212 HOW TO MAKE A COUNTRY PLACE 



charming demesne it proved, the long driveway flanked with a 

 veritable floral calendar wherein for eight months of the year and 

 every day of the eight months new blossoms opened to the sunlight, 

 and during the remaining months the rare coloring of red-stemmed 

 dogwoods and steel blue spruces brightened a drear landscape. Near 

 by stood tall Irish junipers, like sentinels among their fellows, inter- 

 spersed with vari-colored, gracefully feathered Retinosperas, and 

 Biotas in silver, gold, and green. In the centre of our largest field, 

 in size, as a plainsman would put it, "three whoops, a halloa, and a 

 holler," was left intact, picturesquely outlined against the sky line 

 a ghostly dead tree resting place for the bourgeois chicken hawk or 

 imperial eagle who, unhampered by adjacent towers of green, scans 

 with keen eye the horizon both for enemies and prey. 



As nature had placed forest, hill, and dale, silver-threaded river, 

 babbling brook and limpid pool exactly right to meet our require- 

 ments, location was simpler than construction. Eschewing clay soil, 

 the very worst for a building site, we pre-emptied the best, a dry, 

 porous gravel edging a seamless, free-from-moisture granite ledge.* 

 How to Face the House. 



The sun was invited where it would be most welcome. The 

 rising sun at times met us at breakfast, scorching beams of July and 

 August shot by our dining table, as this room faced southeast, but 

 the living room, large enough to dodge heat rays or bask in their 

 health-giving glow as temperature dictated, faced the sunny south 

 and breezy west. The library on the north welcomed with blazing 

 log, easy chair, and book, while the kitchen, as it faced north and 

 east, could not saturate the house with odors that the west wind 

 seems to joy in scattering. Due west rooms we found need special 

 ventilation, as they broil to their farthest recesses with the heat of 

 the low western sun, while in a southern exposure the King of Day 

 is high in the heavens. 

 Architecture. 



Before location came the vital question of architecture. Should 

 it be Byzantine, Moorish, Gothic, French or Italian Renaissance, 

 Elizabethan or Jacobean, a house outlined with Palladian formality 

 without and probably inconvenient within, or the construction repre- 

 sented by that talismanic word of the Nineteenth and Twentieth 

 Centuries Colonial. The latter, with its high pillars, square rooms, 

 and glaring "don't touch me" white enamel finish, to us lacked the 

 homelike feeling that all crave, but its impressive columned and archi- 

 traved exterior made it a near second in the final decision, as a pil- 

 lared Colonial front is always a favorite. We could not copy com- 

 pletely the English country house, with its smajl diamond windows 

 and lack of veranda and porch room, unsuited to our climate, but a 



*The redemption of any soil, including clay, as a building site is possible by thor- 

 ough drainage and the correct use of stone, cement, oil and tar. 



