6 
HOUSE AND GARDEN 
January, 1910 
Your Colonial mansion may be stately and dignified, but can you with rule-of-thumb methods 
gain the picturesque individuality that half-timber work makes possible ? A house at 
Wellesley, Mass., A. W. Jackson, architect 
A house at Merion, Pa., Horace Trumbauer,. 
architect, showing even an un-English 
piazza is not impossible with this work 
less appealing, less soft and beautiful, less picturesque and charm¬ 
ing, but they stand without adventitious aid to proclaim and 
attest the greatness of their designers and builders. 
And then to be reckoned with, in its very powerful but ex¬ 
tremely subtle appeal to the sensitive mind, is the potent power of 
age. For time means history, and nothing is more effective in 
making us feel the presence and reality of the past, in recalling 
historic events than buildings which saw or may have even shel¬ 
tered them. The power which such works have of revivifying the 
former life which surged about them and profoundly affecting 
and moving the imagination of the onlooker by the subtle aura 
that hangs about and permeates them, is a force that must be 
carefully taken into account and guarded against by him who 
would sit in judgment on architecture. 
These pleasant emanations are for the critic illegitimate and 
must first of all be exorcised, before he is fit to don the ermine. 
Let us therefore be a little careful before we are quite sure that 
our admiration is wisely bestowed and that our old buildings are 
really so much finer works than any we produce to-day. Let 
us eliminate Mother Nature and her accessories of verdure and 
decay, let us forget the singularly happy results she obtains by 
sagging our roofs and staining our walls, by blunting our edges 
and playing havoc generally with the specifications. It is all 
so delightful—but it is not architecture. 
In the same way let us banish Father Time from our thoughts, 
with the rich pageant that follows in his train, and try to discover 
only what it was our designer had in his heart, what colored his 
thoughts, what guided his hand, when he stood before his empty 
field with visions swarming through his mind. 
Let us look now at what this English half-timber work was in 
its birthplace and what we make of it to-day. We shall notice 
in looking over the illustrations chosen for reproduction that 
many of the buildings are not entirely done in half-timber. Many 
of the most successful ones are those that use it in connection 
with plain plaster or brick, the black and white used as an accent, 
as a precious thing. 
A particularly strong point of the English work is that your 
Englishman will spend $100,000 and when he is through will have 
a simple, quiet, modest cottage. We, on the other hand, with 
half the money at our command, at once try for a palace, Corin¬ 
thian columns through three stories, and plenty of carved stone. 
We build the cottage only when we can afford nothing else. But 
it is pleasant to think that this quiet simple work is becoming 
more common with us every day. We are coming to recognize 
its picturesqueness and adaptability to varying conditions of site, 
its homelike quality and freedom from ostentation. All these 
considerations act powerfully towards making it the one suitable 
style for our country homes. 
Another example of the half-timber work’s picturesque 
possibilities and the American tendency to use the 
timbering sparingly 
An old example showing the 
naive carving used for en¬ 
richment 
A Llewellyn Park, N. J., house, Percy Griffin, architect, 
where brick takes the place of plaster above the 
stone base 
