The Iconic A-Frames
Could you imagine a B-Frame?
Photography: Woods Wheatcroft
Warm Springs in Ketchum used to be full of A-frames, here is one that has endured.
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The triangular design concept known as the A-frame was a post-World War II phenomena that hit America in its quest for leisure outlets. As author and architectural historian Chad Randl states in his encompassing book on the iconic A-frame, it was “the right shape at the right time.”
The A-frame’s ascent to popularity coincided with an economic expansion that brought vacation homes within reach of a rapidly expanding middle class,” he writes in A-frame. “As Americans began to enjoy longer weekends and extended vacations, they yearned to get away from their everyday life, to obtain what was once available only to the rich: a second home in the country.”
Architecture in the late ’50s, early ’60s, Randl explains, was in flux and without one readily-identified trend. Technological advances, population growth and cultural influences were bringing about new ideas and variations on the old. As Time magazine noted of the emerging A-frame in 1961, “The A-frame is not a new idea. The first man who leaned two poles together and threw a skin over them had a rudimentary version of it.”
Americans were embracing postwar prosperity. It was “the era of the second everything,” Randl notes.
Making these homes easy choices for vacation home properties was the fact that you could buy a “kit” to build them, often for less than $1,000, and erect a second home in just a few days.
“It was visual interest at the right price,” says Randl.
Soon, churches and businesses, from Howard Johnson’s to Whataburger, were adapting their concepts to the style.
“The A-frame’s popularity is particularly impressive when one considers it came about despite inherent and obvious flaws in its form,” writes Randl.
“Simplicity, a dramatic shape, ease of construction, and low cost imposed certain limitations, some of which were hard to avoid without losing the triangular look.”
The main liabilities, he says, include a lack of space and light and climate control challenges.
Still, he says, “the A-frame offered great flexibility, and designers responded with ingenuity.”
And so the A-frame would prevail and adapt for two decades.
It is not surprising then that the vacation home style would surface in ski towns across the country, and Ketchum was no exception.
By 1970, after 20 years in the limelight, however, A-frames were oft dismissed as a silly fad. Randl recounts a 1968 cartoon that ran in Ski magazine he says defined the public’s reversal.
“Attempting to escape a typical downhill resort, the intrepid skier completes a journey to the other side of the world, only to find identical runs, leading down to an identical cross-gabled A-frame, in Afghanistan,” he writes.
Other complaints about the style were that they were cramped and lacked privacy, Randl says.
Local longtime Realtor Alex Higgins of Sun Valley Associates says they can be a challenging sell.
“It is functionally pretty inefficient, that’s why you don’t see them being built anymore,” he says. “They are a step back in time.”
But for anyone interested in them, Higgins says nostalgia and price are factors. Those that sell these days he believes are also often sold for the land they sit on, not the structures themselves.
Sun Valley Real Estate’s Tom Drougas has a soft spot for the old style. He recently sold one to an architect and he owns one himself. Both are situated on exquisite spots along the Big Wood River, natch. >>>
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