HOUSE AND GARDEN 
February, 
1910 
49 
A recently remodeled Long Island farmhouse, the architectural merit of which 
has been sustained through a century and a half 
extremely individual. Its designers 
have left us so many precedents that 
in working in that style you never 
have the least feeling that you must 
go look it up in a book and find out if 
it was ever done in that way before. 
You are very sure that if it was never 
done, the only reason was because the 
Dutch did not happen to think of it. 
Mr. Wallis has said that the influ¬ 
ence of Dutch Colonial compared with 
that of the architectures of the north 
and south of it has been negligible. 
This is to some extent true, and it has 
been a matter of never-ending surprise 
to me that the style is so little known 
or appreciated even here in New York, 
within twenty miles of which we can 
find the most exquisite small houses 
that were ever built. It is true that 
we have no “mansions,” nor are there 
any “villas,” but we have homes. If 
country life is worth anything at all 
it is because the necessity for dress 
and convention is minimized, and the 
enjoyment of country life depends upon outdoor sports. Cer¬ 
tainly nothing could be more ridiculous than golf clothes in an 
“Adam room.” 
I grant that the style has its limitations; there never was one 
that hadn’t, but what I do most firmly believe is that there is no 
other architecture so perfectly adapted to American conditions, so 
plastic in permitting adjustments of exterior to plan, and so 
absolutely suited, aside from any sentimental reason, to small 
house architecture as is the Dutch Colonial. A small house can¬ 
not be built two stories high before the roof starts and not be too 
high for its width. It is essential that the walls of a house should 
be wider than their height and this can only be attained in the 
small house by bringing the roof low. The Dutch, two hundred 
years ago, for purely practical reasons, discovered that the gambrel 
roof was the solution of the problem of getting the most room in 
a low house; their solution is still correct. 
The architecture of the first settlers in a country is apt to be 
the most desirable to employ. Whether this is because of a reflex 
action of sentiment, or whether it is that the old houses were built 
from materials taken from the earth and fields around them—and 
there is something peculiarly fitting in the use of local materials— 
cannot be easily known. The fact remains that the Dutch is the 
only indigenous architecture and certainly the most suitable. 
With our complex modern conditions, the vast increase in the 
wealth, not only of the very rich, but also of the well-to-do, 
In all probability the gambrel roof was developed by the attempt to 
build story-and-a-half houses to escape the tax on two-story ones 
conditions in this country have somewhat changed. Our race 
is no longer English, but cosmopolitan; its dominant strain is 
English in political ideas only, our morals are of home growth, 
our educational system has been adapted from the German, our 
art is governed by French ideals. We are cosmopolitan, and yet 
everything we have taken from the old sources has been adapted 
and adjusted to our needs until it has become stamped with our 
ideals. We are reaching out and grasping for everything that 
is good, coining the world’s gold to our use. That is precisely 
what was done in house-building two hundred years ago by the 
settlers in New York and New Jersey who developed Dutch 
architecture. We all agree that a dwelling house should look 
like a dwelling house and not like a museum or a castle; the only 
point of disagreement is as to what kind of a looking thing a 
dwelling house is. In his effort to sustain the domestic reputation 
of the Colonial style Mr. Wallis has stated that the Greeks, whose 
architecture was a kind of “missing link” ancestor of Colonial, 
invented the nightshirt; can he deny that the Dutch discovered 
pajamas? Even more than Colonial, the Dutch has that quality 
of intimacy which is at the root of successful work; and it has a 
The Barber house, Englewood, N. J., — designed by Mr. Embury—illus¬ 
trates the great freedom that may well be given the old motives 
