HOUSES AND GARDENS 



important also that the routes of passage of the various members of the 

 family units should be carefully studied and arranged without undue waste of 

 space in passages. The hall or house-place, while forming the central idea of 

 the plan, must not be a passage-room for servants or visitors. The servants 

 should be able to reach all the other rooms and the front entrance without 

 passing through it, and the room appointed for the reception of visitors who 

 may not be on terms of intimacy which would warrant their reception in the 

 house-place itself, should be reached from the front entrance without infring- 

 ing on the privacy of the family. In some cases the children may have their 

 special entrance from the garden and special staircase, and a separate staircase 

 for the servants is often desirable. The extent to which this isolation of 

 routes may be carried out in the plan depends greatly on the particular 

 circumstances of each case. It must not be pressed too far, and in that judicial 

 balance of advantages and disadvantages of which the plan is the outcome, it 

 may often be to some extent deliberately ignored. 



So far I have dwelt on the economical side of house-planning, mainly 

 because it is in the house for the average family that reform is most urgently 

 required. Where space is necessarily limited and precious, it is of great 

 importance that it should be made the most of. The defects of the present 

 house, it has been shown, are chiefly due to a blind and unreasoning adherence 

 to obsolete traditions and to the abortive attempts to produce on a small 

 scale the appointments and apartments of the mansion rather than to realise 

 on a large scale the cottage plan. It has been urged that the number and 

 arrangements of the subdivisions of the whole house space covered by the 

 roof should be governed by actual requirements, which, in the case of the 

 average family, represent a fairly constant quantity, and the house evolved on 

 these principles should be at least approximately suited to actual uses, expand- 

 ing into spaciousness where the members of the family meet together, and 

 contracting to a minimum in rooms occupied by its individual members. 

 In cases where the uses of such smaller apartments do not demand an 

 absolute privacy, these may take the form of recesses in the central common 

 room, and the application of these principles to the plan suggests at once 

 the dining recess. In other cases, where the intermittent use of a room 

 occurs for purposes which do not demand absolute isolation from the 

 common room, sliding-doors or even curtains may be found sufficient to 

 give the required privacy, while in such rooms as those devoted to the 

 play of the children the work of the master of the house, a more complete 

 isolation is demanded, in the one case to shut noise in and in the other to 

 shut it out. 



While it is probable such a conception of the house will not recommend 

 itself to the followers of an irrational tradition, on the other hand the 

 dawning spirit of a more rational era tends to a utilitarian ideal no less 

 to be deplored. The house here represents a congeries of conveniences, 

 and in its wholesale rejection of the beauties of the old world refuses to 

 admit features and principles which belong to all the ages. It is the 

 part of the modern architect to fall into neither extreme, but to study 



II 



