Mid Century Ranch

Long, low, and built to last. Here is how to bring an original ranch or split-level kitchen back without losing the easygoing character that made these homes a classic.

The everyday post-war ranch, raised ranch, and split-level, built roughly 1945 to 1970. We design to the era's relaxed, horizontal character, across Chicago and the surrounding suburbs.

The house the suburbs were built on

If the architect-designed modern home is the showpiece of the post-war years, the ranch is the workhorse, and there are far more of them. As the suburbs filled in through the late 1940s, the 50s, and the 60s, the ranch became the default American home, affordable, practical, and built by the thousands across Chicagoland. You know it the moment you see it. A long, low, horizontal silhouette that stretches across the lot instead of stacking up off it. A low-pitched roof. A picture window facing the street. An attached garage. Brick on the lower half, frame or siding above. The whole house sits close to the ground and reads calm and unhurried, a deliberate break from the tall, vertical, ornamented homes that came before it.

The ranch came in a few flavors, and Chicagoland has all of them. The classic single-story ranch is the purest form, everything on one level, easy and open. The raised ranch lifts the main floor up over a half-buried lower level, so you climb a short flight of stairs to the living space and head down to a finished basement or family room. The split-level stages the home across two or three half-flights, with the kitchen and living areas on the main and the bedrooms a half-story up. What ties them all together is the philosophy. Compared to the pre-war bungalow or the formal colonial, the ranch opened up, fewer walls, more flow, a kitchen that finally connected to the family spaces instead of hiding at the back of the house. These were homes built for informal, family-centered, indoor-outdoor living, and that easygoing spirit is exactly what a good kitchen update should protect.

It is worth drawing one clear line here, because it matters for how you treat the kitchen. The everyday suburban ranch and split-level are cousins of the architect-designed mid-century modern home, but they are not the same thing. The true modern house was a statement, walls of glass, dramatic rooflines, a designer's vision. The ranch is its friendly, mass-built relative, simpler, warmer, and far more common across the northern and western suburbs. If your home is a sleek, architect-pedigreed modern, our Mid-Century Modern page speaks to that house directly. This page is for the everyday ranch, the raised ranch, and the split-level, the homes most Chicagoland families actually grew up in.

What is usually going on in a ranch kitchen

Open the cabinets in a classic Chicagoland ranch and there is a good chance you are looking at the original kitchen, or close to it. These homes were built solid, and a surprising number of their kitchens have simply never been touched since the day the family moved in.

The most common find is original wood from the 1950s, 60s, or early 70s, usually birch or oak, in plain slab fronts or simple flat doors with very little profile. The boxes tend to be honest, well-built, and square, and the wood underneath decades of old finish is often perfectly sound. What dates these kitchens is rarely the construction. It is the finish that has yellowed, darkened, or gone orange under an old varnish, the worn linear hardware, and a door face that reads tired even when the box behind it is solid. The other common scenario is the home where the kitchen got a partial, dated update somewhere along the way, honey-oak or a builder-grade replacement that now reads just as out of trend as the wood it replaced.

Here is the encouraging part, and it is the whole reason this page exists. A ranch kitchen is very often a perfect candidate for refacing. The boxes are good. The carcasses are good. The layout, a compact galley or a practical L-shape, usually works fine for how the room is actually used. What is showing its time is almost entirely on the surface, the doors, the fronts, and the finish. That is the best possible situation to be in, because it means you can get a brand-new-looking kitchen by changing the parts that are dated and keeping the good bones that are not.

How we'd approach it

A ranch kitchen points clearly in one direction first. With good boxes and dated fronts, this is one of the strongest refacing situations in all of Chicagoland.

Refacing, into Flat Panel, is the most period-true move. When your boxes are solid but the doors and the finish are what is dragging the kitchen down, refacing is the cleanest possible answer. We keep your good bones and replace the doors and drawer fronts with brand-new ones, and in a ranch the period-true choice is Flat Panel, a smooth, straight, frameless face with no profile to fuss over. It is the door the era was built around, simple, horizontal, and quietly handsome, and it lets a long ranch kitchen read calm and clean the way the architecture always intended. A Mini Shaker can work beautifully in a softer, more transitional ranch if you want the faintest hint of a frame, but for a true period feel, Flat Panel is the answer. And because we finish everything in-house, your boxes included, the new fronts and the kept boxes read as one seamless kitchen, no mismatched parts, no telltale seams.

Warm walnut tones, and a finish that suits the era. The material is half the magic in a ranch. We are doing a lot of warm wood right now, and a ranch is exactly where it belongs, a walnut or white-oak Flat Panel front that lets the grain carry the room, flat and broad in the true mid-century spirit. You can run a warm wood throughout, or pair a wood island or run against a painted main kitchen for depth. The finish is part of what pulls it together, and our 30 gloss reads clean and current, giving the wood a warm, refined surface that shows off the grain. It is a big part of what gives a ranch kitchen its easy, of-the-era feel.

Painting in warm neutrals modernizes a ranch beautifully. Refacing is not the only good path here, and for many ranch kitchens, painting is exactly right. If your wood fronts are simple and sound and you would rather refresh than replace, a painted finish in a warm, grounded neutral updates a ranch kitchen with real warmth, soft whites, a warm greige, a muted sage, a grounded blue. The era loves a muted, lived-in palette over anything stark, and a warm neutral keeps the kitchen feeling easygoing rather than clinical. We build our coats very thin and in multiple coats for a smooth, durable factory finish, and we encapsulate the whole kitchen in a sealed plastic bubble under negative pressure while we spray, so the dust and overspray stay off the rest of your home. The result is a kitchen that looks brand new and still feels like it belongs in a ranch.

Refinishing, if your original wood is worth keeping. Should your ranch still have its real wood fronts and you genuinely love them, refinishing brings them back rather than replacing them. Our Revive path moves the wood to a current tone, often correcting an old yellowed or orange finish toward a cleaner, warmer walnut, and our Refresh path simply restores a finish that has dulled with age. Refinishing keeps the authentic material a ranch does best.

Long, low, warm, and easy. That is a ranch kitchen brought back to exactly what it was always meant to be.

Where Chicagoland's ranches and split-levels live

The post-war ranch is a suburban story through and through, and the northern and western suburbs are full of them. Glenview is one of the best examples in the region, with a housing stock that skews newer than the architect-pedigreed towns nearby and a deep base of 1960s through 1990s ranches, split-levels, and Colonials, exactly the homes whose original or first-update kitchens are now squarely ready for a refresh. Northbrook is structurally a refacing-and-repaint market for the same reason, an enormous layer of 1960s through 1980s ranch and split-level stock, where homeowners overwhelmingly prefer updating the kitchen they have over the disruption of tearing it out. Out west, La Grange Park and its neighbors carry their own strong run of post-war ranches alongside the older styles, modest, well-built homes whose kitchens have aged in exactly the way refacing was made to fix.

Beyond those, you will find solid ranch and split-level stock across Deerfield, Skokie, Western Springs and its Springdale section, Arlington Heights, and out along the outer edges of the bungalow belt, wherever the post-war boom built fast, low, and to last.

We know these homes, the easygoing character that defines them, and how to give a ranch kitchen the clean, warm, low-sheen look the architecture was built around.