[How to Build #2] American Postwar Housing

Now that we've covered the basics on how to build in a 1:1 scale, we can move on to actual houses and architecture styles. The American Postwar Housing.

These homes are rooted in American History. They were built as the American soldiers returned from fighting in World War II. Millions of Americans were buying these single-family houses. From other styles, they differ by having a rather simple design, minimal, usually a flat roof, and 1 floor. So it might be considered a classic. Now, these homes are almost everywhere across the whole United States.

This also led to the huge economical growth of the country in general, which led to the creation of this typical idea of the "American dream", to have your own house, a family, a car, a career, and a lawn with green cut grass.

But how do we build those houses in Minecraft? This is necessary to know as you might want to achieve this look of a classic American city's suburban areas in your builds. In this lesson, we'll cover how to build a house like this and the pattern of the streets of the neighborhood in the next.

Ranch Style Housing

Exterior Characteristics:

- One story

- Low-pitched, gable roof

- Brick or stone fireplace

- Integrated car garage

- Open, airy design

Floor Plan Characteristics

The house shape is quite simple, usually just a rectangle. The house plan is almost as if it was cut in half, one part is the living room and kitchen, the other is the living space, bedrooms, and bathrooms. And when you enter the house you directly enter the living room with some sort of a fireplace.

I decided to revert the plan and build it close to the previous example, but the idea here is the same. Again, we're building in a 1:1 scale, with realistic and real-world room sizes, though one question rises, if the Minecraft block is 1m, are then the walls also 1m thick? Hah yeah, in this case, we can't do anything, but we need to pay real close attention to the realistic space sizes in the interior, as well as realistic size from the exterior. That is basically the whole challenge of building :D

But the rewards, in the end, make it all worth it.

Also notice how we can save space with merging the rooms like this:

After that, we'll need to add flooring, tiles, and carpets. In houses like this back in the 50s, they used carpet for flooring, and in this example, we will use light gray wool. 

1 - bedroom, 2 - master bedroom, 3 - bathroom, 4 - master bedroom closet, 5 - kitchen, 6 - living room/family room.

Now let's build a wall :D For this, we will use birch planks because they give the most realistic representation of the actual material of real-world houses of that era. 

Don't forget about the window position.

Notice the distance between the widows is a minimum of 3 meters, this is because we will use decoration on windows, various colorful terracotta blocks, so we need space for it.

The distance between the window and a door is 2 meters for the same reason.

The total height of the house without a roof should be 3 meters.

The main feature of these houses is the fact that the roof is flat, we will use andesite stairs for that.

The roof system might be a little complex. But once you get used to doing it, it will be easy. The idea here for this type of housing is to construct a flat roof, while at the same time keeping the interior ceiling height of 2.5 meters, this we were able to achieve through placing smooth quartz slabs.

This is how it should look like inside without any furniture or decorations.

This step is the final step, and the most fun, the decorations :D

Although it is fun, there are some basic rules that I try to follow each time I decorate any house in Minecraft. Is that, less is more. Keep it simple, look at pictures of real-world interiors and try to emulate it through blocks, slabs, and stairs, whatever Minecraft can provide.

This is the section, so you can see better where I placed what:

Nice and clean.

After that, you can add more and more street details, pathways, a backyard, a car garage, a car itself, trash cans, trees, other houses, lights, and so on. There really is no limit to that kind of stuff, be careful though not to overdo it, so, I guess there is a limit :D

Again, to do this just look through streets in any suburban area of a city, any state. Use Google Earth Street View, if possible.

In the next lesson, we'll try to cover the patterns of suburban streets, lightning systems, the distance between roads and houses, pedestrian paths, the realistic length of roads, and all those technical details.