The New House 
eled ceilings, high wainscoting and wonderfully con¬ 
torted stairways, and in the finish of the wood use 
fireproof paint or take such precautions as will pre¬ 
vent it from being too fruitful an agent for carrying 
fire. Allow no vertical openings through your floor, 
enclose your stairways and put fireproof automatically 
closing doors at each landing. It will be a little 
trouble at first, to open a door every time you go 
up and down stairs, but you will be well repaid for 
the trouble. In the average house, fire almost invari¬ 
ably starts from the basement or kitchen and in a 
minute is up to the top of the house, or at least the 
upper storeys are suffocating with smoke, and the 
draughts will soon draw the fire upwards. Close 
your stairways and that is eliminated. Your incipi¬ 
ent fire is confined to the place in which it starts. 
Neither smoke nor flame goes up the stairway. Be¬ 
sides, your house will be easier to heat. When you 
are downstairs with company, for instance, you will 
not hear all that is going on upstairs. It has a 
thousand advantages, so close up all your stair-wells. 
Now with a house built in such a manner, you 
will have eliminated fire from the equation as far as 
structure goes. If you use good sense in the decora¬ 
ting and furnishing of your house, cutting down the 
fussy, wooly draperies as much as possible and the 
other fruitful spreaders of flame, and depending upon 
good color schemes and fine lines for effects, you can 
live in pretty nearly perfect safety, because if a fire 
should start in the fuel room, or in the kitchen, or 
a lamp upsets in your bedroom, or anything of that 
kind, there is comparatively little upon which fire 
may feed, nothing structurally inflammable for that 
flame to gobble up with avidity and carry it to the 
uttermost extent of the house, while the matter of 
putting out the incipient blaze is child’s play. 
Going back to the open stairway question, are you 
aware of the fact that the aforesaid opening ordinarily 
found in our houses adds just about fifteen per cent, 
to your cares, work, and inconvenience ? 
Every time you sweep a room in the lower storeys 
you are merely transferring dust to the upper ones. 
The open stair means a draught all winter, the 
addition of about twelve per cent, to your coal bill, 
and oftentimes the addition of a very large per cent, 
to your doctor’s bill. Altogether, I consider the 
open stair-well one of the worst features in modern 
house construction—a menace to life, health, com¬ 
fort and peace of mind! Besides, by enclosing your 
stairway you can make it serve all the purposes of 
the house, and by properly locating it you can do 
away with back-stairs, servants’ stairs and all that 
sort of thing that normally eats up a very considerable 
percentage of floor space. 
Illustrating these brief notes I show a number of 
houses, one in each of the several classes of expensive, 
THE FACADE OF TYPE D 
F. W. Fitzpatrick, Architect, Washington 
ordinary and modest domiciles, that may not be 
without interest to my readers. 1 hese sketches of 
what is proposed to be done by intelligent people of 
each class show the possibilities of the construction, 
and that to build well is not beyond the reach of any 
man who can build at all. He who can afford to put 
three thousand dollars into a house can certainly 
afford to make it thirty-three hundred dollars and 
have a permanent and safe investment, besides sav¬ 
ing more than three hundred dollars in insurance 
alone, not to count the greater peace of mind, com¬ 
fort, and satisfaction there must necessarily come to 
anyone who does anything well. 
5 1 
