What is a Bungalow Court?

I didn’t know until a few weeks ago that pocket neighborhoods had a direct historical precedent. A design that closely parallels the pocket neighborhood was a trend termed the “bungalow court” and it emerged in the early 1900s.  The house I grew up in, as well as the first home my husband and I purchased were Craftsman Bungalows both built in the early 1920s. Its crazy to me how much life echoes and dovetails and circles back on itself, but needless to say, bungalows are a house style that charm the pants off me, and that I’m only realizing all these little connections now, is beyond super cool to me.

This book of floorplans by Gustav Stickley I should probably just buy for myself because I’ve borrowed it from our old library probably 5 or 6 different times. I love looking at the floorplans and the styling of the craftsman movement, and similar to village layouts, designing floorplans is my own little puzzle game I like to play.

But back to bungalow courts: Pasadena California in 1909, a man by the name of Sylvanus Marston submitted plans to the city for eleven houses to be built on a single lot. He planned to market them to wealthy Midwesterners who came to California on vacation. The houses all faced a central courtyard alleyway and this was the first of several “bungalow courts” that would come into being over the next two decades.
 
Bungalow courts became a neighborhood model that made detatched homeownership available to a wider range of people. From Walt Disney animators and Hollywood stars to residents of lesser means, these clusters of modest sized homes meant that single family dwellings were affordable.
 
The bungalow court model preceeded the pocket neighborhood by nearly a century and informed its unfolding. There are slight nuances: more consideration for privacy with strategic window placement, front porches with “perch-able railings” to encourage conversation when the opportunity presents. The first pocket neighborhood: Third Street Cottages was stylized in the bungalow fashion, and Ross Chapin, the architect/designer has even made note that the pocket neighborhood concept doesn’t need to be executed in a bungalow style, but could be built with almost any aesthetic.

What came between these two movements and why people are cycling back toward an intentionally close but detatched housing situation is worth considering.  Some voices in our society today are drawing attention to the fact that there is a housing opportunity gap, termed the Missing Middle, where between mid-rise apartments and detatched single family homes there are a range of housing options that would contribute to a walkable urbanism that just aren’t being built enough to meet the housing needs of the current demographics.

I would argue that the microvillage design similarly fills a gap between suburban and rural, whereby strategically hybridizing the two would provide residents a better walkable local community and support network without the density of the suburbs or the isolation of rural living.