Small Home Gazette, Winter 2023
Answers to Your Toughest Bungalow Questions: plans for a new bungalow
The Manzanita, a modern design by The Bungalow Company.
A : Fortunately, there are many options for building a new house in the bungalow style. If you want ready-to-build plans, a good place to start is with The Bungalow Company. This well-established business is headquartered in Washington state, but their plans are used to build homes across the nation. In fact, a “Homes in Progress” map on their website indicates that two such homes are being built in Minnesota—one in the Twin Cities metropolitan area and one in Rochester. The Bungalow Company offers plans for 27 bungalow designs, plus several plans for stand-alone garages. They will, of course, work with you to tweak their plans to your satisfaction.
A page from a catalog for Bennett Homes, one of many kit home companies that flourished in the 1920s.
If you would like to work with a company closer to home, there are a number of architectural design firms and independent architects in Minnesota you could reach out to. In 2004, the Twin Cities Bungalow Club’s spring home tour featured five homes with architect-designed, stylistically sympathetic additions or alterations. The bungalow and Arts & Crafts style has only become more widely understood and appreciated since then, so finding an architect to work with should not be difficult.
But before buying a plan or seeking out an architect, it may be a good idea to become deeply familiar with the original bungalow style, inside and out. During the bungalow’s heyday in the early 20th century, house plan books proliferated. Some were distributed by kit home companies such as Sears and Roebuck Co. and Aladdin Homes. Others sold only blueprints and construction plans. Reprints of these catalogs are easy to find. Visit Dover Publications and do a site search using the word “bungalow.”
You can also find digitized copies of vintage home plan books online, including some that were published in the Twin Cities. Architect J.W. Lindstrom published several plan books, including one titled simply Bungalows.
Even The Minneapolis Tribune newspaper jumped on the home plan bandwagon. For a time during the early 1920s, each Sunday paper included a plan, an elevation and a description of construction. They were later collected in a book (The Minneapolis Tribune Plan Book for Home Builders), which is available online in digital form.
Wherever you find inspiration, we wish you luck with your bungalow homebuilding project!
This house was built in the Longfellow neighborhood of Minneapolis just 15 or 20 years ago.
