There can be no practical objection to a porch 
when the adjoining room is lighted on both 
sides as well 
Leaving the porch roof uncovered excepting 
by the vine-bearing rafters insures a more 
cheerful interior 
The paved open terrace will in time supplant 
the porch. “ Maxwell Court, ” Charles 
A. Platt, architect 
The Porch and the Paved Terrace 
THE ADVANTAGES AND DISADVANTAGES OF EACH—WHY THE PAVED TERRACE, 
UNCOVERED OR COVERED BY AWNINGS, IS GAINING ADHERENTS EVERY DAY 
by Jared Stuyvesant 
Photographs by M. H. Northend, J. T. Beals and others 
T HE porch is so distinctively an American institution that it 
seems heresy indeed to say that it is losing its hold and 
will some^day be seen only on old houses. Considering the fact 
that wCAmericans are coming to live outdoors more than ever 
before, and also that we are building our houses out in the coun¬ 
try, where the porch has for so long reigned supreme, my first 
statement needs some explanation. It is not that we are losing 
our taste for living in the open but that we have something that 
better fills our needs for an outdoor living-room. The paved 
terrace, uncovered or sheltered from the sun by awnings or by a 
vine-covered pergola, has all of the advantages of the porch with 
none of its disadvantages. Excepting shelter from rain, you say? 
—but you do not sit on the porch in the rain, or if you do you 
may just as well sit inside the open French windows leading out 
upon the terrace. 
The great trouble with the porch is that, as usually located, 
its roof darkens the best rooms of the house. It is almost essential 
that the porch be built out from the living-room and if it does 
occupy this position it means that one-half 
or one-third of the light for that room is 
almost shut off entirely, to say nothing of 
the same effect upon the hall and perhaps 
upon the dining-room as well. 
Occasionally architects have avoided 
this handicap to some extent by building 
the porch out from one end of the house with 
its shorter dimension against the house wall. 
A porch standing free, as it were, is the kind 
to build if you really want a porch. The 
question is, though, does not the terrace fill 
every function that the porch does and in a 
better manner? 
There seems little doubt—if you are con¬ 
vinced that a terrace is the thing to have— 
that it should be paved with brick or some 
durable material of that kind. Wooden ter¬ 
races or deck porches, built to shed the water 
and properly protected by paint, will last 
many years. Paving, however, of brick, of 
square red quarry tiles or of cement, or of a 
combination of two of these, seems more 
Both porch and awning-sheltered terrace are provided in this house 
designed by Guy Lowell, architect 
(3 2 ) 
