HOUSE AND GARDEN 
OVEMBER, igil 
29I 
of its general surroundings? Usually the surroundings are fitted 
to the house with the inevitable result that an incongruity, more 
or less blatant, is produced. 
Man cannot hope to compete with God as a landscape gardener 
or architect. The Swiss mountaineer felt this, even if he did not 
A little chalet near Berne, which shows features adopted by builders 
of the type in America 
know it. He made no attempt to terrace the eternal hills, to create 
false and artificial plateaus upon which to build a conventional 
dwelling. He made a partner of Nature and 
worked to their mutual advantage. Out of 
it came an architecture which, if primitive, 
was big, harmonious and wholesome to a 
wonderful degree. 
The original Swiss chalet does not seem 
to have been built against a hillside. Ap¬ 
parently it was a crude log cabin, not unlike 
the huts of our pioneer ancestors, erected 
by Alpine cowherds for more or less tem¬ 
porary shelter. It differed from the Amer- 
icon log cabin in the mortising or notching 
of the log ends and the rudimentary at¬ 
tempts to square and dress the timbers. Out 
of this, undoubtedly, developed the present 
elaborate system of dovetailing and fitting 
together the timbers and framework of 
Swiss houses, a practically nail-less con¬ 
struction scheme. 
From the rough habitation of the cow¬ 
herd was evolved the village house, slight¬ 
ly more pretentious but still of the block¬ 
house construction ; and being adapted to the 
exigencies of hillside construction, it was 
so modified as to present the progenitor of 
what is now generally known as a chalet. 
Following this came two evolutionarv 
phases of building 
development in 
Switzerland, char¬ 
acterized, respective¬ 
ly as the Stander- 
wand or stand-wall 
and the Regal-bau 
or masonry con¬ 
struction. The latter 
however, is only an 
amplification or elab¬ 
oration of the for¬ 
mer. One, if not 
both, of these un¬ 
questionably i n - 
spired the steel- 
frame method of 
modern construction. 
The “stand-wall” 
style of construction 
differs from the old 
block building and, 
for that matter, 
from most, other 
methods of building, 
ancient and modern, 
in that the frame of 
the entire house is 
outlined by corner- 
posts and a skeleton 
roof before the walls are built. The original chalet, therefore, 
was built from the ground up, one timber being laid on top of 
another and dovetailed into a nice contact with ends that pro¬ 
truded beyond the intersecting unions. The second type of 
chalet was completed in outline and then filled in, as to walls and 
roof, with wood, plaster, stone or a kind of light brick as fancy 
or necessity might indicate. 
Here it may be pertinent to remark that the foregoing refers 
to the characteristic holzbau or wood construction of Switzer¬ 
land. In a country so prolific in stone, however, it is inevitable 
The home of R. C. Hutsinpillar. A pure type of the lowland chalet, giving a good ex¬ 
ample of the use of projecting roof supports- — a common feature abroad. Maybeck & 
White, architects 
Buckham chalet, designed by Frank May, 
shows a similarity to the Berne chalet in 
its tiers of balconies 
