BUILDING AN ATMOSPHERE OE STABILITY INTO THE HO!\IE 



BY RAWSON W. HADDON 



a 



RECENT commission has decided that not more 

 llian a fraction of the people of one large Ameri- 

 ^flf^ can city can be called really native American, and 

 that the rest — nearly ninety i)er cent of the total 

 population — remain so purely and hopelessly alien that 

 immediate steps were thought necessary to bring this 

 foreign ])o])ulation, or at least some part of it, into touch 

 with our own American ideals in more effective ways 

 than have yet been attempted. 



While no statistics are available in the case of oui 

 suburban population, carefully arranged figures would 

 probably show the population there less migratory than 

 one might suppose. 



It is certain, however, that until very recently the typ- 

 ical suburban house has carried with it no suggestion of 

 stability or permanence. The average house within com- 

 muting distance of large cities has been, and still is, in 

 appearance, an extremely haphazard and informal af- 

 fair, more suggestive of hurried erection than of any- 

 thing else and entirely lacking in those marks of long 

 residence which one sees, or unconsciously feels, in the 

 recent suburban develoiiments outside of London or 

 other English cities. 



The American su!)urbs are in many instances older 

 than the English ones. It is not a matter of actual oc- 

 cujjancy at all, but of architectural design. .\nd whili- 





The house of Mr. diaries II. Bush, at Cranford, N. J., looks for all the world as though it miglit have 



been put up by one of the "earliest settlers." But it was built only a few years ago. 



Hollingsworth and Bragdon, Architects. 



English architects seem always to have known instinct- 

 ively how to put into their work a feeling of dignified 

 stability, the ability to put a similar feeling into their 

 designs is one that has but recently been ac(|uired by 

 architects in the United States. 



But some of our architects undoubtedly have the 

 knack, and it would probably puzzle most visitors to 

 Cranford, New Jersey, to explain why the Bush house, 

 built only a few years ago, possesses so subtle and defi- 

 nite an apjiearance of age and carries so much more dis- 

 tinct an impression of containing within itself those best 

 traditions of American home life in which its neighbors 

 — even those of undoubtedly greater age — seem most 

 lacking. 



The explanation is simple. Mr. Joy Wheeler Dow, the 

 architect of some delightful houses, of which a few have 

 been illustrated in this magazine, has worked out the 

 following explanation which apjiears in his book, "The 

 American Renaissance." 



In an average, modern house of that western type of 

 design which has been widely heralded from time to 

 time as a "new American style" of architecture, Mr. Dow 

 found the following elements suggested : 



Moresque Spain 10 per cent 



Moresque Algiers 10 per cent 



Mores(|ue California Mission 10 ])er cent 



East India 5 per cent 



Newly reclaimed land 



10 [jer ce'.H 

 Chinese Ornament.. ...5 per ce; t 

 Modern invention, ])ure 



oO per cent 

 Anglo-Saxon Home 



."Xtmosphere 00 \)cv ceni 



On the (.)tlier hand, a dis- 

 tinctly homelike looking house 

 of American Renaissance or Co- 

 lonial design consisted, accord- 

 ing to the same analysis, of: 

 Moresque Spain.... 00 per cent 

 Moresque Algiers. . .00 per cent 

 Moresque Californi.i 



Alission 00 i)cr cent 



l-last India 00 per cent 



.X'ewly reclaimed 1;imi1 



00 ])er cent 

 Chinese ornament. . .00 per cent 

 Miulcrn invention, pure 



00 \>cv cent 

 .\nglo-Saxon Home 



Atmosphere .... 100 per cent 

 I'he secret of the Cranford 

 house consists, also, of its pos- 

 session of that single important 



eso 



