HOUSE AND GARDEN 
218 
June, 1910 
A house built in 1765 that has been kept in splendid repair throughout its lifetime—remaining in the same family. The old box-bushes flanking 
the porch have grown so high that they shut out the view from the lower windows 
house is but a few feet from the road, but cleverly screened 
therefrom by stone wall and picket fence, with masses of shrub¬ 
bery behind. 
The present owner has built the rear porch and terrace over¬ 
looking his hundred or more acres of farm land in the valley 
toward the west, where the Mianus River winds slowly through 
its low meadows. To the south he has developed a flower gar¬ 
den, photographed here in its autumn tangle. The interesting 
arched gates are, of course, modern ; the seats of the entrance 
porch are a restoration. 
Behind a row of enormous elm trees. on the Post Road 
further down the river is a 
house built in the year 1818 
(illustrated at the top of page 
216) ; it could be occupied 
just as it is. I first saw it two 
years ago in late February. 
Since the first of the year we 
had been in search of a house 
with moderate rent whose 
rooms would be large enough 
for our heavy furniture. We 
had explored one suburb after 
another and had found small 
new houses in plenty, but they 
were invariably close to their 
neighbors with no gardens, no 
privacy, nor space for either. 
If one insists on a modern 
house at a low rental he must 
be willing to sacrifice these 
things ; to us they outweighed 
anything a new place could 
offer, and this house gave all 
we required. Its large win¬ 
dows opened to the south on a terrace with apple orchard beyond, 
and westward to a ploughed garden at the lower level. A small 
brook meandered through the orchard and beside it the grass 
was just turned the early spring green. A window had been 
left unlatched and I climbed in; the old-time parlor and dining¬ 
room, with singularly beautiful gold-veined black marble man¬ 
tels, a smaller smoking-room, a library facing the garden and 
the usual kitchen and service rooms were what I found, all so 
excellently disposed that it seems worth while to give a plan of 
the place and a suggestion of how it might be developed ; but of 
this in the next issue. To us it promised much, but from the 
owner we found it had been 
rented the day before. 
Close to this house is one 
of the most interesting of all 
the old houses. Built in the 
height of that period when 
the beauty of a building was 
measured by its exactitude in 
reproducing Greek motives, 
with its great columns copied 
directly from the Parthenon, 
it overlooks and dominates 
the river valley, not at all the 
farmhouse type, but suggest¬ 
ing rather a Southern “man¬ 
sion.” The lawn to the rear, 
studded with apple trees of 
great age, slopes down to the 
river-bank; the garden to the 
south is interesting through 
the summer with its masses of 
flowers hemmed in with 
clipped grass borders; where 
(Continued on page xviii.) 
“The Round Hill House,” with its delicately carved entrance porch 
and another pair of great box-bushes 
