Berkley's Beautiful Kit Homes

BERKLEY’S BEAUTIFUL KIT HOMES

Building Your Own Home Sweet Home!

SOME PEOPLE HAVE ONE AND DON’T KNOW IT; OTHERS ARE LOOKING FOR ONE AND ARE EVEN WILLING TO PAY A PREMIUM TO HAVE IT.

The city of Berkley is sprinkled with 52 kit homes, five of which were on the home tour this Fall. “We have lots of kit homes here in Berkley,” says Jeff Tong, long-time resident and Vice Chair of the Berkley Historical Committee. “What’s truly unique is that we have a lot more of the more expensive, fancier kit homes than most cities do.” The first went up in 1915, and the most recent was assembled in 1944. Some of the homes were purchased for as little as $700 or $800. The vast majority were purchased from Sears, but Wardway, Montgomery Ward and Aladdin also offered kit homes. (The house within the grounds of the Roseland Park Cemetery is an Aladdin kit home.)

“A great way to relate to kit homes today is to think about going on Amazon, choosing the design of a house, buying it and then having them ship you all of the materials,” explains Tim Murad, a Berkley resident, realtor and part of the team that created the kit home tour. “The companies sent you everything you needed: bricks, nails, shingles – everything. The only thing you were responsible for was the foundation. And because it was coming from Sears, you could buy furniture, plumbing fixtures, decorative pieces, etc.”

ALTHOUGH NOT EVERY CURRENT KIT-HOMEOWNER KNOWS THE FULL DETAILS of who built the homes initially, many buyers were likely carpenters and other skilled craftspeople who wouldn’t have found assembling a home to be overly daunting, just as some people today eagerly embrace assembling IKEA furniture. All of the lumber was pre-cut and labeled, Tim points out, and it all came with instructions. The homes ranged in size from 691 square feet to over 3,000 square feet – at least one has a third floor – and most were built in the 1920s and 1930s.

Some of the homes were purchased and built by local luminaries, a factor that may partly explain why Berkley has one of the largest collections of kit homes in Oakland County, let alone the country. “In Berkley’s early days of incorporation, a couple of the wealthier citizens built some of the nicer models on Edgewood,” says Dale Carlson, a resident since 2008 and a board member of the Berkley Historical Committee. “I believe that because the residents saw the more affluent members of the community building kit homes, that made it more appropriate for them to do it, too – for example, the mayor from 1933 to 1942 lived in a kit home on Beverly.”

Far from being a Lincoln-Logs kind of construction, the kit homes were beautifully built, says Tim. A kit home from 1917 in particular, he thinks, has an “incredible interior character.” Over the years, the house has been modified and expanded, as have some of the other kit homes.

Avid admirers of kit homes are willing to pay a premium to live in one. “To me, the kit homes really are one of the things that make Berkley super unique in the modern era,” says Dale. Hopefully more tours will happen in the future so that more residents can enjoy Berkley’s signature juxtaposition of past and present.