The thing I find most interesting about Sanctuary Hills? Historical accuracy. Those types of houses actually existed. They were built in the late Forties/early Fifties by the Lustron Corporation as a solution to the post-WW2 housing boom, caused at least in part by returning GIs who needed homes for themselves and their families.
Lustron Corporation promotional material - note the metal accents near the porch, a unique feature of the homes which you can see in Fallout 4 too.
Lustron houses (the brainchild of entrepreneur Carl Strandlund) looked pretty much the same as the ones in Sanctuary Hills. They were prefabricated steel homes with enamel tile cladding, designed to withstand natural hazards like fire, lightning, rodent infestation, rust, decay, etc and were said to require very little (if any) painting or other maintenance.
A happy homeowner hosing down her low-maintenance Lustron Home (house color: Surf Blue).
Sources vary somewhat regarding price (I’ve seen them listed as starting at $6,000 to $8,000 toward the beginning of the construction period) but a two-bedroom, one-bathroom home like the one the Sole Survivor owned would probably have cost something in the region of $10,000 to $12,000 by 1950… although that price would no doubt have escalated quite considerably by 2077, in line with the insane levels of hyperinflation evident in Pre-War society.
Pre-War Sanctuary Hills - Sole Survivor’s house shown center.
The house colors we see in Sanctuary Hills are also accurate - the original Lustron homes came in Surf Blue, Maize Yellow, Dove Gray, and Desert Tan (some sources also say pink was available, although I haven’t seen any evidence to that effect). The metal roofs, pocket doors, tripartite windows and built-in shelves that you see in Sanctuary Hills were present in the originals too. Each house also had its own unique serial number on a metal plate in the laundry room, although sadly we don’t see any evidence of those in-game!
An example of the 2-bed Westchester Deluxe model, similar to the one the Sole Survivor and family would have lived in - the Westchester Deluxe was the only floor plan with a bay window in the living room.
A Lustron Home kit came in about 3,000 parts and was usually constructed on a concrete slab foundation, with methods that we can see in evidence in the West Everett Estates project in Fallout 4 - a stroll around the neighborhood (carefully avoiding the Super Mutant residents) shows that several of the homes were still under construction at the time the bombs dropped on the Commonwealth.
A Lustron house with parts laid out for display - some assembly required!
Unfortunately the Lustron Homes were a short-lived project, partly due to expense (construction costs were greater than those of traditional wood-frame houses), a large backlog in orders, and additional pressure from Congress and trade unions, and the Lustron Corporation only got to make the houses for a short period before it was forced to declare bankruptcy in 1950.
However, many of the houses built in the Midwest and East Coast still exist today, and some have even withstood hurricanes and other natural disasters…
This one was hit pretty heavily by extreme weather - it survived! (Just!)
… so it’s not too surprising that a few of them managed to hold out against the ravages of time and nuclear warfare either!
Not too bad for a community of prefabricated Pre-War homes. Sanctuary Hills might not have been a perfect Pre-War community, isolated as it was from the more immediate horrors of Boston, 2077 (food rationing, riots and martial law, not to mention military checkpoints, internment camps and other grim reminders that the country was anticipating nuclear war at any moment), but the houses themselves held up pretty well over the centuries. All in all, I’d say it was a pretty good investment on the part of Sole and their family.
(Vault-Tec, well, that’s another story. They probably should have asked Vault-Tec Guy about the money-back guarantee, or at least some sort of complaints policy.)
A video of an IRL Lustron House here for the curious, courtesy of the Ohio Historical Society:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mwFonBxpDWs