| Lustron homes | |
| Did you know... | |
| Lombard has the largest concentration of Lustron homes than any other civilian community? (We're only second to the military, located on various bases across the U.S.) | |
| So what is this Lustron Home, anyway? It all started with a dream Carl Gunnard Strandlund had to help returning GI's with affordable housing. | |
| In 1946, Strandlund was the vice president and general manager of CHICAGO VITREOUS ENAMEL PRODUCTS COMPANY. He
went to Washington D.C., to get his hands on some steel to help build more gas stations for his company. After WWII, steel was scarce
and the Government regulated the distribution of steel to private industry. He found Washington gave him the cold shoulder when
it came to gas stations, but he also found out they were looking for low cost housing for returning GI's. |
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Over the next several years, Strandlund made some very influential friends in D.C. A couple of these were, Wilson Wyatt, President Truman's Housing Administrator and Henry A. Wallace, Secretary of Commerce. Strandlund caugh the intrest of Washington when he showed some sketches of his all-metal house and promised a full production of 100 homes a day within nine months at the affordable cost of $7,000 per house. Strandlund returned to Chicago Vitreous and started work on his new prefab home. A young architect named Morris H. Beckman, was the man responsible for the actual design that became the Lustron Home. Beckman and his partner, Roy Burton Blass, had just opened up their offices in Chicago. Blass had ties to Chicago Vitreous and Beckman took the design assignment. |
| The design consisted of these features: It was a rectangular, one-story, two-bedroom house. It had a low pitched roof and a recessed
front porch. Four large picture windows, (one in each bedroom, one in the dining room and one in the living room.) Radiant heating
panels in the ceiling. A lot of closet space. And built-ins: cabinets in the kitchen, a bookcase in the living room, a pass-thru in the dining
room and a vanity in the master bedroom. All of these features, not to mention the outside and inside walls and roof, were all made of
porcelain enamel on steel. The house itself was just over 1000 sq. ft. in area. The inside doors were recessed to help with the limited space. There was a utility room off of the kitchen so a basement was not needed. This room also had access to the heating, water and electrical systems. |
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Strandlund was given a $52 million budget. He wanted an old aircraft factory to build his home in. The one he wanted was a Dodge
aircraft plant in Chicago. Unfortunately this had already been leased to the Tucker Motor Company. His
second choice was an almost new aircraft plant in Columbus Ohio. Wison Wyatt persuaded the war Assets
Administration to lease this plant to Strandlund at $425,000 a year. George Allen, the head of the Reconstrction Finance Corporation, was approached by Wyatt for the capital needed to begin production. Allen said he would finance the project if Strandlund would raise $3.6 million on his own. The Chicago-based firm of Hornblower and Weeks sold stock in the new company. Stock sales were slow. Only $840,000 was raised. Fortune Magazine reported that Strandlund put up only $1,000, for which he was given all of the 86,000 shares of voting stock. |
| Wilson Wyatt resigned his position and Strandlund felt this was the end for the
Lustron. Lewis E. Starr, national commander of the Veterans of Foreign Wars, called Strandlund and pursuaded him to talk to one more gentleman, Sen. Ralph Flanders of Vermont. He was a fellow engineer and a supporter of prefab housing. In June, 1947, legislation was passed to authorize the RFC to issue up to $50 million in loans for prefabricated housing. On June 30th, the RFC passed a $15.5 million loan to Lustron, just fifteen minutes before its emergency lending powers were to expire. This was the first time since the war that the government had appropriated money for private venture capital. Strandlund was ready to start production. |
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| The Lustron Corporation put together the first Lustron model home in Hinsdale, Illinois, toward the end of 1946. The house's first occupant was a former seabee who was now a student at Michigan State College. Strandlund hired many veterans of the auto industry. He needed them to be stylist, production managers, machinists, and salesmen. At its peak, the Lustron Corporation had 3400 employees in mid-1949. The move was on to promote the Lustron. Strandlund had ads running in major magazines (Life, McCall's) and newspapers. |
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| A network of Builder-Dealers was then needed to get the ball rolling. The Lustron Corporation received more than 10,000 request for franchises. The franchise policy for Lustron was aimed particularly at architects and contractors. One ad stated: "It is the policy of Lustron to enfranchise well-established construction organizations capable of demonstrating to Lustron their financial, construction, merchandising, and land development qualifications." By May 1949 there were 143 dealers. These were concentrated in the eastern two-thirds of the country. |
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| Model homes were constructed in 100 cities in 1947. The public liked what they saw. The original $15.5 million loan from the RFC was inadequate to underwrite the start-up cost. More than 3000 parts, totaling more than 12 tons of steel, were needed for each and every Lustron produced. With the factors of building codes, and problems with the start-up capital needed by the builder-dealers, production cost raised the retail price from $7,000 to $9,000 or $10,000 depending on the location. On top of this, back orders began to pile up and the new home owner experienced long delivery delays. The Lustron Corporation obtained two additional loans from the RFC ($10 million in 1948 and $7 million in 1949). The Government was not ready to see Lustron fail, since the debt owed to them by Lustron, was a whopping $37,500,000. |
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| The first Lustron came out of the Columbus, Ohio plant in March, 1948. At it's peak, Lustron was producing 26 houses a day. Nowhere near the 100 a day Strandlund had promised. And 50 houses a day were needed just to break even. And, of all the special features that were included, the public's favorite, the combination dishwasher and clotheswasher that was manufactured by the Hurley Company, never performed either of these task well. The company found that they needed more models of the Lustron to satisfy the house-hungry public. In 1949, Lustron offered a larger version, a three bedroom model. "Standard" and "Deluxe" versions (models 021 and 02), were 31' x 35' There were two smaller versions, the Newport and the Meadowbrook (Models 032 and 022). These were 23' x 31' and 25' x 31', respectively. These smaller models were also offered with three bedrooms. Another featured offered at this time was a Lustron garage and optional breezeway. The garage had a wooden frame instead of a steel frame, like the house. |
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| Lustron felt giving the public a new model each year, the same as the auto industry does with automobiles, would be just what the public would want. They invited Carl Koch and his associates to revamp the Lustron. The model Koch came up with for 1950, was a marked improvement over the original. Unfortunately it never saw the light of day. Lustron was losing around $1 millon a month. When Strandlund returned to Washington, he faced an unfriendly Congress. A congressional subcommittee in 1948 revealed that Strandlund had never filed a financial statement with the RFC. Also, payoffs to key people in Washington, including Senator Joseph McCarthy, did not help matters. It was also revealed by BUSINESS WEEK that more than a half-dozen Lustron vice presidents, including Joseph Tucker, Strandlund's right-hand man, had come and gone in a two year period. In 1949, the RFC told Lustron to reorganize or face disclosure. |
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| Plans to sell 60,000 shares of Lustron stock failed. In Februay 1950, the RFC filed forclosure action against
Lustron. In March of that year, a court-appointed receiver ousted Strandlund and other top officials. By the Summer, the Columbus, Ohio plant was silenced. Approximately 2500 Lustrons were constructed during its time of operation. Many are still standing to this day. Lustron owners, myself included, would be the first to tell you, that this home, this "dream home" of yesterday, was, and still is, way ahead of its time! |
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