Photo book explores quirky metal homes and their devoted owners

Sue Williams stands on the front porch of her Lustron home in Columbus, Ohio. (Michael Chritton/Akron Beacon Journal)

PERRY TOWNSHIP, Ohio — Sue Williams wasn’t exactly impressed when she learned the little house down the street was a Lustron home.

She’d requested a showing when she saw the house was for sale, because she was interested in the big garage out back. When the agent mentioned it was a Lustron home and suggested she check out the enameled steel houses on the Internet, “I’m like, yeah, well, whatever,” she recalled.

Now she’s a convert.

Since 2009 the quirky cottage in Perry Township near Canton, Ohio, has been Williams’ home. She embraces its compact layout, its steel interior walls and the optimism embodied by its forward-thinking, midcentury style.

The house is one of 68 that Cleveland photographer Charles Mintz profiles in “Lustron Stories,” a book recently released by Trillium Books, a division of the Ohio State University Press.

Mintz explores what it’s like to live in a Lustron home — and by extension, what it means to be a homeowner — by capturing images of the occupants in their no-nonsense dwellings.

Lustron houses were prefabricated homes manufactured in Columbus, Ohio, from 1948 to 1950. The mass-produced, easy-to-assemble structures were intended as a solution to the postwar housing shortage, but they never fulfilled that promise.

Only about 2,680 of the homes were built before the Lustron Corp. went bankrupt in 1950. Williams’ is one of roughly 1,500 that survive.

Lustron produced eight models, all of them boxy, one-story designs. The houses were made entirely from steel, right down to their frames, and the exterior surfaces had glass baked on for durability.

Those features were meant to make Lustron homes easy to maintain, but they also make the houses hard to update. You can’t just call a painter to change your house color, Mintz said. You can’t cut a hole in the exterior to add a modern feature like central air conditioning, because the glass coating will shatter.

“It’s almost like having a pet,” he said — lovable, but not without challenges.

Working from online databases of Lustron homes, Mintz wrote to homeowners, asking permission to interview and photograph them.

A sort of community grew up around the project.

Mintz tells the homeowners’ stories only in photographs, supplemented by an introduction to the book and a history of Lustron homes.

The images show the diversity of people who live in Lustron homes. There’s an elderly couple holding hands on their early-American sofa. There are two women seated in an artfully decorated dinette, a contemporary drum light fixture suspended overhead. There’s a middle-aged man sitting in a living room devoid of decoration, walls shabby and a lamp lying broken beneath a worn chair.

Williams has relished the chance to decorate the 990-square-foot house in period style, using secondhand finds, creativity and often, a healthy dose of humor.

She even found retro turquoise appliances for her kitchen, including a range with push buttons to operate burners.

The look is kitschy and cheerful, but that’s the point. Her nursing job at Affinity Medical Center in Massillon can be demanding, she said, and she wants her home to offer respite from the stress.

“That’s the whole thing. It’s fun,” she said.

The house has what Williams called “totally weird” features, such as steel walls grooved as though they might be mistaken for paneling. But it also has a thoughtful, space-saving layout and such practical attributes as pocket doors, ample closets and halls wide enough to accommodate a wheelchair, should she ever need one.

“I’ll be able to die in this house,” she said with a throaty laugh.

She’ll go out smiling.