The rise and fall of the sunshine: The changing ideologies of the home in the 20th century

Kit house catalogs did more than advertise houses; they participated in constructing ideas about what made a house desirable and what a home should provide. This study examines changing representations of domestic value in catalogs produced by the Aladdin Company between 1915 and 1975. Combining a quantitative analysis of adjective use across a corpus of Aladdin house descriptions with a qualitative analysis of the Sunshine, a house plan marketed repeatedly between 1919 and 1953, the study traces changes in aesthetic, functional, and spatial language over time. The results reveal not a straightforward replacement of one set of domestic values by another, but a recurrent reweighting of values that remained available throughout the period. The Sunshine makes this process especially visible: a relatively stable material form is repeatedly recontextualized through changing combinations of affective, aesthetic, functional, and spatial qualities. Rather than treating catalogs as transparent reflections of consumer preference, the study approaches them as mediating texts that both draw upon and participate in constructing historically situated ideas of the desirable home. The analysis demonstrates how linguistic evidence can illuminate the changing meanings attached to material objects and the cultural values through which those objects are made desirable.