Meanwhile, Back to the Ranch

For years, the hottest architectural style in the shelter magazines has been Midcentury Modern, the glass and steel boxes of the 1940s, '50s and '60s that today embody the retro gleam of the Space Age but accommodate the open, Zen-calm interior high-end designers prefer today. Examples have shown up prominently in the movies (see the Richard Neutra house that starred in 2001's "The Anniversary Party") and they are glorified in their own magazine with its winking ironic name, Atomic Ranch.

A more recent, and more shocking, trend is the reprise of the lower order of ranch—brick or sided single-level or split-level homes that populated the suburbs from the '60s on—that has long been the very image of suburban bland bad taste. The first inkling of this development came a dozen years ago, when the markethttp://www.blogger.com/img/gl.link.gif in Long Island's East End became so tight that dumpy-looking G.I. Bill ranches were being spruced up as Hamptons getaways. Another milestone was Princeton, N.J. interior designer and architect Bruce Norman Long's transformation of a traditional ranch near New Hope, Penn. Long replaced the living room's plate glass with a row of vertical windows and added columns around the front door.

But trendy buyers have no interest in masking the true nature of these suburban staples. Instead, they are decorating with period furniture, preserving their linoleum, cork walls and other original materials, and generally treating them as antiques. "The Ranch has not only survived," say the authors of "Updating Classic America: Ranches", "it's on its way to timelessness."