INTRODUCTION 



NE of the most prominent features in the literature of the 

 last few years has been the garden book, and so numerous 

 have these publications become that every one may learn 

 how a garden should be formed and how maintained. All 



the gardens described in these books are necessarily attached 



to houses, and the house as an appendage to the garden meets with a 

 certain degree of attention ; but the problems involved in house-building, 

 furnishing, and decoration have hardly been treated with the considera- 

 tion they seem to deserve. If this increased study of gardening is but 

 the prelude to the consideration of the house, it may be taken as an 

 augury from which much may be hoped. For just as one finds that 

 the buildings of an agricultural community are generally well conceived, 

 so the kindly influence of the garden may lead to the realisation of 

 houses which may possess some of the kind of beauty which flowers 

 and trees have. For the building and adornment of the house is 

 surely the most important as well as the most human expression of 

 the Art of man. We are apt to consider it in these utilitarian days as 

 a trite formula a matter of drains, wall-papers, and bay-windows and 

 we are apt to forget the possibilities of beauty which lie in mere building 

 possibilities which do not necessarily demand great expenditure for their 

 development, but which may be realised in the simplest cottage. Those who 

 dwell amidst the vulgar and impossible artistry of modern villadom may visit 

 now and then some ancient village, and in the cottages and farm-houses 

 there be conscious of a beauty which makes their own homes appear a trivial 

 and frivolous affair ; but such beauty is generally held to be incompatible 

 with modern ideas of comfort and sanitation, and the lack of real comeliness 

 in a modern house is often held to be a necessary concession to practical 

 demands. 



And so the art of building as practised in modern times is not so much 

 an Art as a disease. In the early stages of the Victorian era it took the 

 form of a pallid leprosy. Nowadays, it has become a scarlet fever of red 

 brick, and has achieved a development of spurious Art expressed in attempts 

 to achieve the picturesque, which in its smirking self-consciousness has made 

 the earlier candid ugliness appear an almost welcome alternative. There is 

 no town or village but is being gradually disfigured by this plague of modern 

 building, and one has almost forgotten that houses have been and may yet 

 be an added beauty rather than a disfigurement to the land. And in 

 matters of furniture and decoration one finds the same spurious art on all 

 sides, so that the modern house of the average citizen has reached a stage of 

 degradation which might be a subject for ironic laughter if it were not for 

 the pity of it. The serene and earnest beauty of the old house is every- 

 where being replaced by a superficial smartness posing as art. It is difficult 

 to know where to turn to escape from this oppressive nightmare of hideous 

 building. Here and there one may find houses built and furnished with 

 sincerity, but these are comparatively so few that they appear but as drops in 



