Original Sears mail-order house on market for $1.125M in Center Moriches

There was a time when Long Islanders could pick their dream home out of a catalog and build it themselves for no more than about $5,000.

That was between 1908 and 1940, when Sears, Roebuck and Co. offered mail-order homes and shipped about 100,000 of them all over the country by rail. The orders included blueprints and all that someone would need to build it, including roofing, flooring, wiring, cabinetry, paint and doors.

Many of these homes remain on Long Island, scattered from southern Nassau County to the East End. In 1989, Newsday reported that one of the largest single sales was by a developer who built 100 homes in Massapequa Park.

Meanwhile in Center Moriches, one of these homes is on the market for $1.125 million.

The listing agents are Letticia Lettieri and Bill Carroll, of The Corcoran Group. There is a fascination with these homes because of how they were built and their history, the agents say. And they have some firsthand experience with Sears homes that predates their listing: Lettieri's mother-in-law owns one in Manorville, and Carroll used to live in one, in Westhampton Beach.

"I didn't realize there's a little bit of a cult following," Carroll said, "and they're a bigger deal than I knew at the time."

The homes are characterized by their clean lines, functional structure and sturdy builds, Carroll said. Sears & Roebuck offered 450 styles of homes, ranging from small cottages (for which the materials cost $500) to Georgian mansions (which cost $5,140), Newsday reported.

On Long Island, these homes were built near railroad stations so buyers could easily retrieve the supplies. The construction was completed by developers, contractors hired by the homeowner or the homeowner themselves. For someone constructing a home themselves, Sears would offer a credit on the down payment according to the value of their work, Newsday reported.

The deliveries would "come with instructions on how to put it together," said Mark Shuster, the seller of the Center Moriches home. He and his wife have lived there since 2002, and owned the home across the street from it for six years before that. They befriended the owner at the time, and Shuster began to research the history behind mail-order houses.

"You just had to dig your own hole, and put your own masonry in," he said.

In the 1986 book "Houses By Mail: A Guide to Houses from Sears, Roebuck and Company," authors Katherine Cole Stevenson and H. Ward Jandl wrote that sometimes the construction manuals would be as long as 75 pages and were written for both the homeowner and the contractor to use. A typical house averaged about 30,000 parts for assembly, not including nails and screws, they wrote.

The Center Moriches listing, on Union Avenue, is in a style called Mitchell Cape. An old advertisement shared by Shuster shows that the materials cost $2,061, and the home was built in 1935.

In Stevenson and Jandl's book, there is a description of the style: "The Mitchell follows the latest idea in English architecture with a touch of the popular California studio type."

The Center Moriches house still closely resembles the catalog's rendering: Two gables of differing heights, a tall chimney, the rounded front door and a bench against the side of the house.

The interior of the four-bedroom, three-bathroom home was revamped in 2021. That included a kitchen expansion and bathroom renovations. Other notable features include bookshelves nestled in the home's peak with a rolling ladder, old-fashioned wooden Anderson windows toward the back and a 20-by-40-foot in-ground pool.

The home was expanded years ago — this was initially a two-bed house — but the addition features the same soaring, cathedral ceilings of the original build.

"It looks like a little English cottage, when you look at it from the street," Lettieri said. "And it's that sloped roof that really is a major architectural feature for these Mitchell Capes."

The property, an 0.84-acre lot, sits on Senix Creek. It includes a boathouse that was transported from Camp Upton in the 1940s, Shuster said.

There are likely "a few hundred" Sears houses left on Long Island, Carroll said, but Sears did not keep sales records after the program ended in 1942, due to Depression-era cutbacks at the company.

There have been many prospective buyers coming in from New York City to check out the home, Carroll said. The agents say they've loved showing it off while informing visitors on its beginnings: From a mail order kit of materials, to the legacy home it is today.

"Some people knock things down," Lettieri said. "But in this home, things were maintained. So you still have an important part of Long Island history."