HOUSES AND GARDENS 



building is still further encouraged by the commercial classification of houses 

 in the market. There is the house with two reception-rooms, and next above 

 it in the scale of excellence the house with three reception-rooms. A bay- 

 window is a further asset ; and so houses are valued, not in relation to the skill 

 and thought displayed in their planning, but by the degree in which their 

 interior has been subdivided into rectangular compartments, and again by 

 the number of excrescences in the shape of bay windows, Sec., which they 

 possess. 



Houses which might have been much more reasonably and economically 

 built as a terrace are thus placed a yard or two apart in order that they may 

 be described as detached ; and the space in the plan, which might have been 

 devoted to a much-needed pantry or added to the dining-room, is partitioned 

 off to form the third sitting-room, which will raise the house a step in the 

 house agent's scale of excellence. 



While urging that improvement in the plan of the modern house, and the 

 small house especially, must chiefly consist in the converse of this commer- 

 cial evolution, and that conventional ideas must be sacrificed to secure at least 

 one room of reasonable size, I do not advocate the pushing this principle too 

 far. In a neurotic age it will not be wise to try and emulate the simplicity of 

 the earliest types of plan, where all the various functions of the domestic life 

 were discharged in one apartment ; and the desk for the student, the grand 

 piano and the cooking-range are necessarily incompatible occupants of the 

 most commodious "house place;" and when used simultaneously one may 

 well imagine that the view from the open gallery, which overlooks and in over- 

 looking destroys the privacy of the whole, would not be entirely harmonious. 

 The whole problem of the modern house is thus necessarily an attempt to secure 

 those opposing qualities of privacy and spaciousness, and the plans illustrated 

 show various methods in which this has been more or less successfully 

 achieved. 



It must not, however, be too hastily assumed that a rational reform in the 

 planning of houses will be readily welcomed by the occupants of the modern . 

 villa, for no subject is so surrounded by every kind of cant and illusion. Those 

 who exclaim against the restrictions and inconveniences of the modern house 

 would be the first to object to the sacrifice of its imaginary qualifications for the 

 real comforts of life. The greater part of the inconvenience and discomfort 

 of the modern house is due partly, it is true, to the ignorance of its builders, 

 but mainly to the prejudices and conventional standard of its occupants. The 

 small house is regarded not as a roomy cottage but as a mansion in miniature. 

 Like the immortal Mrs. Wilfer, its occupants are anxious that we should believe 

 that though they live in a small house, " male domestics are no rareties to 

 them ; " and so we find the modern house, with its tissue of pretentious 

 absurdities and inconveniences, chiefly explained, inasmuch as it is the exponent 

 of the ideals of its occupants, who have set the possession of that gorgeous male 

 domestic as a sort of counsel of perfection, an impossible and long hoped-for 

 ideal to which all must be sacrificed. 



And so the drawing-room is made worthy of his presence by imitations of 



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