South Dakota Real Estate

Mount Rushmore is located in South Dakota. Is that all you know about South Dakota? How about that the capital city in South Dakota is Pierre, but the most populous city is Sioux City? South Dakota is primarily a farming state, yielding terrific crops of corn, wheat, and soybeans. The state doesn't draw a lot of controversy or drama. It is a peaceful state that seems to keep to itself, but that doesn't mean the trends of the United States fail to be appreciated here. In real estate this is especially true. Architectural designs that were less renowned, or even almost nonexistent, still made their way to South Dakota. One of the smaller housing and commercial building styles to pass through South Dakota is the Egyptian Revival. These designs popped up on the real estate scene at the turn of the nineteenth century. Homes of this style would feature ornate touches that resembled Egyptian artifacts and designs. Real estate structures typically had columns that looked to be sticks bundled together at the top and bottom. Urns decorated front porches and sun disks were placed wherever possible. This style is mainly commercial, but is seen on residential buildings. Though this style did make it to South Dakota, it never had a very large real estate market in the United States. Beaux Arts is another small housing movement that made a blip on the real estate radar around 1900. The style was so tiny and limited that the movement was old news by 1930. Beaux Arts popped up randomly across the country, never really taking hold. Even so, for however briefly, this housing style was in South Dakota. Real estate of this style normally had sculptures, murals, or other artistic traits to separate these buildings from other. The façade was ordinarily flat with classical pillars accenting the front door. Homes of this style would usually draw inspiration from other common architectural styles, smoothly blending them all together.

The Lustron houses are perhaps the most rare of all. In fact, only twenty-five hundred Lustron houses were ever built. Two percent of them were placed in South Dakota. These houses arrived on the scene shortly after World War II, in 1947. Lustron houses were specifically made for tired soldiers returning home from war. There was an initial problem when the United States didn't have enough housing available for these local heroes, and thus came the invention of the Lustron. These houses were provided by a single company in Ohio, the Lustron Corporation. They made these special homes out of panels of steel enamel. Each panel approximately measured two by two feet. The houses were made to order, with specific options on colors, window type, flooring, et cetera. Different fabricated models were available for buyers to choose from. Though not as small as the Lustron, a more obscure real estate mode is the Shingle movement. How these houses found there way to South Dakota is bewildering. Homes of the Shingle style are almost exclusively on the northeast coast! Shingle houses are one of the few designs to rebel against symmetry. In the 1880s the Shingle homes said no to symmetry and insisted on asymmetrical designs. This style was a reaction to Victorian homes. While Victorian style emphasized details and decorations, Shingle houses eliminated ornate touches and utilized the beauty of unadulterated lines. True to the name, Shingle homes used shingles; shingles lined the roofs and all the walls in one continuous flowing motion of material. Many transitional architectural movements are ignored as they serve to only move from one popular style to the next. The Stick style falls in this category. Stick had it's debut in 1860 following the Gothic Revival period.

In Gothic Revival homes there was an emphasis on sharp angles and lavish, but traditional decoration. Succeeding the Stick period was the Queen Anne style. This style was purely about fun shapes and patterns. The Stick style is somehow in the middle of those two real estate designs. So what does a Stick house look like? It has a very steep gable roof. It has overhanging eaves similar to the Gothic Revival, but it has minimized the intense amount of garnish. Playful and decorative patterns of diagonal, crisscrossing boards appear on the horizontal sidings. Porches on these homes are usually very large and adorned with braces. Vibrant colors appear on these homes, while in the Gothic Revival period everything was more concentrated on darker or earth tones. Real estate of this style is also known as Eastlake. Another housing style that entered South Dakota real estate was the Prairie style. Homes of this style were very popular across the country, not solely in South Dakota. However, the style was extremely short lived, almost as if it was cut short by World War I. The famous Frank Lloyd Wright was an architect of Prairie homes but he generally worked in the southwest and not South Dakota. Homes of this real estate style obsess with horizontal lines. Everything has to be about the horizontal. These houses are long rather than tall and keep a low pitched roof. Often, the eaves had a large overhang, further lengthening the horizontal lines of the real estate. The emphasis on lengthening was based on the name of this style, "Prairie". Houses of this style were meant to blend in with the prairie real estate. Nothing decorative was cultivated into these designs. Walls were often plaster with wood or sometimes even concrete blocks. Ironically, despite the abundance of relatively small real estate style movements present in South Dakota, this northern state is lacking some of the big ones! South Dakota completely missed the first few real estate movements in the United States because it wasn't yet a state. Housing styles like Federal, Greek Revival, or Georgian are widely popular among homes on the east coast and the original colonies, but in newer states they don't exist. South Dakota has such a remarkable make up of house styles, and of architectural history with the concentrated focused on smaller real estate styles rather than large ones.