Design
The Fading Romance of America's 'Cinderella Homes'
“All you can lose is your heart.”
All fairy tales fade. But few ever sparkled as deliberately as the Cinderella Home.
This story starts in 1954 in Downey, California, just outside Los Angeles, where Jean Valjean Vandruff built his first Cinderella Home. These low-slung, ranch-style houses, marked by high-gabled, shake-shingle roofs and decorative gingerbread trim, sold a fantasy. These were storybook homes, designed through and through to appeal to the nuclear family at the dawn of the Atomic Age.