew, they sought larger but still affordable move-up homes. Split-levels were the 1950s’ ingenious creation that gave growing families more space for not a lot more cash.
According to Frank Johnson, architect and vice president of design for Wheaton’s Smykal & Associates, the design worked because split-levels required no more costly foundation work than did ranches. “Builders found they could raise the bedroom level of that home up, use the same foundation they were using for the ranch home, and put the basement one-half level below grade,” he explained.
Of course, that basement wasn’t a basement in any traditional sense, Johnson added. Because it was only partially below ground, there was the chance to add large escapable windows, lots of ventilation and even a bedroom if the family’s needs required.
Eisenhower-era homebuyers couldn’t get enough of the split-level, writes Alan Ehrenhalt in his book “The Lost City.” “By 1957, the split-level home had become the national icon for middle-class aspirations to luxury. Its popularity had spread remarkably fast. In 1953, 88 percent of new houses built in America had still been ranch houses. … Three years later, split-levels had overtaken them.”
It was the notion of gaining a house with three levels for not that much more than a one-story ranch that appealed, and not just to buyers. According to Ehrenhalt, a House Beautiful article of the era rhapsodized that the split-level offered, “not just the illusion of space … [but] soaring, singing spaces that have been made possible in our time.”
The split-level was not without critics. Some sociologists of the 1950s fretted the design didn’t provide the separation between adults and children earlier two- and three-story houses did. “The split-level house was advertised as a temple of spaciousness,” Ehrenhalt wrote. “But it was not advertised as an advance in privacy.”
As the Baby Boomer generation grew up, an array of factors combined to stem the proliferation of split-levels, said Steve Hovany, president of Strategy Planning Associates, a Schaumburg real estate economics and planning firm.
One was that they defied easy expansion. “I used to live in one, liked the house, and wanted to add an addition, and found it just didn’t fit,” Hovany said. “When you’re halfway between two stories, how do you put an addition off the rear?”
As well, it was hard for builders to offer visual variety, Johnson noted. “You can’t easily hide a bi-level behind a popular style like a colonial, French provincial or English Tudor,” he said. “It lent itself only to a contemporary design, contemporary for that time.”
By the 1980s, many Chicago-area builders had moved away from split-levels to offer more ranches, as well as two-story homes with first-floor bedrooms, Johnson said.
Spaciousness was what sold the first split-levels a half century ago. It’s still the prime quality that attracts buyers today, say architects and builders.
Susan Brill, director of sales and marketing for Wauconda-based Deer Point Homes, says her company’s split-levels have been among its most popular designs in Zion and Woodstock. They particularly appeal to 25- to 40-year-old buyers who savor “a little bit of separateness, space and some elbow room as well,” Brill said.
Deer Point Homes’ design solves some privacy issues by adding an additional master bedroom one flight up from the traditional bedroom level. This master suite, said buyer Stacy White, “is separate and apart, and almost like its own sanctuary.”
The Galway with two-car garage at Shepherd’s Crossing is priced at $205,990, the Spyglass with three-car garage at Ponds of Bull Valley at $221,990. Buyers can take an interactive tour of the design at deerpointhomes.com.
Libertyville-based Cambridge Homes offers the Easton single-family detached model in its communities in Beach Park, Pingree Grove and Montgomery, said vice president of sales and marketing Dave Smith. “It allows folks to get a potentially larger home, because we have an unfinished family room in that split. That permits them to finish off that family room at some point in time,” he said. “You can get a 1,900-square-foot home for a 1,600-square-foot price, because that family room is unfinished.”
Prices range from $206,900 to $245,000 across the three communities, he said.
Len Besinger, owner and president of Marengo’s Leonard W. Besinger & Associates and The Woodstone Co., raised his own children in one of the split-levels he and his father built and sold for about $13,000 in late-1950s Carpentersville.
Today, he continues to offer split-levels — these for a bit under $300,000 — at his company’s Deerpass Estates in Marengo, where the split is the most popular design. His buyers cite the same motivations their grandparents might have felt in the 1950s. Back then, he said, “during the day, a housewife only had to go down a half flight of stairs to get to the laundry, and at night up a half flight of stairs to get the kids to bed.
“It’s a much more civilized way to live than a two-story, in my opinion.”
