In case you haven’t been notified yet, let me be the first to break the news. Ranch style houses are cool! I mean officially cool, complete with their own trend being analyzed by news stories, two different hip magazines documenting their coolness, and great big books filled with pictures of them.

It’s safe to say this trend is aggressively retro, even revisionist. It only works because the conventional wisdom of the past few decades is so clearly that ranch-style houses are ubiquitous, undesireable, and nothing special. As soon as our culture reaches a consensus of taste, you can count on the polymorphously perverse to get out there and subvert that dominant paradigm.

So let the backlash begin: (more…)