tory-and-a-half bungalow 
lcove of a bungalow living-room 
cheap glass and yet, when curtained with muslin, chiutz or 
raw silk, be all that could be desired. (Figure 9g.) 
In illustration No. 9 we have French windows opening 
from a living and dining-room. Curtained with beautiful 
chinz in wistaria pattern they give much charm to the 
simple room. 
There seems also to prevail an erroneous impression that 
French windows are not suited to a cold climate. This de- 
pends entirely upon whether they are well-built and carefully 
fitted; and, undoubtedly, they add a double portion of sun- 
shine to the room within. 
In order to appreciate the real value of the present 
fashion of fitting up and furnishing the modest house of 
to-day, which is represented by a cottage or a bungalow, let 
us contrast it with the typical house of twenty years and 
more ago. The sitting-room in those days (the living-room 
was then unheard of) was often small; to have made it large 
and airy, with French windows or casements, with an arch- 
way opening to the dining-room, with an alcoved fireplace, 
would have been to have struck at the traditions which gov- 
erned the building of the cheap house and would have scan- 
Fig. 5—A dining-room paneled in white enamel battens 
dalized the public. I may safely state that, generally speak- 
ing, it was something in this wise: A room 12 x 18 feet 
had plain walls of white smooth plaster; or if papered, the 
color was dark of a mixed pattern in a calico design which 
was utterly impossible as a background for pictures and 
totally without beauty of its own. The woodwork of pine 
was grained to represent some impossible wood, generally 
light oak, and was highly varnished. ‘The four uncom- 
promising walls of this room were utterly devoid of a break 
or irregularity of any kind and rendered the room as char- 
acterless as the inside of a pasteboard box. The thin walls 
had shallow windows, often unrelieved by shelves or dra- 
peries; if curtains of Nottingham or other lace were used, 
they accentuated the thin, flat effect of the mill-made windows. 
These bleak, unhappy windows have small resemblance, with 
their somber shades of green cambric, to the pretty diamond- 
paned casements of to-day, where a curtain of soft silk (at 
39 cents a yard) or of flowered cotton, or denim, with rod 
and rings is drawn across the window-space, where a shelf 
below holds ferns and geraniums and where a wide-cushioned 
bench offers a lounging-seat. It is a matter for wonder that 
Fig. 8—A harmonious dining-room and living-room of a mountain bungalow 
