What it means
In Scottsdale ranch house means the long, low, one-story house on a wide lot, with a shallow roof, a carport or garage facing the street, a sliding glass door to a back patio, a block wall around the yard and, quite often, an orange tree. It is the house of South Scottsdale, the 85257, and much of central Scottsdale: blocks of them laid out on a flat grid in the 1950s and 60s, as the town grew more than thirtyfold in two decades.
Locals say “a ‘58 ranch” or “a block ranch” the way people elsewhere say “a Cape” or “a colonial.” It is not glamorous. It is the architecture most longtime residents actually grew up in, and its selling points have not changed: one story, a big lot and walls that never need paint.
The word has a second Scottsdale life. “Ranch” is also the old land: the cattle and horse operations whose names now sit on master-planned communities such as McCormick Ranch, Gainey Ranch and DC Ranch. The house and the subdivision sign are cousins, not twins.
Where you’ll meet it
On South Scottsdale listings, in moving to Scottsdale advice, in arguments about teardowns, on Modern Phoenix home tours and on every map of north Scottsdale.
Where the word came from
The ranch house is an American invention of the 1920s and 30s, drawn partly from the single-story Spanish colonial buildings of California and the Southwest: one floor, native materials, low roofs, wide eaves, a courtyard. After World War II it became the default suburban home. By the 1950s, by one widely repeated estimate, the California ranch accounted for nine of every ten new houses in the country.
Scottsdale arrived at exactly that moment. The town incorporated on June 25, 1951 with about 2,000 people on less than a square mile. Motorola had opened a plant near the western border in 1950 and added another on McDowell Road in 1956, bringing engineers and assemblers who needed houses. By 1960 the population had passed 10,000, and by 1970 it neared 68,000 on 62 square miles. Most of that growth lived in ranch houses.
The city’s own historic report on the Town and Country neighborhood says the traditional Ranch style “dominated the Valley’s postwar subdivisions” and that nearly every other postwar development in Scottsdale offered standard Ranch plans. A typical Scottsdale postwar neighborhood, the same report notes, averaged homes of about 1,700 square feet with three bedrooms.
What it is not
A ranch house is not a dude ranch, the guest resorts that sold Easterners a cowboy holiday, and not a working ranch. It is also not automatically midcentury modern. The ranch is a plan; modern is a style. Town and Country Scottsdale, designed by Ralph Haver, was singled out precisely because it chose Contemporary designs instead of standard Ranch.
The fine print
Block, not boards. The Valley built its ranches out of concrete block. Superlite, a Phoenix company that began making block in 1944, produced lightweight block from volcanic scoria, and by 1955 its block went into 75 percent of all new buildings in the area. Block did not rot and never needed paint, and it set the look: exposed or lightly stuccoed walls, the same material in the house and the backyard block wall.
The sub-styles. Scottsdale’s preservation office describes four ranch looks in its postwar surveys. California Ranch mixes brick, block and board-and-batten on the front, often with shutters. Post Ranch is plainer, with low gable or flat roofs and screen walls. Los Ranchos adds stucco or slump block, arches and applied Spanish trim such as vigas and iron gates. Character Ranch dresses the house as a cowboy bunkhouse, a Swiss chalet, a Polynesian hut or Tudor.
Living in one. Many South Scottsdale ranches still sit on flood irrigation lots, and older ones were built for swamp coolers before central air took over. The renovation questions are predictable: roof, plumbing, ductwork, windows. The answer to why people keep buying them is the lot.