Open Space | Rancho Estates Cliff May (1954)

If you're looking for a house that lives very modern, this may not be for you, but if you're looking for the California experience of a ranch home, this is the perfect house. So this is a 1954 Cliff May, so this is actually a tract home and although it has crazy popularity now and they've really developed a cult following, these were just post-war affordable homes. We bought our home in 2019 and we probably got the last cheap Cliff May home in this tract at least and we bought our house for $685,000 and it was a disaster. It was the ugliest house in the neighborhood. It stayed on the market for such a long time because it didn't present well at all. Had all of the original windows and doors had been removed and replaced with more like modern versions of them and it lost all of its charm and it definitely looked like a neglected diamond in the rough. Luckily we had some friends in the area who told us about you know the post and beam construction and how it's actually pretty simple to revert them back to the way they were made and we just dove in and did most of the work ourselves without any experience in you know doing any sort of remodeling on a home. We didn't really have a preference. I think it all started when we started looking at homes and everywhere we went didn't check the box. Everything didn't feel like home. Really it was when I met a neighbor down the block and I was helping them out and I went to their Cliff May home and I was like damn this is something that I want. This house didn't present well. It was on the market for a very long time. We had looked at it and didn't know if we were ready to take on such an enormous project but after a lot of consideration and looking at much nicer homes in the area we figured we'd take the plunge and give it a shot and I think everyone here is very friendly. People love these homes so we've made a lot of friends just through you know discussing house modifications upgrades and so on but it's also so private like we rarely see our neighbors. You have to it's incredible how we'll go weeks without seeing like our friends who live across the street or next door because if you're home or you're outside you're likely behind your your fence and your gate and for me personally I love that. It's my favorite thing about the neighborhood. I think it relates a lot to cars because it's very aesthetic driven. When we first moved into this house I actually joked about it feeling like a because you'll do things to the car or the house to make it look or feel a certain way even if it makes it less practical. When we moved in there was wall air conditioning units and we removed them right away to not have air conditioning because it didn't look nice and that's such a thing that I think only people who are into cars could understand which is like you you change your car to make it worse for the road because it's better on a racetrack or it looks cooler or it's more unique and I think these homes are very similar with that is that you know everyone wants to personalize their house they want their house to look a certain way they want to feel a certain way and there's so many things that you can do to this to make it uniquely yours and I feel like that's probably why it relates so much to cars. Automotive is very visual you build a car to look a certain way because you just want it to feel like that and this house I think is very very similar. I often joke that it feels like we're at like a car meet for houses because you'll go and walk your dog and wind up talking to your neighbor or someone around the block who you've never met before about their new fence or you know or a new material they used in their house and it's like it's so ridiculous but it's awesome because it's such a unique community to have and like I personally love it because I like to mess with everything whether it's cars or houses or literally anything I have has to be you know personalized and changed. As far as the mid-century modern house here I don't feel like it is cold or uninviting I do think that it has a lot of drawbacks that people don't understand which is like this house lacks a lot of creature comforts. I actually always joke that it's like living in a glorified gazebo because I mean it's drafty it doesn't hold heat well it doesn't hold air conditioning well there's no insulation on the ceiling it's just cellotex and then plywood and then shingles so you know the heat comes in very hot in the summer but there's a lot of like little drawbacks to it but I mean the overall experience is so great that you get to sort of overlook all of those like I feel like I'm the least exciting person to talk to about this stuff because I'm very new to this space you know we don't have architectural pedigree and our backgrounds and we're not people who grew up dreaming of this home it's just something that we kind of stumbled into and wound up loving and it became something that we were really passionate about and it's been really fun to build this house from something that was really horrible into something that is great enough to have you guys here filming it it's like that to me is actually insane and that's very much like the automotive community is you build a car and you get it featured in a magazine or a video and it's like it's not what the original intention was but it's such an honor to be that opportunity to showcase what you did for yourself