44 
House & Garden 
HUMANIZING THE 
COBBLE 
GENEVIEVE B. SEYMOUR 
Taylor & Levi, Architects 
The decorative and constructive pos¬ 
sibilities of fieldstone and cobble are 
shotvn i7i the views to right and left. 
Laid almost dry with wide interstices 
between, the beauty of the individual 
stone is further enhanced 
I T is little and clean and 
hard, and it has no heart. 
Indeed, those who know the 
cobblestone only as a paving 
material for city streets not 
unjustly declare that it lacks 
a soul, or even so much as the 
futuristic aura of one. 
Speaking definitionally, a 
cobblestone is a bit of rock of 
any of the harder sorts—blue 
limestone, granite, quartz, etc. 
In size it may resemble a hen’s 
egg or a human head, ranging 
through all the stages in be¬ 
tween. Below these limits it 
loses dignity and becomes a pebble; 
above, its added stature is properly ap¬ 
preciated and it graduates into the boulder 
class, where it serves other purposes. 
The name cobblestone comes, quite 
simply, from the use to which these highly 
The cobble even lends it¬ 
self to Dutch Colonial 
architecture, as above, 
where it has been used 
with decided success 
Below is an ingenious 
use of small cobbles in 
an interesting type of 
house. The mason must 
have been a patient man 
efficient rocks were put: the 
cobbling of roadbeds against 
the danger of a washout. Later 
they were used as the above- 
mentioned public paving mate¬ 
rial, but here they were so 
unsatisfactory because of an 
inherent fondness for shaking 
out the teeth of those who 
rode over them that today they 
have been largely abandoned 
except in a few places where 
the thoughts of the citizenry 
are on higher things. Yet as 
paving for a yard or gutter, 
cobbles are admirable; they 
have never been known to wear out, and 
their variety of coloring, as well as their 
slight differences in size and shape, com¬ 
bine to make them most effective. 
Of late years cobblestones have come 
to hold a distinctive place in architectural 
