12 
HOUSE & GARDEN 
In treating the native Pennsylvania stone, architects both whitewash and leave untouched 
the wall, with the obviously successful results. Savery, Sheetz & Savery, architects 
honorable Colonial of to-day each mode 
is used as a starting point and by men 
in almost every part of America. From 
the beginning this is a divergence, both 
from the name itself and away from 
all the others: this is as it should be. 
What has been accomplished by the 
Philadelphia architects on the basis of 
their own wonderful old stone-work, 
by far the most notable contribution to 
general house building in America, and 
one of the most distinguished achieve¬ 
ments in modern architecture—is typi¬ 
cal of what has been done elsewhere. 
So has come a very beautiful new 
thing, not an imitation, nor an affecta¬ 
tion, but a fine recognition of fine things 
and fine motives. Papier mache orna¬ 
ments and stock columns and ballusters 
have gone the way of all flesh; in their 
place has arisen a reserved and instinc¬ 
tive feeling for those fine, wide pro¬ 
portions, those elements of grave and 
well-bred simplicity that mean Colonial 
and are emphasized by the delicate and 
affectionate detail we can still cull from 
the few relics which are left us along 
he Atlantic seaboard. 
first there was nothing of this; 
we took our fantastical aggre¬ 
gations of blocks and gables and 
round bay windows and con- 
tendedly applied our miscellan¬ 
eous detail of broken pediments, 
twisted balusters, Palladian win¬ 
dows and what-not, and prided 
ourselves on our patriotic re¬ 
turn to a “national style.” Of 
course, we then painted it yel¬ 
low and white, with green blinds, 
and the task was triumphantly 
accomplished. When at last a 
realization of the singular wick¬ 
edness of our acts came to us, 
we conscientiously turned to a 
careful study of the existing 
movement, and this was carried 
to such lengths that we went 
through a period of pure archae¬ 
ology when the careless addition 
of Georgian mouldings from 
Pennsylvania to a structure 
couched generally in the terms 
of Salem Colonial was a faux pas so 
atrocious as to be almost enough to 
keep a man out of the A. I. A. Pedan¬ 
tic as it was, however, it killed the silly 
stuff of the first kind and actually made 
possible the third,—the present—when 
study and general culture have pro¬ 
duced a working in Colonial, by innu¬ 
merable architects, that is sensible and 
intimate. The archaic quality has dis¬ 
appeared, the houses are no longer 
either burlesques or restorations, and 
new conditions, new ways are met just 
as the old builders would have met 
them, simply, delicately, in good taste 
—gentlemen always. 
The Honorable Colonial 
And, as there was great Colonial and 
Georgian work (the two were quite 
different, as Mr. Eberlein has shown in 
his book, “The Architecture of Colonial 
America”) in many sections of the 
country—New England, the Hudson 
River, Pennsylvania, Virginia—each 
differentiating itself delicately from 
the others, so in the development of the 
Garden view of the house above, showing its natural relation to its setting 
A Tudor country house of modern construction in 
which the objectionable elements of earlier work 
are fortunately missing. Edmund B. Gilchrist, 
architect 
The English Mode 
Equally with Colonial (or 
properly speaking, Georgian) 
the English mode of building 
has transformed itself. From 
the time of “Downing’s Cot¬ 
tages,” sporadic attempts had 
been made at a revival of Eng¬ 
lish 16th Century work; at first 
in the quaintly fallacious wood 
of the “Carpenter’s Gothic” 
era, later in the Eighties with a 
slight increase in consistency. 
Not that the moral reform was 
brilliant or far-reaching: if the 
“Strawberry Hill” fancy for 
translating 14th and 15th Cen¬ 
tury stories into the accommo¬ 
dating and economical medium 
of painted plank was aban¬ 
doned for a specious “half¬ 
timber” style, the gain in struc¬ 
tural veracity was not great for 
(Continued on page 68) 
