Our house, which has come to be known as “Highland House,” was “prefabricated” by Deck House, Inc. of Acton, Massachusetts, and built in 1981 by a local contractor. At least seven thousand Deck Houses have been built in the country, most of them on the East Coast. Deck House is one of the most successful prefab companies in the country, producing houses just as good as those by Joseph Eichler, but for whatever reason they have received less attention.
After World War II, architects, industrialists, and consumers were interested in employing mass production to build better, more economical homes. In 1959, Deck House was founded by architects William J. Berkes and Robert Brownell, both of whom previously had experience with Carl Koch’s early prefab corporation Techbuilt. Berkes observed that houses in the Northeast often were built into hills and reconfigured the single-family house into a then-radical split-level design to take advantage of this. Unlike Koch, they introduced more natural materials, particularly mahogany and cedar, in construction.
Being a product of New England, Deck Houses are known for the generous overhangs of their gable ends. They also characteristically have vertical siding, updating the New England aesthetic for the modern era.
The bottom floor of a typical Deck House has bedrooms for children and an exit onto the lower part of the hill so that they could run out into the yard to play at will. Eliminating the attic upstairs allows the living areas and adult master bedroom, both located upstairs, to have soaring cathedral ceilings. I’ve always thought that low ceilings produce low spirits, so this works for me. Painted a dark brown, the beams of a Deck House reveal its construction.
Deck Houses are not constructed in the factory and hauled to the site, but rather are kits of parts hauled to the site and erected there. Construction eschews the typical American balloon frame for post and beam, allowing the interior to be freely configurable and permitting walls to open up to large glass windows and open floor plans. The most distinctive aspect of the house, however, and the reason why it is called a “Deck House” is the 3” thick tongue and groove structural cedar decking under the roof and supporting the upper floor. The rear deck is also 3” thick structural cedar, albeit not tongue and groove to permit water to flow between the beams.
There are at least seven Deck Houses on Highland Avenue in Montclair, built in the 1970s and 1980s. Ours was built in 1981. We bought it in 2011 and have extensively restored it, painstakingly removing the solid stain from the mahogany siding, as well as modernizing the kitchen and bathrooms.