Breaking the Mold

In the cookie-cutter world of tract developments, where a colonial is a tudor is a cape, the splanch is suburbia's rebel. From its rather eccentric layout to its utterly preposterous name, it's the house that refuses to play by traditional architectural rules. It isn't a split, and it isn't a ranch, though its name borrows from both. What it is is a three-story house in a two-story skin -- a Rube Goldberg structure with a central staircase from which basement, first floor, stand-alone living room and a raft of upstairs bedrooms unfurl.

``It's like an exploded house,'' says Merrick interior designer Miriam Wohlberg.

But if the splanch is arguably Long Island's quirkiest bit of mass construction, it also was one of the most popular designs to come out of the building boom of the late '50s, '60s and '70s. No matter that tucking a living room into its own floor rendered a chunk of the splanch all but useless. In an era of the small and dark, its relative openness captured the bouyant mood of modern suburbia just as surely as the original colonial embodied the solidity of the early settlers.

``The splanch got away from the mundane house that everyone had been building since the beginning of time and introduced a whole new spatial context,'' says Roslyn architect and preservationist Guy Ladd Frost. ``Traditionally, you had one-story houses and two-story houses. All of a sudden, here was this different thing happening where you could get a flow of space vertically and horizontally.''

Although neither architectural historians nor architectural reference books can pinpoint the splanch's origins, the evidence strongly suggests it's a child of Long Island. And like millions of other houses built in America's postwar developments, this was purely a work of commerce, a style conjured up not by high-minded designers, but by contractors trying to adapt to the demands of time and turf.

In Nassau County, where the state began to fill in the South Shore estuaries in the '50s, the splanch provided a practical solution to the difficult question of how to turn swamp land into buildable space. ``The water table is only three or four feet in places like Baldwin and Merrick, so you couldn't put in a traditional seven-foot foundation, which is what you need for a basement,'' says Lawrence Hahn, whose company, House Beautiful, built 5,500 Long Island houses between 1955 and 1989.

The splanch, however, allowed builders to construct a house by boring down just three feet and pouring a half-basement. Up above, the house unfolded not just layer-over-layer, but side-to-side: The first floor -- dining room, kitchen, family room -- is built on a slab. Up six steps, the living room sits on its own floor, over the half-basement. Up eight more steps, the bedrooms fan out above the first-floor rooms. ``In effect,'' says Frost, ``the house is chopped in the middle and everything slides off vertically on alternating floors.''

Of course, in those go-go days of suburban construction, developers weren't just looking for innovation, they were looking for cheap innovation. ``The splanch was simply an effort to see how much space you could effectively get into the smallest number of cubic feet,'' says developer Ted S. Fishman, who built his first splanch in Seaford in 1955. And, indeed, few houses could boast so much in so little. A standard-issue splanch squeezed eight rooms, 21/2 baths and a half-basement into around 2,600 square feet; that's twice as many rooms as an original Levitt ranch, using scarcely 50 percent more space.

``I remember going to look at the house and running out to my mother saying, `My God, it's a mansion!''' laughs one woman, who bought her Nesconset splanch in 1967. ``My folks had a ranch in Yonkers, and I had always wanted a ranch, but with the splanch you got so much more for your money.''

Not surprisingly, with its cathedral-ceiling living room, it's newfangled kitchen-to-den pass-through and its open floor plan, the splanch quickly proved to be a wildly popular style, not only along Nassau's South Shore but also in landlocked communities where high-water tables were not an issue.

But for all its freshness, the house was not without its faults, chief among them, the living room. Sitting up there on its own floor -- separated from the family room by a wall and visible only from the foyer -- the room was something of a jewel-box, a too-precious space that aggressively showed off its wares, all the while shouting, ``Don't touch!'' And in an era of increasingly informality, when California Modern was the rage and the television was the hub of the house, formality -- especially pretentious formality -- didn't cut it.

``The living room was our answer to the plastic slipcovers our parents had in Brooklyn,'' quips Wohlberg. ``No one ever goes into that room, and, even if they do, it's not inviting. The Island isn't nearly as formal as people originally thought it would be. We don't have dinner parties where we sit in a formal living room and wait to be called to dinner.''

For many splanch owners, the solution lay in two words: gut it. And, in fact, with the exception of the Levitt ranch, probably no house has been pushed and pulled so far or offered so clear a blueprint of the restless suburban soul. To some, the surest route to a less-formal splanch was to ditch the living room sofas. ``I was originally going to turn the living room into a pool room,'' the Nesconset splanch-owner says. ``Then my mother said, `What are you going to do with a pool table?' She suggested we make it into a master-bedroom suite.''

Instead, she did what vast numbers of other splanchers have done: She broke down the wall separating the living room and the family room. The result is a wide-open upstairs-downstairs space that offers at least the illusion that the two areas work together, even if the reality is far more separate.

But with the bottomless wallets of the '80s, splanch-owners didn't stop there. Some abolished the wall between the dining room and the adjoining kitchen. Others pushed out from the living room's oversized window (or French doors) to create a library off the back of the house. Still others turned the garage into a gym or the two tiny upstairs baths into a giant bathroom suite. And, especially along the bayfront from Baldwin to Seaford, some razed the house and put up a whole new mega-structure.

These days, contractors have moved on to new Taras. ``Like anything else, the splanch died out after the fad,'' says Hahn. ``Now, I don't think you can build a contemporary house in the luxury market because everyone wants traditional.'' But that, he says, doesn't necessarily mean the end of the splanch.

``Everything goes in cycles, especially houses. If the splanch comes back, I wouldn't be surprised.''