EDITORIAL 
THE HOUSE NOT MADE HP HERE, sirs, you have 
WITH HANDS A read of it—the house 
that is made with hands. For 
if thus far you have followed these pages, you have witnessed the 
idea of a house being crystalized into a material entity. You 
have had your choice of country houses and learned how you and 
your architect can best work together; you have seen to the gar¬ 
dens that can surround it, the hardware, the plumbing, the light¬ 
ing, the closets for the wife, the sturdy walls and the roof; and 
you have planned the truck patch in the back of the yard where 
you will help Nature on Saturday afternoons give body blows to 
the high cost of living. It's an interesting process, this building 
a house from the idea up. To read of it brings stimulus; ambi¬ 
tion is awakened. When you lay down the magazine you make 
a resolution that some day you will have a house, or if you have 
one, you will make it better. 
Much the same materials are being used to-day as were used 
centuries ago. We have improved on them; we are making 
things more comfortable according to our concepts of comfort, 
and more sanitary and more lovely to look upon, but each gen¬ 
eration brings its own improvement in the measure of its added 
wisdom over the generation that has gone. The bathroom that 
was a luxury of yesterday is a necessity of to-day. Yet back of 
all building and building improvement is a mightier force than 
that of steel and stone and concrete. The house to-day is the 
product of ages of improvement in customs. Customs make 
houses what they are to-day; they are the architects and masons 
and carpenters of the house not built with hands. 
Houses, a recent author claims, were made primarily to shelter 
and protect the child. Was it the tree-house of the tropics or 
cave-house of the mountain dwellers or the hall of the sturdy 
folk of the north, for the child’s sake a home was devised to pro¬ 
tect it against the heat of summer and the cold of winter. 
Sociologists are only now awakening to the fact that the love of 
father and mother for child antedated the love of husband and 
wife. 
From the cave dwelling developed the hall — or cave above 
ground — and from the hall came the modern house. Traces of 
the influence of the cave as a model may be seen in the construc¬ 
tion of the hall. The hall stood east and west, with the door in 
the western end giving less access to cold winds. The roof was 
pitched high so that the smoke could arise above the eyes. The 
lines of the roof were irregular, so that a foe would mistake it 
for a grass-grown mound of earth. The entrance was through 
the western gable, whose lintel was so low and threshold so high 
that no enemy could enter without difficulty. There was a 
window, too, in the center of the roof, through which the smoke 
passed out, and where stood the guard in times of danger. It 
was one big room without partitions or stories, and all the furni¬ 
ture was what we call built-in. In those days the sign of a man’s 
strength was that he could tear the furniture from its fastening! 
A table ranged down the middle of the room, with a bench on 
either side, the middle of which was raised above the level of the 
rest and reserved for the master of the hall and his wife, the dis¬ 
tinguished guest sitting opposite. As this was situated near the 
fire, it was also a place of great comfort. Two sacred things 
were in this house — the high posts, usually decorated with carv¬ 
ings of the gods, that separated the master’s seat, and the cord 
that closed the roof window in hours of danger. It takes no 
great stretch of the imagination to build up from these rudi¬ 
mentary things our modern master’s suite in the house, and the 
custom of locking up the house at night! 
The desire for privacy—an acquired custom — brought about 
the division of the hall into rooms. The women’s seat on the 
long bench marked the place where a partition was erected, and 
that space further subdivided into sleeping boxes or “lock-beds”— 
little more than closets into which the sleeper locked himself. 
Another partition or wall was erected parallel to the west gable, 
making a space that was divided into four rooms, two above and 
two below. One became an entry, one a storeroom, another a 
sleeping place. Thus the sleeping places went from the ground 
floor to their present positions upstairs. 
When the life of the family became too complex for the rooms 
inside the house, other buildings were erected close by. Thus 
there was the guest house — still used to-day on some large estates; 
the seething-house for cooking, which can be seen on Southern 
plantations, an improvement on which is being advocated in a 
community kitchen and bakery of the town of to-morrow; bath 
houses, constructed near springs, to which water was conducted 
in stone pipes, barns, byres, stables, sheepfolds and pigsties. 
The fireplace was built to conserve the fire when wood began 
to grow scarce, one fire a day being built, and the hearth left to 
radiate heat the remainder of the time. From this grew the 
stove. Toward it was moved the seat of honor—for even as to¬ 
day, honor in the home spelled comfort. 
With the subdivision of the one large room came the necessity 
for smaller movable furniture, the type of to-day. Ornaments 
grew from the bow and arrow and spear and the trophies of the 
chase to things of utility and decoration. Business customs re¬ 
quired a knowledge of the time, and thus came into use the hour¬ 
glass, and then the clock. 
Although in such limited space only a few of the simplest facts 
of the development of the house can be touched upon, it is evi¬ 
dent what romance lies behind us and how custom has been 
fashioning through numberless centuries the house not made with 
hands. But the work has not ceased, and, as customs change, so 
will the house. One can only conjecture what the house of to¬ 
morrow will be. We have not yet completely solved the problem 
of dust, nor do many houses have elevators that eliminate the 
wearying climb of the stairs. Democratic customs becoming 
more widespread have made the servant question threaten the 
feasibility of a separate kitchen for each house. Heating facili¬ 
ties have also not reached the state of blissful perfection. The 
apartment house has done much to eradicate some inefficient and 
uneconomical evils, but it has lost, in the process, much of the 
old charm of the separate house. Nor can the time ever come 
when men will be content to have their home lives completely 
regulated by machinery or guided by community regulations. 
The house not made with hands is not alone the product of 
people’s customs, but of an owner’s individuality. Each man builds 
his own house unseen, a house of sturdy walls not made of brick, 
roofed in with other things than slate or tin, windows fashioned 
of more than wood or metal and glass, and rooms made habitable 
with furniture no artist can create. For to each house made with 
hands is one made not with hands. You can see it — if you have 
the vision of the intangible. 
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