A Long Island Home and Its Garden 
THE COUNTRY HOME OF MR. F. D. SHERMAN, OVERLOOKING MANHASSET BAY AT PORT WASHINGTON, 
—A DISTINCTIVE ADAPTATION OF THE COLONIAL FARMHOUSE—TROWBRIDGE & ACKERMAN, ARCHITECTS 
by Jared Stuyvesant 
Photographs by Mr. Sherman and J. D. Walter 
A V E you 
ever tried 
the interesting 
mental exercise 
that consists in 
outlining a mind 
picture of some 
person with the 
aid only of a story 
or a letter he has 
written or a pic- 
ture he has 
painted? It is 
astonishing how 
wide of the mark 
such conceptions 
often turn out 
to be. I am in¬ 
clined to believe 
that your mental 
picture will be far 
more nearly ac¬ 
curate and true to 
life if it be based 
on the character 
of house a man 
builds, and the manner of its furnishing and decorating. It 
matters not how much a man can afford to spend on his home; 
much or little, there always remains the possibility of stamping 
upon the result the hallmark of individuality, the fairly accurate 
expression of one’s personality. 
But what of the man who hires a decorator and goes abroad 
to await the completion of the work? Well, there are two possible 
alternatives: if the decorator is really a master of his art he will 
succeed in showing forth in the completed house the character, 
aims and taste of his client; if the decorator is not able — or per¬ 
haps not cruel enough — to do this, the result will be the cold, 
stiff, conventional thing, faultless according to the canons, of 
course, but like a house without vines. And just as surely, in 
either case, would you be able to picture the sort of man who 
would want that 
sort of thing for his 
home. 
All of which is 
prompted by the 
perfectly evident 
fact that is pro¬ 
claimed by the ac¬ 
companying photo¬ 
graphs and plans 
of Mr. F. D. Sher¬ 
man’s home at 
Port Washington — 
the fact that here 
is a house and a 
garden setting 
made for a man 
who knew what 
he wanted, and 
got it. 
The Sherman 
house shows a 
particularly suc¬ 
cessful adaptation 
of the American 
farmhouse type 
of architecture to 
modern needs as 
regards planning 
and equipment. 
There is absolute¬ 
ly nothing about 
either house or 
garden that is not 
perfectly in keep- 
ing with the 
modern healthful 
type of country 
1 i v i n g — a life 
lived largely out- 
of-doors, on the 
long broad ver¬ 
anda that over¬ 
looks the Bay, or on the garden side among the old-fashioned 
flowers. 
The suburbs of our large cities contain quantities of another 
type of country home — large estates, laid out stiffly with severely 
formal gardens, cold marble seats, elaborately carved fountains— 
the so-called show places of America. The houses are almost 
castles, with great oak-paneled libraries, in which nobody ever 
reads, with morning rooms, breakfast rooms, interior fountain 
courts—all usually large, inhospitable and deserted. Contrasted 
with places of this sort, the Sherman place is a real home for the 
American business man who wants a place to live in, not a trans¬ 
ported Italian villa nor a feeble imitation of an English manor 
house for his neighbors to look upon. Based, architecturally, 
on the type that belongs solely to Long Island — the quaint low 
farmhouses of the 
earl y settlers, 
which still lend a 
distinct flavor to 
localities like East- 
hampton, for ex¬ 
ample, it is de- 
signed with no 
slavish repetition 
of plans outgrown, 
no handicap of 
antiquated meth¬ 
ods, but with the 
idea of making 
a modern, com¬ 
fortable, sanitary, 
country home. 
A garden of old-fashioned perennials, filled out with annuals, lies just across the main 
entrance driveway, with a vegetable garden and garage beyond 
Large rooms, grouped conveniently around 
a spacious hall, make a splendid first story 
"71 
Three bathrooms, one containing a shower, 
are conveniently related to the five bedrooms 
( T 34) 
