Advertising
Kit houses were promoted through catalogs available at lumber yards and hardware stores, through the mail-order catalogs published by large retailers like Sears and Wards, and through advertisements in popular magazines. Dale Wolicki lists Saturday Evening Post, National Geographic, and Good Housekeeping as examples of magazines where Gordon-VanTine advertised. Prospective customers could arrange to inspect kit houses in their vicinity or visit a company's factory to tour model homes.
The ease of construction and cost savings of kit houses appealed to many would-be homeowners across the economic spectrum, from blue-collar workers to the affluent. For example, in 1928 Walt Disney and his brother Roy built two kit houses made by Pacific Ready Cut Homes on lots they owned in the Silver Lake neighborhood of Los Angeles.
The popularity of kit houses was attested in a roundabout way in the 1920 silent comedy One Week starring Buster Keaton, which shows Keaton constructing a build-it-yourself house that turns out all wrong.
Read more about this topic: Kit House
Famous quotes containing the word advertising:
“The same people who tell us that smoking doesn’t cause cancer are now telling us that advertising cigarettes doesn’t cause smoking.”
—Ellen Goodman (b. 1941)
“Remove advertising, disable a person or firm from preconising [proclaiming] its wares and their merits, and the whole of society and of the economy is transformed. The enemies of advertising are the enemies of freedom.”
—J. Enoch Powell (b. 1912)
“Life is beset by many annoyances, and those that stand out above all are the life- insurance and advertising agents.”
—Alice Foote MacDougall (1867–1945)