HOW A SUCCESSFUL SUBURBAN HOUSE IS BUILT 



BY RAWSON W. HADDON 



WHEN we see a thoroughly successful house one 

 that seems well designed and conveniently plan- 

 ned we are apt to be so much interested in ths 

 external successes that we give little or no atten- 

 tion or consideration to the 

 less prominent details of 

 construction which made 

 very largely for the gen- 

 eral success of the work. 



In our admiration of the 

 structure we, as mere 

 spectators, are apt to think 

 far more of how well pro- 

 portioned a room is, or 

 how convenient the stairs, 

 than of how carefully the 

 building materials have 

 been chosen to assure dur- 

 ability and consistency 

 with the general design of 

 the house. 



Of course, good design 

 and substantial construc- 

 tion are of quite equal importance to the home builder, 

 and inthe extreme case, a slightly less well designed but 

 carefully built house would be preferable to one that is 

 well designed but not substan- 

 tially constructed. 



And structure must be as 

 carefully considered by the ar- 

 chitect as must the design, and 

 a thorough knowledge of the 

 comparative merits of various 

 available materials is as essen- 

 tial to his success as a thor- 

 ough knowledge of the rules and 

 theories of architectural design. 



When you build your house 

 you will do well, in selecting an 

 architect, to choose a man 

 whose horror of flimsy beams 

 and undersized or poorly se- 

 lected studs is as great as his 



View of the DeVries hfime. B. E 

 tually be grown over the lattice i 

 9tory windows. 



dislike for houses in which one must go through one 

 bedroom to get to another, or other equally uncomfort- 

 able errors in design. 



In the American house of today just as in the Ameri- 

 can house for the last two 

 hundred and fifty-odd 

 years wood is the most 

 generally used and most 

 successful building mater- 

 ial. But the earlier build- 

 ers used only that material 

 nearest at hand, which 

 they could cut down within 

 hauling distance of the 

 building site or that which 

 they could buy in their im- 

 mediate neighbor hood 

 while we, today, not only 

 have greater facilities for 

 transporting material to 

 fit our requirements of de- 

 sign and exposure or ex- 

 pense, but we also know 

 more about the comparative durability of various sorts 

 of wood and their adaptability to various purposes. 

 The successful archite.t does not use haphazard 

 methods in choosing his mater- 

 ials and each piece of lumber 

 that goes into the building is 

 used because experience has 

 shown the architect that the ma- 

 terial chosen is the best fitted to 

 stand all the conditions imposed 

 upon it in the part of the build- 

 ing where it is found. 



For this reason it seldom hap- 

 pens that any single kind of 

 wood is used throughout the 

 house, and instead of being a 

 white pine or cedar house, many 

 woods will be used, each in the 

 place where it will give the best 

 results, and your house will have 



Mulier architect. Red rj.ses will cvcn- 

 n a sriiil mass to the top of the first 



FIRST FIjOOR. plan 



First floor plan of the Warner house. View of the Warner house. Bernard E. Mulier architect. 



5EC0ND -FLOOR PLAM 



Second floor plan of the Warner house. 



td3 



