418 
HOUSE AND GARDEN 
June, 1915 
with its special service wing, not to mention the numerous first- 
floor rooms, the house was clearly designed for generous hospi¬ 
tality. A great many country houses of its size are not at all helpful 
to the builder of small suburban homes, but this one is full of sug¬ 
gestions ; suggestions, too, that do not lead astray into impossible 
longings, but help to proper characterizations. By a small suburban 
home we mean a house, let us say, that has to be built on a 50- or 
6o-foot lot, or that can have not more than 1,600 square feet of 
floor space for the first floor. These houses are now usually de¬ 
signed with a large, oblong living-room. Ten years ago this large 
room seemed a step in the right direction, but sometimes it seems to 
have become stereotyped. A room, let us say, 38 feet x 20 feet— 
and it is possible to gain it even with a respectable dining-room 
and kitchen in a floor plan of 38 feet x 38 feet—gives a chance 
for a remarkably interesting characterization of the family life. 
A living-room has no right to be uninteresting. Yet ever so 
many homes are being built to-day with uninteresting oblong 
rooms with a fireplace and glass doors on one long side, a great 
opening on the other, and with windows on the front and back. 
This has now become, in a way, the conventional living-room. 
Sometimes it is made distinctive through fine furnishing or through 
good proportions, but where it is uninteresting it has been made 
so not only through lack of individual architectural treatment, 
but of any deep and underlying purpose, any imaginative insight 
and understanding of the lives the owners wish to live there. 
In the Pattison house are three rooms that well illustrate three 
distinctive characterizations of a main living-room. There are 
other possible characterizations, to be sure, but here are three: 
the living-hall, the library and the drawing-room. 
The main room of even a small house may well be a large 
living-hall, lighted by a transomed and mullioned glass door 
that serves as a front entrance, with a decorative flight of stairs 
occupying one side of the room, under which, in a smaller house, 
might be a passage into the dining-room, with a fireplace at one 
end and an artistic window at the other. A living-hall with inter¬ 
esting architectural features, very beautiful in coloring, all gold, 
with brown woodwork like this, of good proportions, with inter¬ 
esting wall treatment, sparsely furnished, with very little need 
of pictures and ornaments, can be a very useful and delightful 
room. It is a room that children can amuse themselves in with 
impunity and free¬ 
dom. In Japan chil¬ 
dren are said never to 
be naughty, because 
the houses give them 
no cause to be. Many 
men who live active 
mental lives in their 
work love this kind 
of a room to come 
home to. It is a room 
where they can sit 
and smoke by the fire¬ 
side without having 
any shut-in feeling. 
It is a room that 
adapts itself readily 
to dances and all 
sorts of receptions. 
It is, too, a room that 
takes beautifully to 
all sorts of festive 
floral decorations. 
Then there is the 
library, whose one 
wall you can see 
through the open door in the photograph of the fireplace, 
a room with book-lined walls and intimately-loved pictures, of 
easy chairs, reading lamps, and a low, cozy fireplace. To some 
people the very idea of home centers in such a book-lined room. 
The drawing-room, with its platform for the piano and the 
interesting spinet, has a very simple and effective suggestion for 
a living-room that is to be a social room in a family that loves 
music and the dramatic elements of life. Just two steps up, 
and yet what an element of interest it adds! .The four-sided bay 
window, with its transoms and casement windows, with its 
cushioned seat, shows the kind of a bay window that can easily 
be used with small-paned sash windows in a harmonious relation¬ 
ship. The main room of the house should have some kind of 
an interesting window, and here it has the best possible position 
at the very center, so to speak, of the stage. 
How many windows there are that look out upon the world 
like a hole in the wall, stripped of reserve and romance! How 
many houses there are whose lack of composition and unity in 
their fenestrations makes the windows seem to be carrying on a 
civil war upon the walls! The Pattison house has reserve and 
the discipline of good breeding in its windows on the courtyard 
driveway, and yet, if you will notice, there is variety even here. 
Good fenestration does not mean monotony. The front entrance 
is made up of a transomed and mullioned glass door. On either 
side of the porch there is a small double casement. There are 
double windows on the projections of the main house, and on 
the first floor all the windows have transoms, although the second- 
floor ones have none. This making the windows higher on 
the first floor than on the second is quite a pronounced tendency 
of our recent architecture. When it comes to the garden side 
of the house, the fenestration is not so reserved. It does not 
have to be when it faces the garden! Yet, mind you, it has not 
lost its sense of composition ! There is, then, the four-sided bay 
of tbe drawing-room at one end of the garden side. Under the 
garden porch there are two transomed and mullioned double 
glass doors that make the small office-study almost an outdoor 
room. Tlie small telephone room has a high-backed settle with 
double casements above it, while the garden window of the 
dining-room is a very interesting “Madame Butterfly" window 
with sliding sashes and a low platform. Here is a window, 
suggested by Puccini’s 
opera, full of Japan¬ 
ese tradition, charm¬ 
ingly picturesque, and 
yet in harmony with 
the simplicity and the 
decorative interrela¬ 
tionships of vertical 
and horizontal lines 
that make up the 
panel-like treatment 
of the walls. 
There is little need 
to explain the deco¬ 
rative effect of these 
horizontal and ver¬ 
tical strips. It is 
clearly shown in the 
photographs of the 
fireplace and the stair¬ 
case. Notice, how¬ 
ever, that it is this 
same scheme that 
holds true in the trel¬ 
lis room, and that the 
( Cont . on page 447) 
Wicker and willow furniture make the porch a comfortable resting place for the summer day. The 
tiling of the floor is at once cool and easily kept clean 
