Lustron Houses

Our son and his family recently stayed in an airbnb that turned out to be a Lustron home.

The Des Moines area has a sprinkling of them but we’d never been inside one of these prefabricated enameled steel houses before. There was a shortage of homes after WWII so a Chicago industrialist and inventor, Carl Strandlund, came up with the idea of low maintenance houses which would also be very durable.

They set out to construct 15,000 homes in 1947 and 30,000 in 1948. The houses sold for between $8,500 and $10,500.

With enameled steel panels inside and out, as well as steel framing, the homes were usually built on concrete slabs with no basement.  The frame was constructed on-site and the house was assembled piece-by-piece from a special Lustron Corporation delivery truck. The assembly team, who worked for the local Lustron builder-dealer, followed a special manual from Lustron and were supposed to complete a house in 360 man-hours.

Its plant in Columbus, Ohio, a former Curtiss-Wright factory, only built 2,498 Lustron homes from 1948 to 1950 because the company couldn’t pay back start up loans from the Reconstruction Finance Corporation.

Many of these houses remain in use today. Several have been added to the National Register of Historic Places. The Lustron Houses of Jermain Street Historic District is a notable grouping and historic district in New York state. And some are popular as airbnbs.

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A list of Lustron houses.

A closeup look at a Lustron home.