Pacific Ready-Cut Home Spotlight: 1910 N. Serrano Avenue
- 20 hours ago
- 2 min read
Archibald and Daisy Murdock’s home at 1910 N. Serrano Avenue was made-to-order… straight from the pages of Pacific Ready-Cut Home’s 1925 catalog.
For $7,275, the tailor and his wife received a Spanish-style stucco home with three bedrooms and two bathrooms, all of which arrived in a 12,000-piece kit complete with lumber, hardware, windows, doors, paint, even nails.
As were all Pacific Ready-Cut structures, the interior was completely customizable.
The Murdocks tailored the home by selecting their preferred lighting, plumbing, trim details, door styles, breakfast nook, and assorted built-in features for the kitchen, bathroom, and dining room.
In the living room, they upgraded the fireplace mantel with premium Batchelder tiles.
Arch died in December 1937, and within weeks Daisy put the Los Feliz home on the market. She also liquidated its contents, including a Straube walnut grand piano, down-filled club chairs, Haviland china, and “like new” Electrolux vacuum cleaner.
The widow, who founded the Women’s Breakfast Club in 1928, went to live with her sister on La Baig Avenue (just north of Sunset). By 1950, Daisy had her own apartment in the Guardian Arms on Hollywood Boulevard, where she lived for the remainder of her life.
Between 1908 and 1940, Pacific Ready-Cut sold 37,000 ready-to-assemble homes based on 1,800 different plans spanning architectural styles such as English, Dutch, Colonial, Spanish, Norman, and Italian.
Pacific Homes Inc. also sold kits to construct bungalow courts, schools, gas stations, banks, libraries, and emergency hospitals.
Their annual catalogs cost 50 cents to order by mail and featured sketches, blueprints, and general specifications for the year’s most popular styles.
In the front section of the 160-page book, Pacific peeled back the curtain on its kit-making process, beginning with the forests where they sourced their Douglas Fir lumber. In downtown Los Angeles, the Architectural Department was shown hard at work designing floor plans, which were then mass-reproduced by the Blueprint Department.
Potential customers were also invited to tour the Pacific production plant at Slauson and Boyle avenues in Huntington Park, where the company manufactured and shipped 25 houses per day. For those who couldn’t visit, the catalog explored its 24 acres, showing photographs from inside the paint factory, cabinet shop, hardware department, and roofing warehouse.
Once a customer selected their preferred model of home, all specifically-sized materials arrived in one shipment via train. The thousands of pieces were bundled and plainly marked to correspond with plans and instructions.
Home builders could either assemble their own construction crews or contract Pacific Homes to do it for them. It was estimated a four-man team could build a home within 28 days.
But it wasn’t just individual home builders. Developers would line the streets of entire residential tracts throughout Los Angeles with Ready-Cut kit homes.
The Ready-Cut catalog came to life in downtown Los Angeles, where Pacific developed a mini-community of exhibition homes and a showroom displaying interior furnishings along the intersection of South Hill Street and 14th Place.
When the company ceased operations, the structures were relocated throughout Los Angeles and many are still standing today.
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