Lustron home in Western Area. Courtesy photo

By Sharon Snyder Los Alamos Historical Society

In the years following World War II, the United States experienced a housing boom. Young GIs returned home eager to buy a house, settle down, and start families, but housing shortages made that American Dream problematic. The Truman administration made the rapid production of housing a priority, and the federally operated Reconstruction Finance Corporation (RFC) awarded loans to businesses in the housing industry who demonstrated innovative ideas for rapid home construction.

 “The housing industry, though maligned by the public, has some hopeful ideas for the future” was the headline leading into a Life magazine article of January 1949. One of those ideas would soon come to Los Alamos in the form of Lustrons, houses made of metal rather than wood.

The Lustron house was the idea of Carl Standlund, a Swedish-born American inventor and entrepreneur who had educated himself through correspondence classes in engineering before he was hired by the Chicago Vitreous Enamel Product Company to transform the factory for defense production. He invented techniques for building non-warping metal plates for tanks during the war. From that experience he came up with the idea of using porcelain-enameled steel panels for building homes. With a loan from the RFC, Strandlund’s company began producing Lustrons with a projection of turning out 40,000 homes per year that would sell for $9,000 to $10,000 depending on the number of bedrooms.

Lustrons used architectural porcelain, substituting welding for carpentry. The factory mass produced homes and turned out up to 30 per day. The parts of Lustron homes were loaded onto trucks in the order they would be assembled and shipped to sites around the country. The company advertised that these prefabricated units for 900- to 1000-square-foot homes could be assembled by six men in five days!

For Los Alamos, a town in the making, the Lustron looked like a good option. Six experimental Lustron homes were added to Western Area in 1949. These enameled metal, prefab structures were built on Fairway Drive and 44th Street. Lustron homes were popular at the time, but due to production problems at the factory, which created a rise in price, the RFC recalled its loan and Strandlund’s dream collapsed.

Author Craig Martin writes in his book Quads, Shoeboxes, and Sunken Living Rooms that “four of the Lustrons that came to Los Alamos were three-bedroom models and two contained two bedrooms.”

They were built along the edge of Western Area, and “local interest in the houses focused not only on the unique porcelain shell, but also on the unusual ceiling radiant heating system. An oil-fired furnace pumped warm air into a plenum suspended from the roof trusses.”

Martin reports that “the design caused residents to complain of overheated heads and cold feet.”

Inside doors were sliding panels and another unusual feature was a space-saving clothes and dish washer, presumable not used for both functions at once!

Despite the demise of the Lustron idea, the majority of the 2,498 Lustrons produced still survive, and 50 Lustrons are on the National Register of Historic Places.

Notable surviving Lustrons have their own registry, listed by states, and many of them can be viewed, along with their history, by a Google search for “Lustron Registry.”

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