The Walls Around Us

YOUR ARTICLE ABOUT THE BALLOON frame (“Who Invented Your House?,” by Ted Cavanagh, Spring 1999) offers a fine history of this wood-saving approach to house building in America. However, there’s another technique that’s even more parsimonious: the board-and-batten house of the California coast.

Your 1941 photograph of balloonframe construction shows walls of vertical two-by-fours spaced about 16 inches apart; in the same picture there’s a similar wall that’s a little farther along, already covered with sheathing, probably one-by-eight boards placed diagonally. These would be covered with a finish such as shingles or stucco on the outside and plastered or drywalled on the inside. A board-andbatten wall uses only the one-by-eight boards (or one-by-tens or such), with battens that are usually one-by-twos or -threes. The boards are placed upright edge to edge, with a batten over each joint. No other materials are added on the inside or the outside; the boards and battens are both structure and finish. Floors are made by simply nailing horizontal ledgers to the boards and then adding joists.

There probably aren’t any houses being built this way anymore. Codes discourage them, and there’s no way to hide wiring or insulation in them. Older board-and-batten houses still exist and are in use, although as one owner told me, they creak whenever the wind blows. Their thin walls are easily twisted, causing board to rub against board in noisy complaint, sometimes loud enough to discourage sleep.

John Wiebenson
Wiebenson & Dorman Architects
Washington, D.C.