HOUSES AND GARDENS 



beauty except apart from usefulness, the hall in this connection helped to 

 give what is considered "artistic character " to a house. It was at least useless 

 enough for that ! In nearly all cases the hall so revived was essentially a 

 passage room for the family, the servants and the visitors, and so whatever 

 functions it might have performed as an additional sitting-room were lost. 

 With its numerous doors, its open staircase and gallery, it was draughty and 

 comfortless. And yet this revival of the hall, in spite of its obvious draw- 

 backs and its practical uselessness, seemed to point to some dissatisfaction 

 with the type of plan blindly evolved under economic conditions. In such 

 an evolution it is not necessarily the fittest which survives, but only the 

 fittest which man is capable of achieving step by step in an empirical way. 

 It has been shown how by such a process, the house from a single room 

 became gradually subdivided into a number of boxes connected by the 

 dwarfed remains of the original room which now fulfilled the only function 

 left to it and became a passage merely. 



It has also been shown how such a house lacks coherence and consistency, 

 and in the smaller houses how it leads to cramped conditions. Advance in 

 planning no longer takes the form of a blind evolution ; for the modern 

 architect, with his essentially modern historical sense, looks back on the 

 houses of the past, and consciously studies the plan of the modern house 

 so that it shall be adapted for the real needs of its occupants. 



And his first step is to revive the hall, but to revive it with a difference. 

 It is to be a room where the family can meet together a general gathering- 

 place with its large fireplace and ample floor space. It must no longer be a 

 passage, and the staircase must either be enclosed or banished from it 

 altogether. Whether it is called hall, houseplace, or living room, some such 

 apartment is a necessary feature as a focus to the plan of the house. 



Of all the functions which such a room originally possessed the last to 

 go was the function of feeding ; and even when it became desirable for the 

 ladies to retire to their withdrawing room, and privacy in sleeping apartments 

 was felt to be essential, the hall still remained a dining hall, and as such 

 it might well remain in the modern house, where the function of dining 

 is still the central and typical feature of the domestic ritual ; for home life, 

 even if conducted on the most approved principles of plain living and high 

 thinking, is still to a large extent, it must be confessed, a question of meals. 

 The family may or may not meet to talk or to study, but it is almost 

 universally the custom to meet to eat. And so, to put the matter in another 

 way, the central room may be obtained by an enlargement of the dining- 

 room in the ordinary house and by a corresponding reduction in the other 

 apartments. 



But this reduction in some cases will make these secondary rooms some- 

 what small if they are entirely self-contained, and so it is further suggested 

 that those which do not demand a strict division from the hall should be 

 divided from it by folding or sliding doors, or even by curtains, so that they 

 share in its spaciousness and appear rather as recesses than rooms claiming a 

 separate individuality. If it is considered desirable that dining should not be 

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