September, 1912 
AMERICAN HOMES AND GARDENS 
315 
4 
a 
It is easy to imagine the quaintness and beauty of this “garden front’” when the beds will be filled with flowering plants and the lawn in order 
A House Set in a Garden 
By Robert H. Van Court 
I] N olden times, before life had become as 
strenuous and as complex as it is in our day, 
the garden house was very often included 
among the buildings necessary upon any 
large and important country estate. It is 
hardly possibly to say just where or when 
the idea originated, for it was used in various forms by the 
ancients, and every nation of modern Europe has taken part 
in its development, which has extended through several cen- 
turies. The original garden house was probably a small 
building—a mere shelter—placed in the grounds some dis- 
tance from the villa or country home, and designed as a 
little retreat or retiring place where cares might be laid 
aside for a moment and forgotten in the quiet and peace 
found close to the heart of nature. Its very utility prob- 
ably caused its being developed into the more extensive and 
elaborate building which it afterwards became, and garden 
houses, called by different names, are found in the grounds 
of many of the great country places of England, Germany, 
and particularly in Italy. In the Vatican garden is a small 
villa which is really a garden house, and here for genera- 
tions the Popes have passed part of the long warm days 
which are so numerous in Rome. In France, the idea was 
expanded into a structure highly decorative and elaborate, 
in keeping, of course, with the surroundings of which the 
garden house was a part. ‘The Little Trianon itself was 
really such a retreat upon a scale vastly enlarged and glori- 
fied, and here Louis XIV and his court would lead their 
version of the simple life in an existence largely in mas- 
querade, shorn of the pomp and circumstance of ordinary 
days, and of much of the divinity which doth hedge in a 
king. 
Very few of the early American country houses were sufh- 
ciently extensive to include more than the most primitive of 
structures which could really be called garden houses. Per- 
haps the nearest approach to such an accessory was the 
little building upon the edge of the lawn at Monticello, 
which was, and still is, used as a waiting-room or office. 
When Thomas Jefferson built his country home upon a hill 
top in Virginia, he was fresh from his career as the first of 
the long line of American ambassadors to France, and 
while he planned and built with true Jeffersonian simplicity, 
he included this modest little structure among the buildings 
of the greatest of Colonial estates. His garden house, to 
