How the Modern Farmhouse Conquered America—and What It Says About the Economy

It has been called “inauthentic,” a tool of gentrification, the “modern McMansion.” It has been mocked, copied, and declared dead.

But whatever you think about the modern farmhouse, there’s little question that it's become the defining look of the new American home.

The signature white siding, board-and-batten accents, clean gables, and black-framed windows can be found in new-construction homes from suburbs to cities. By 2017, builder design awards were already identifying those features as major trends. And as recently as early 2025, modern farmhouse plans were outselling other styles by 36%.

Its rise is often attributed to taste—fueled by "Fixer Upper," Chip and Joanna Gaines, and an insatiable American appetite for nostalgia. But liking a style and building it everywhere are two different things.

"Material costs are a major determining factor when it comes to the type of new-home inventory being offered, especially among smaller builders who don't have scale advantages for purchasing," explains Joel Berner, senior economist at Realtor.com®.

And while some critics have derided the movement toward cheaper building as the erosion of American aesthetics, architectural historian Gwendolyn Wright argues that tension has dictated architectural styles for more than a century.

“Builders have pursued ways to economize since the late 19th century," Wright writes. "Experiments with neoteric building materials and construction systems sought to reduce production costs."

For a style to become the face of American housing, it also has to survive the economics of construction. And those calculations have repeatedly left their mark on what houses look like.

Why modern farmhouse fit the postcrash housing economy

Modern farmhouse emerged from an industry that had just learned, painfully, how much architectural complexity could cost.

In the years leading up to the 2008 crash, convolution had become part of the visual language of the American new home: bump-outs, masonry façades, and rooflines crowded with peaks and gables. Looking back from the depths of the recession in 2010, one architect joked that homeowners had somehow been convinced they needed “10 gables” to measure up.

When the market collapsed, builders began taking those features back out. Trade coverage from the period documented an industry aggressively value-engineering its houses.

While it was once routine to apply 500 square feet of stone to a new home's exterior, builders cut their use in half, using only 200 square feet—the recession had literally taken half the stone off the house.

But stripping away expensive features created another problem. A house still had to possess that almost mythic je ne sais quoi of residential real estate: curb appeal.

Enter modern farmhouse.

White siding, clean gables, and dark-framed windows became a recognizable vocabulary of modern farmhouse. (Volodymyr Kyrylyuk/Adobe Stock) The traditional look of wood siding is made more affordable with manufactured materials. Fiber cement’s share of new single-family homes rose from 7.5% in 2003 to 21.7% in 2023, reaching 22.6% in 2025. (Getty Images)

Its identity could be concentrated in a relatively small set of recognizable features—clean gables, light siding, vertical board-and-batten, dark windows, porches, and occasional metal accents—without re-creating all of the structural complexity builders had just stripped away.

Even the homages to traditional wood construction could be reproduced with cheaper, industrialized materials—and builders jumped on the opportunity. 

Fiber cement siding, which can mimic wood exteriors, grew from 7.5% of new single-family homes in 2003 to 21.7% in 2023, a 14.2 percentage-point increase in two decades. By 2025, it covered 22.6% of new homes started.

By the time "Fixer Upper"—the original vehicle for the Gaineses—premiered in 2013, it had already become a powerful national arbiter of residential taste. HGTV itself later described the pair as its original “farmhouse sweethearts,” and scholars have treated the show’s “farmhouse chic” as central to the nostalgic vision of home it constructed.

So while popular culture helped teach buyers what to desire, the building economy filtered that demand through what could actually be produced at scale.

Modern farmhouse landed at the intersection of the two: a highly recognizable aesthetic arriving at a moment when builders had powerful reasons to create visual interest without returning to the expensive structural excess they had just stripped from the American house.

It was a compelling answer to that economic equation—but it was far from the first.

This is how the ranch conquered America, too

After World War II, the United States entered 1945 short an estimated 5 million homes. Returning veterans were forming families, suburbs were expanding, and builders had to produce housing faster than they ever had before.

The solution was to turn housing into an industrialized product.

Builders adopted precut lumber, plywood sheathing, premixed concrete slabs, and factory-made windows, doors, and fixtures. Gypsum wallboard (today more commonly known as Sheetrock) began replacing the far more labor-intensive process of applying wood lath and plaster.

Wartime engineers had even developed lightweight roof trusses that required roughly 45% less lumber and cost about 35% less than conventional ceiling and roof framing.

Postwar builders transformed home construction through standardized materials and specialized labor. At Levittown on Long Island, a 36-person team could start and finish a house in a single day. (Irving Haberman/IH Images/Getty Images)

Developers then combined those materials with a new way of organizing labor, just as Henry Ford famously did for the automobile.

At Levittown on Long Island, construction was broken into specialized tasks performed repeatedly from house to house. A 36-person team could start and finish a house in a single day.

One style proved particularly well suited to that new building economy.

The ranch’s single-story, horizontal profile lent itself to mass production. Because of its simplicity, it could be erected on a concrete slab or simple raised foundation, reducing the need for highly skilled labor. 

And by its 1950s peak, ranches accounted for an estimated 9 out of every 10 new houses built in the United States.

But again, efficiency alone can’t explain the style’s meteoric rise.

The ranch worked because the innovations making houses faster and cheaper to reproduce coincided with a style buyers actually wanted: informal living, an attached garage, large windows, a connection to the outdoors and a new vision of suburban family life.

The ranch proved particularly compatible with postwar mass production—and with what buyers wanted. It's still widely popular among homebuyers today. (Getty Images)

What will today’s houses eventually say about us?

The lessons from Leavittown and the post-WWII building boom is a powerful reminder that homes have always reflected more than architectural taste—preserving the aspirations, anxieties, and economic possibilities of the people who built and bought them.

Architectural historian Barbara Miller Lane found developers paying such close attention to consumer preferences that one prominent building family called buyers their “best architects.”

It is an interesting idea to hold against the criticism that tends to follow popular housing styles. While builders may determine which designs can be produced profitably, the houses that spread are also, in some sense, the houses buyers reward.

Consider the McMansion.

Sociologist Brian Miller found that the term ultimately came to represent far more than a large or garishly designed house. It became “a symbol for more complex issues including sprawl and excessive consumption.”

In hindsight, of course, the association seems almost inevitable. The McMansion emerged as mass-produced materials made elaborate displays of luxury easier to reproduce, while the same easy credit that would eventually lead to the crash made that opulence easier to finance.

The house became a record of its economy, what buyers wanted and eventually got from it. And nearly 20 years later, the architecture has become a shorthand for the era of conspicuous abundance.

Modern farmhouse is losing favor as builders once again confront rising costs and tighter affordability. (Getty Images)

Modern farmhouse may eventually tell us something just as recognizable about the period that followed: an era emerging from a devastating housing crash, attracted to nostalgia and authenticity, and ever more adept at reproducing both through standardized construction and manufactured materials.

But just as those insights are emerging, the calculation is changing again.

"Builders are simplifying rooflines and floor plans to cut framing waste, shrinking lots, and adding low-material 'value' features—drop zones, flex rooms, EV hookups—plus porches and patios that expand livability without adding much interior square footage or cost," says Berner.

And as they do, the modern farmhouse is falling out of favor. The style registered a net popularity score of -31% in the American Institute of Architects’ latest design survey. Contemporary home styles and façades, meanwhile, reached +41%.

The motivation is once again plain enough to see.

Builders are under pressure to wring more out of every construction dollar. In July, they reported that the materials required to build the same house cost a median 6.7% more than a year earlier. The increase was 9.1% among builders producing five or fewer homes, compared with just 1.8% among those producing at least 100.

At the same time, the house itself is contracting. The median single-family home completed in 2025 measured 2,142 square feet, with new-home size generally declining from its mid-2010s peak. Nearly two-thirds of new detached homes now sit on less than one-fifth of an acre, compared with 46% in 1999.

It’s too soon to say those constraints are producing whatever comes after modern farmhouse, but some of the contours of the next American house are starting to become visible.

What buyers decide looks beautiful within those constraints remains an open question. And what those choices eventually reveal about this economic moment may become obvious only when we’re looking back at it.