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House & Garden 
A GROUP of ADOPTED HOUSES 
That Nestle in Gardens on a Hudson River Hillside 
SUSAN GRANT SMITH 
Set in the curve of a Vic¬ 
torian driveway a formal 
flower-bed blooms below a 
wall fountain and green 
gates shut them both in 
from the road 
Slone walls should, by 
rights, keep people out, 
but when beyond green 
railings and gates appear 
gay green balconies it 
can’t be done 
I N one of the “new poetry” 
magazines a little verse 
comments on empty houses 
“waiting for someone to give 
them a soul.” City houses and 
flats often get their souls on a 
year’s lease and go through a 
hundred reincarnations; but 
country houses are more ex- 
igeant; they live to capacity 
only under a sympathetic touch 
and deprived of that touch 
they lose their beauty as dry 
sea shells lose their color. 
To encourage personality in 
houses—as in people—requires 
above all things imagination 
and a dramatic sense, for creat¬ 
ing the mise en scene for 
everyday life is just as much a matter of taste 
and values as the staging of a play. An ex¬ 
traordinary instance of the combination of 
these two qualities is to be seen up in the 
Hudson valley, where a group of old Dutch 
houses overlook a landing from which in Revo¬ 
lutionary times Molly Sneeden rowed her fares 
to Dobb’s Ferry. 
Varied Nationality 
Six of these houses have been bought by one 
person, and like six adopted children with a 
wise mother each has had the very best thing 
done to it that could bring out its good points. 
The owner of these houses has gone on Isadora 
Duncan’s principle of adopting children of 
various nationalities and training them to be 
artists, only she has applied the principle to 
these six adopted houses instead of to children. 
Why not? Think of all the houses that ought 
to be taken out of orphan asylums, so to speak, 
and given a chance in life. 
Some of them were old stone houses bulk 
by the Dutch settlers, and for them there was 
little to do except to fence in the land around 
them and plant flower gardens. The fences 
were soon, hidden under honey¬ 
suckle vines, and hollyhocks 
bloomed against the stone walls 
almost overnight, for in the 
fertile Hudson valley “spring 
comes on forever” and flowers 
grow as they do in the tropics 
and the pages of seed cata¬ 
logues. 
The house that stands near¬ 
est the river is of stone, with 
bright green shutters, and its 
poplar trees give it the air of 
a joyous French inn. It is 
easy to imagine that the little 
Seine boats run up to it from 
Paris, and that at luncheon 
time little tables will be set 
under striped awnings, and 
omelette and salad and red wine may be 
ordered at any moment. But no French inn 
ever had a garden like the one behind this 
house, for the hollyhocks and roses and lark¬ 
spur and box-edged flower beds are not French 
at all, but English, like the gardens in Kate 
Greenaway’s book^. And the long grape arbor 
overlooking the river is' neither French nor 
English, but perfectly Italian. Very cosmo¬ 
politan, this old stone fisherman’s house, that 
has had a garden and a fence and some green 
paint added by a sympathetic hand, and has 
suddenly become a personality among houses. 
“Chateau Hash” 
Farther up the liill at a bend in the road 
there stands a frame house, painted white 
with bright green shutters and balconies and 
doors, and called by its owner the “Chateau 
Hash,” because it is made of two houses, or 
rather a house and a half joined together. A 
cement wall shuts in the driveway, and on the 
side next the house a wall fountain trickles 
down into formal flower beds. There is noth' 
ing especially original, of course, about a wall 
fountain, as such. But this one drips under 
A fantastic balcony and railing from 
an old church have been used 
Past the garden walls of all these houses the country road curves betiveen 
hedges of honeysuckle down to the ferry landing by the river 
