No vemb er 
HOUSE y GARDEN 
19 16 
TALKING IT OVER WITH THE ARCHITECT 
The Value of the Scrap Book for House Planner s— 
Selecting the Right Architectural Details 
AYMAR EMBURY, II 
A N architect’s clients are generally of 
two kinds: those who do not know 
what they want, except that they have 
vague ideas as to the number of rooms and 
a sort of hazy preference for the Colonial 
or English style; the other, the people who 
come in with a very definite set of ideas, 
and reinforce their arguments as to the de¬ 
sirability of the various items, by produc¬ 
ing envelopes full of clippings, or scrap 
books pasted full. 
The first sort are perhaps the easiest to 
get along with until the job is done. Then 
you may find that they have had no con¬ 
ception of the house as you have designed 
it, and if may not be at all the sort of house 
that was wanted. The second sort are 
usually the devil to 
work for, but, on 
the other hand, when 
the house is done, 
they are satisfied, 
because they have 
learned, as the draw¬ 
ings progressed, just 
what of their cher¬ 
ished hopes and 
fond desires have 
been found possible 
o f application t o 
that particular 
house, and which 
ones had to go into 
the discard. 
The illustrations 
in the architectural 
magazines are the 
food upon which an 
architect lives; he 
is constantly going 
over them, learning 
from them, clipping 
good pieces from 
them, and saving 
things which he 
thinks may be useful 
in future design, so 
that all of us accu¬ 
mulate a very great 
number of illustra¬ 
tions of buildings of 
every possible kind, 
all of which seem to 
have some merit, 
either as a whole, or 
for a piece of detail. 
Benefits of the 
Clipping Habit 
The client, or as 
we architects (fol¬ 
lowing clerical 
usage) call him, the 
“layman,” is very 
apt to get his ideas 
in the same way we 
do; he either sees 
houses which have been built in his neigh¬ 
borhood, or he sees pictures of houses in 
the magazines which he generally begins 
taking when he becomes interested in the 
building problem. When he shows his archi¬ 
tect these clippings, the latter is afforded 
an opportunity to study his client’s type of 
mind, and to learn the sort of thing that is 
going to please him. 
Of course collecting miscellaneously this 
way, he will accumulate a whole lot of irre¬ 
concilable details, all of which he likes and 
wants in his own house. I am not exagger¬ 
ating in the slightest when I say that I have 
had at least a half dozen clients come in 
with clippings of three types of stairways, 
all of which they wanted to reproduce, and 
when I have pointed out to them that a dou¬ 
ble staircase going up to a landing; a cir¬ 
cular staircase such as the one designed 
by Murphy & Dana, and illustrated in this 
article, and a straight Colonial staircase up 
at one side of a hall, cannot be simultane¬ 
ously constructed, there was inevitably a 
display of considerable disappointment at 
my failure to grasp their ideas. 
Now that is not joking; it is solemn fact, 
and very many people who would laugh at 
this in others, will want not dissimilar as¬ 
semblages of unrelated objects in their own 
houses. I do myself. 
I have been thinking over a new bouse 
for the last ten years. I want four 
quite different kinds of houses. I can’t af¬ 
ford to build any of 
them, but when I 
can, I want the good 
features of all four 
of these schemes. 
Fortunately for my¬ 
self I know that 
every house is the 
result of a series of 
c o m p r o mises be¬ 
tween the things one 
wants, and the 
things one can pos¬ 
sibly get, so I realize 
that without reflec¬ 
tion on my own abil¬ 
ity, I must regret¬ 
fully give up three- 
quarters of the 
things that I think 
would be very nice 
to have in a new 
house of my own. 
Discarding the 
Impossible 
Nevertheless, the 
clipping habit is a 
useful one; in the 
first place, because 
it enables the archi¬ 
tect (as was said 
before) to get some 
kind of a line on the 
sort of house that 
an owner wants, and 
in the second place, 
because people gen¬ 
erally keep clippings 
for quite a while be¬ 
fore they begin to 
build, and gradually 
come to realize that 
they cannot secure 
all the things they 
want in one house. 
A natural selective 
.. - - •• i . . 
A. Winter Rose, architect 
Both the design of this English gateway and the material used in its construction call 
for relatively the same treatment in the house. This gate might conceivably be used 
for the half timbered house on page 12 , but not for the Dutch Colonial house on page 13 
process goes on, so 
that by the time 
they are financially 
