HOUSES AND GARDENS 



house consist of a number of small boxes, and in these cases its members 

 should fall back on the bedroom for occasional use as a sitting-room. In many 

 cases a portion of the roof-space affords a place for the children's playroom, 

 and the form and position of the attic is very well adapted for this use. The 

 children can make as much noise as they like without disturbing the other 

 members of the family, and it is easy to adapt the structural timbers of the 

 roof to support a swing and other furnishings of the gymnasium. A children's 

 room on the ground floor may have its separate entrance to the garden 

 through a sunny verandah, which will enable them to keep as much as possible 

 in the open air. 



It may be well to reconstruct our conception of the home and to consider 

 it not so much a place for the reception of visitors as for the rearing of children ; 

 and in its planning the inclusion of at least one large room will be of the 

 greatest benefit to the health of their bodies and minds. In houses where 

 circumstances do not allow of ample accommodation for special children's 

 rooms, it is urged that the central apartment should become to a great extent 

 a place for their work and play. 



It is no part of the scheme of this book to discuss the planning of 

 schools, but it is so intimately connected with my present subject that I hope 

 to be excused a brief digression. The private school is too often a building 

 planned, and not well planned, for a house, and rooms intended for 

 occupation by members of an average family are overcrowded with 

 children. In Board schools special rules govern the planning and limit 

 the occupants of its rooms, but in the average school no such rules are 

 enforced or observed. 



But even in the Board school an excessive zeal for light and air has led to 

 an unnecessary expanse of windows, so that its rooms are subjected to every 

 variation of the external atmosphere, and can neither be readily warmed in 

 winter or cooled in summer. In warm fine weather children should be 

 taught in the open air in sunny verandahs or garden-rooms. In winter they 

 should be able to feel really indoors in the school, and not confronted 

 with the glare of large walls of glass. Light and air they should have in 

 plenty from windows of reasonable size placed in right positions ; but an 

 excessive expanse of window area, while it does not materially increase the 

 light, destroys the whole function of a room as a shelter from external 

 conditions. 



26 



