THE ESTATE 251 



Entered from the front door may be the entrance hall which, in the 

 formal and axial type of house, often runs through the house to a door 

 on the other side. From this hall there will be stairs to the floor above. 

 Opening off the front hall are the living room, reception room, library, 

 billiard room, or whatever may be the rooms of this kind, in name and 

 use, that the living of the family requires, and the dining room, which 

 is connected with the kitchen by the butler's pantry. 



Entered from the back door will be the back entry from which the 

 back stairs give access to the upper part of the house and to the serv- 

 ants' bedrooms. Opening off the back entry are the kitchen and 

 perhaps the laundry and the servants' dining room. The back hall 

 and the front hall should usually be directly connected. The arrange- 

 ment of the servants' quarters upstairs should be independent of the 

 rest of the rooms on this floor, but the back hall upstairs should con- 

 nect with the front hall upstairs. In this way the various front rooms 

 branch off the front hall, and the service rooms are related similarly to 

 the rear hall, so that all traffic may be provided for in the halls, with- 

 out disturbing the particular use of any room by devoting it in part 

 to traffic into another room. 



Now this or any other chosen interior arrangement will have its Effect of 

 effect on the exterior form of the house. Since the living room, the Interior 

 reception room, the dining room, and the billiard room should open off 

 the entrance hall, and since, for the sake of light, a house can hardly 

 contain in its thickness more than two rooms and a hall, it is frequently 

 desirable that the entrance hall should have rooms on both sides of it, 

 which means that except in unusually large houses the front door is 

 usually more or less in the middle of one of the long sides. If the 

 scheme of the house and surroundings is axial, the center line of the 

 front turn or forecourt may be the center line also of the main hall, 

 and be continued, on the other side of the house, as the main axis of the 

 gardens or of whatever other formal development may be arranged 

 there. Where the house is built on the "H" or "E" plan, the fore- 

 court may be included, wholly or in part, between the wings, as a house 

 terrace or a small garden might be, on the other side of the house. 



Where, as is so frequently the case in modern houses, the life of 

 the family goes on primarily in the living room, which is much the 



