Cover of 1958 DFPA planbook
Dr. Hellyer's A-frame
In the spring of 1958 the Douglas Fir Plywood Association sponsored a ten-page plan book titled Leisure-Time Homes of Fir Plywood. Urging customers to "plan now to use [their] off hours and vacation time to build one of these uncluttered little cottages, made better, easier and more economically with fir plywood," the book featured plans for six vacation homes, as well as suggestions for plywood boats, boathouses, and outdoor furniture. Based in Tacoma, Washington, the DFPA was established in the 1930s to further plywood manufacturing technology and the use of plywood products. W. E. Difford, managing director of the association in the 1950s, saw financial promise in the emerging leisure market and so set off to encourage new vacation home construction as well as the amount of plywood used in that construction.
Dr. Hellyer's A-frame under construction
Advertisements for Leisure-Time Homes prominently featured the plan book's one A-frame, designed by a Tacoma pediatrician, Dr. David Hellyer. A very modest triangular vacation home, with plywood shingles and inset vertical walls on both upper and lower levels, Hellyer's design was an immediate attention getter. Within a few months of publication, the DFPA had filled twelve thousand orders for Hellyer's plan. A year later the association had received seventy thousand requests for information on the vacation homes offered in its plan book. The overwhelming response to Leisure-Time Homes confirmed Difford's intuition about the vacation-home market's potential. The widespread interest in Hellyer's design hinted at the A-frame boom that lay ahead.
Raised in Japan, Switzerland, England, and Southern California, Hellyer was a twentieth-century Renaissance man. He authored several books, including a well-known volume on child rearing, cofounded a ski lift company, and established a wildlife refuge and education center near his home, outside Olympia, Washington. Though not formally trained in architecture, Hellyer came up with a well-proportioned, nicely detailed, spare version of the A-frame, one that remained an important component of the DFPA's vacation home initiative for the next twenty years.
The DFPA was attracted to Hellyer's A-frame for obvious reasons. Here was its material prominently displayed and central to the design of a cheap, increasingly popular vacation house form. Exterior grade plywood sheets functioned as both interior and exterior sheathing, providing lateral rigidity and a smooth contemporary finish. No shakes or other roofing materials were used. Rather, the panels were laid lengthwise with their edges overlapping like giant shingles; the rear facade alone used nineteen four-by-eight-foot sheets. Texture One-Eleven grooved plywood panels covered the gable end walls and the vertical inset walls, where they continued the grooved pattern on the plank deck.
Over the next decade Hellyer's A-frame was featured in such varied publications as the New York Times, Popular Mechanics, the National Association of Home Builders (NAHB) Journal of Homebuilding, the American Automobile Association's American Tourist, Medical Economics, and half a dozen how-to vacation home books. The NAHB article noted that the house was "designed for the Douglas Fir Plywood Association, pioneer of new uses for the A-frame." Six years after its initial publication Hellyer's A-frame tied with a design by George Matsumoto for the most often requested plan among the twenty-two offered by the DFPA. During the 1960s the DFPA (later renamed the American Plywood Association) furthered its involvement in the vacation home market. The association released an expanded set of vacation home plans, featuring an additional A-frame called the Ranger, hosted a national vacation home conference; produced a series of guides for builders and developers interested in the second home market; and helped place hundreds of articles in newspapers and magazines.
