September, 1910 



AMERICAN HOMES AND GARDENS 



361 



originally a small room, used by Mr. Abbott as a sort of an 

 office, lay to the south of this room, cutting it off from the 

 garden and the morning sun; but after the "big room" was 

 built the dining-room seemed small and out of scale with 

 the rest of the house; so the little room was thrown into 

 it; the heavy arch which divides the room marks the place 

 where the partition used to be and supports the wall of the 

 second story and the chimney. The casement windows on 

 the side open into a conservatory. 



The oak beams in the entrance-hall and dining-room are 

 made of trees cut down on the estate, adzed into shape by 

 two old laborers in the garden — before it was a garden. 

 These beams have been stained with walnut juice, and took 

 the stain so well that they look really venerable, although 

 eight years ago they were standing in the woods. 



A peculiar feature of the house is that there is no cellar 



system which works extremely well. There is no cellar 

 under the "big room" either; the sills to which the floor- 

 boards are nailed are laid on the same foundation as the 

 bricks in the entrance-hall and the dining-room ; the only 

 cellar is the small one under the old Haggerty house. This 

 elimination of the cellar is a special fad with Mr. and Mrs. 

 Abbott. This space always has been an abomination to them 

 — the abode of rats, mice and broken bottles, the source 

 of subterranean smells and sounds — a thing always waiting 

 to be cleaned out the first rainy day. The average archi- 

 tect has no sympathy with this antipathy, and the average 

 householder rates his cellar as scarcely less important than 

 his roof; so Mr. and Mrs. Abbott preached their fad to 

 deaf ears, until they met Mr. Howard, in whom at last 

 they found an architect as eager to build a house without 

 a cellar as they were to have one built; and so the thing 



The dining-room has a high wainscot of cypress, and blue tinted rough plaster walls 



at all under the front part of the house. This is particularly 

 noticeable from the garden. When the house was built the 

 soil was excavated to the depth of three feet, the founda- 

 tion walls laid to the depth of four feet, the three foot ex- 

 cavation filled with sand and six inches of concrete, on 

 which the brick floors of the dining-room and entrance-hall 

 are laid. The floor of the stairway-hall is raised a foot 

 above the concrete to give room for the furnace pipes to 

 pass underneath. The old house is heated by hot air as well 

 as hot water — the new ell by its own hot water furnace, 

 which is in a basement behind the big room. 



The "big room" is heated by a coil of pipes under the 

 window-seat; in winter the wooden back of the seat is taken 

 off and replaced with a piece of iron grill work, to give the 

 hot air free entrance to the room; and the heater is supplied 

 with fresh air through an opening under the windows — a 



was done. And the cellar has never been missed. 



The brick floors, another fad, also deserve a word. They 

 are made of common building bricks — not pressed brick — 

 laid in basket pattern. They were oiled when first laid, and 

 have been weekly washed with milk and water until they 

 have taken a very nice polish and the trifling irregularitv 

 of the bricks gives them a very good effect not unlike the 

 Mercer tiles, now so fashionable. Apart from this they 

 are a great comfort — nothing can hurt them! Except for 

 the walnut juice used for staining the oak, and the white 

 paint in the entrance-hall, absolutely no finish of any kind 

 has been applied to any of the woodwork. 



The outside of the house has no existence except as a 

 sheath for the inside; it has scarcely a simple decorative 

 feature of its own. The original structure was built with 

 a gambrel roof, the lower section of the north slope being 



