46 DWELLINGS, OUTBUILDINGS, 



cottage or mansion. If the reader contemplates building a house, 

 we pray him to lose no time in obtaining and carefully reading 

 some of these works ; and if he finds in them a plan and exte- 

 rior that meet his wants, let him entrust no illiterate carpenter 

 with their execution, but employ some competent architect, who 

 will furnish all the drawings, not only of the dwelling itself, but 

 of the stable and all the outbuildings. There is no better evi- 

 dence of a vulgar taste, or an exhausted purse, than to see dwell- 

 ings of some architectural pretension and expensive finish, with 

 rude outbuildings, having no resemblance in style to the house, and 

 seeming, by their incongruity, to say to every passer — " You see 

 we are but poor relations." Decorating the street-front of the 

 house only, or robbing the outbuildings to add finer}' to the dwell- 

 ing, belongs to the same class of mistakes as that of the ostrich, 

 which, in flying from danger, seeks a place in which to thrust its 

 head only, and there thinks itself safe and unseen. Do not our 

 friends, who think their outbuildings of little importance, reveal 

 their foolishness in the same way ? 



There is an unfortunate tendency among our countrymen who 

 are building houses, to be willing victims of some fashionable 

 mania pertaining to architectural styles ; so that different eras of 

 style in domestic architecture can be distinctly traced throughout 

 our country by a multitude of examples of what were, in their day, 

 called houses in " the classic styles," and their Doric, Ionic, and 

 Corinthian varieties ; houses in " the Gothic style," with its rustic 

 Norman, Tudor, Elizabethan, and Castellated varieties ; houses in 

 " the Italian style," with bracketed, Romanesque, Lombard and 

 Swiss varieties ; and lastly, those least grotesque, but often clumsy 

 forms for small houses, " the French or Mansard-roof style ; " — a 

 title that does not even assume to designate a style of architecture 

 for an entire house, but fore-dooms a dwelling to be designed for 

 the purpose of sustaining a certain fashionable hood of roofs. 

 Hardly do we begin to adapt one style or another to our needs in 

 building, with a tolerable degree of fitness and good taste, before 

 some supposed new style, or novel feature of an old style, intrudes 

 itself as "the fashion," and straightway builders throughout the 

 breadth of our land vie with each other in numberless caricatures 



