306 
THE CULTIVATOR. 
Sept. 
hundred dollars on every thousand expended, by 
studying this book. 
We had marked a number of passages for copying 
into our columns, but want of space will exclude all 
but a few*. The following rules to be observed in 
designing farm-houses , contain much in little. 
The first four refer to the production of beauty :—■ 
11 That the form of the building should express a 
local fitness, and an intimate relation with the soil 
it stands upon—by showing breadth, and extension 
upon the ground, rather than height. 
That its proportions should aim at ampleness, 
solidity, comfort, and a simple domestic feeling, 
rather than elegance, grace, and polished symmetry. 
That its details should be simple and bold, and 
its ornaments, so far as they are used, should rather 
be rustic, strong, or picturesque, than delicate or 
highly finished. 
That in raising the character of the farm-house, 
the first step above the really useful, is to add the 
porch, the veranda, and the bay-window, since they 
are not only significant of real, but of refined utility. 
So far as the useful is concerned in the farm-house, 
its principles are better understood, but we shall do 
no harm in recapitulating the most important :— 
The farm-house should be built of strong and en¬ 
during materials, whether of timber or stone, so that 
it may need repairs very seldom. 
The pitch of the roof should always be high, not 
only to keep the chamber-floor cooler, and to shed 
the snows in a northern climate, but to give suffi¬ 
cient garret room for storing and drying many of 
the smaller products of the farm. 
The living-room of the family should be a large, 
and usually the largest and most comfortable apart¬ 
ment ; it should be so placed as to be convenient to 
the other apartments used in the every-day occupa¬ 
tions of the family, and its size should never be 
sacrificed to that of the parlor. 
Every farm-house should contain a room for milk 
(even when the dairy is a separate building, as in 
most American farm-houses,) as well as a room or 
back building for wood or other fuel. 
When the means of the farmer allow him to extend 
his accommodation, they should first be applied to 
multiplying and rendering as complete as possible, 
all apartments, on the first floor, calculated in any 
way to facilitate the domestic labors of the family 
or farm, before he increases the size or number of 
his parlors. 
In addition to the rules laid down in Section II. 
for the production of fitness and tasteful effect in 
cottages, we may also add, that though a farm¬ 
house should always be built of solid materials when 
economy will permit, yet there is a mental satisfac¬ 
tion in finding at all times, that it is constructed of 
materials most abundant on the farm, or at least in 
the district where the house is placed. 
Wherever good building materials abound, their 
use in building the house of the owner of the land, 
not only enables us to understand that the abundance 
and cheapness of those materials have made it easy 
to build a large housQ there, but it also affords us 
an index of the natural products of the earth, and 
has therefore a local meaning, much more valuable 
than any novelty that we may gain by bringing our 
bricks from Holland, like the original settlers of New- 
York, or importing portions of a French chateau, 
like some of our modern architectural virtuosi.” 
We copy a single design, that of a bracketed 
farm-house of wood :— 
“ The proportions of this farm-house are good, the 
form is a simple and pleasing one, and the impression 
it produces upon the judgment is that of a roomy, 
substantial, comfortable, and sensible house. It 
looks essentially like a country house, and while it 
has rather more dignity than most farm-houses, 
there is neither ambition nor ostentation visible in 
its exterior. On the contrary, the rather low and 
broad chimney stacks and the truncated gables show 
that there is a desire to avoid any especial affecta- 
tion of elegance. It is in short a design which might 
be built in any part of the Union, and would be 
recognised as a country house of some importance— 
while it has no feature out of keeping with the 
position and life of a farmer in independent circum¬ 
stances. 
Accommodation. The exterior of this design is 
our own, but the arrangement of the first floor 
we borrow from one of Mr. Loudon’s farm¬ 
houses. It is spacious and comfortable, with¬ 
out sacrificing too much to the parlor and living- 
room. The back door opens, it will be seen, into 
the scullery —which may be a wash-room or hack 
kitchen. The passage which runs from the kitchen 
to the dairy should be lighted by a small sash of 
ground glass, placed in the partition of the scullery, 
exactly opposite the back door. 
In many cases in this country, the dairy room 
being in a separate building, persons adopting this 
design would prefer to turn the room devoted to 
this use, on this floor, into abed-room—making the 
pantry a milk-room, and diminishing the size of the 
scullery sufficient to take a pantry out of the space 
occupied by it. 
Indeed, the ease with which this kind of paral¬ 
lelogram plan may be varied to suit different wants 
will occur to every one of the least ingenuity—and 
we therefore offer the exterior, as the most needful 
portion, as a guide to the mode of building to be 
rooms. 
