TREVISTA 



THE house now to be considered is one specially designed to suit one of 

 those rectangular plots of ground so commonly to be found in suburban 

 and even country districts, where estates are laid out with little regard for 

 anything but commercial and utilitarian ends. In such districts it is not 

 permitted to advance the house beyond what is called the building-line. 

 Such beauty as might be gained by a certain irregularity as one may 

 find in old villages, where here a cottage abuts on the road itself, and 

 there one stands back from the highway, is here impossible, and the 

 houses appear as if drawn up on parade, toeing the line with dreary 

 and inevitable regularity. The land so divided is generally sold by the 

 foot of frontage to the road, and the plots are generally of consider- 

 able length, asit is assumed that the back land is of no great value. A 

 house is considered, apparently, as primarily a place where one sits in a bay- 

 window which commands a view of other bay-windows and an outlook on 

 the road. Whether the sun looks in at your window is apparently a minor 

 consideration as long as an expanse of plate-glass reveals to the passer-by 

 the elegance of your furnishings. The house illustrated here follows no 

 such canons, but deliberately turns its back on the road because the road is to 

 the north, and its occupants prefer the sun and the beauties of a secluded 

 garden to the traffic and dust of the street. 



Although thus cut off from the drawbacks to a roadside situation, it yet 

 keeps as close to the road as the building-line permits, in order to gain the 

 more land for the garden on the sunny side. 



In its frontage of a hundred feet three gates form the starting-point of 

 three main vistas, which extend to the back boundary of the site. On 

 entering the centre gate in the paling of cleft oak one finds oneself in no 

 miserable apology for a front garden set with rows of bedded flowers or 

 choked with amorphous shrubberies ; but, instead, in a cleanly open court 

 from which one catches glimpses right and left of pleasant vistas appro- 

 priately terminated. On opening the front door, one enters a wide and low 

 passage, and beyond its cool shade one sees the garden-room, and, beyond 

 that, one catches a glimpse of a garden vista which, beginning with the rose 

 garden, ends in the semicircular recess at the end of the lawn. This definite 

 connection of the garden paths with the passages of the house helps to make 

 house and garden parts in a comprehensive studied effect. 



Ic is impossible to consider them entirely apart from each other, for taken 

 together they form a single conception. It is not a case of first designing a 

 house and then laying out its immediate surroundings as a garden bearing a 

 certain relation to it, tor house and garden are here the product of a single 

 initial idea which comprehends the whole. 



In the consideration of the ground plan it will be observed that the 

 central passage serves to separate the main living-rooms of the family from 

 the kitchen premises and the children's room. The central feature is the 

 large hall, house-place or living-room, of which a sketch is given, in which 

 some indication is conveyed of its great hospitable open fireplace, and its 

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