“The House of the Seven Chimneys” 
THE STUDIO WITH A CORNER OF THE FIREPLACE 
second, Mr. Davis’ house is so arranged that any 
part of it can he shut up and cut off from the rest. 
Mr. Davis, his wife and children, servants and two 
or three guests could not possibly spread themselves 
through thirty-six rooms, use eight bath-rooms, look 
out of one hundred and ninety-one windows, or enter 
and leave through seventeen doors! So when the 
family is small, the old house and the farmhouse, or 
one of them, is cut off. d he water is shut off, the 
heating is stopjied, the doors are locked and Aunt 
Maria’s house alone holds the inmates. When more 
guests come, another furnace is started up, water is 
turned on, and two houses become as one, and the 
same again with the other house when still more 
friends arrive. “No use having a big house and no 
guests’’ the owner will say, “hut no one wants guests 
all the time. So I increase or decrease the size of my 
living quarters to suit the needs of the family under 
my roof. ” 
Guests at “1 he House of the Seven Chimneys’’ are 
comfortable. In every guest’s room is a large fireplace, 
and a register to keep the air comfortable. As e.x- 
plained, a bath-room can he thrown with each of every 
pair of rooms. In every guest room is a red cedar 
closet, in natural wood finish, and a set of cedar draw¬ 
ers built in. The amount of red cedar used completely 
cleaned out Boston at the time. There are seventy-two 
closets in the whole house, Mr. Davis’ room having 
unhealthy conditions; it is hound to he noticed as 
soon as it occurs.” Well, if one can afford a new 
floor or a new rug if the old one is spoiled m discover¬ 
ing a leak, who wouldn’t have such an arrangement 
of automatic detection .? 
Then, again, Mr. Davis has introduced a new 
element into house building; it may not become 
popular with builders, but it worked in his case. He 
paid his plumber a stated sum to do the work, and 
footed the bills for supplies himself. The plumber 
had nothing to gam and nothing to lose in ordering 
material, he turned his purchasing profits over to 
Mr. D avis. And he was tied up with an iron-clad 
guarantee that he would keep his work in repair for 
two years free of charge, no matter whose the fault 
if anything went wrong. “You can bet he isn’t 
coming five miles and spending half a day fixing a 
leaky trap if good work at the start could prevent,” 
laughs Mr. Davis, “and so far I haven’t had any 
trouble. ” 
South Yarmouth has no sewage system, as have 
larger towns. The waste from “The House of the 
Seven Chimneys” goes to three closed cesspools, and 
from there overflows into four open ones, — “open” 
meaning open-work stone, from which the waste water 
leeches into the sandy soil. Why so many Because 
of two things; first, it is much better to have too ample 
a sewage system than one not large enough, and. 
THE STUDIO 
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