January, i <y I 6 
29 
As the Sinclair residence (see pages 20-21) would look to the front when imposed on a different 
lot and with garage attached and planting grown 
PLANNING THE HOUSE FOR THE GARDEN 
Which Describes the Principles of Planning the House and Grounds Together—And Those Principles 
Applied to Two Properties of Moderate Cost 
GRACE TABOR 
Illustrations by Jack Manley Rose 
E VERY home builder should build as he prefers, creating 
thereby his own home in the fullest sense of the word. 
But the tremendous problem of co-ordinating all the pref¬ 
erences which he has managed to accumulate, and all the cir¬ 
cumstances of his prospective home’s location, in such a fash¬ 
ion as to produce a result as harmonious and beautiful as it is 
practical and convenient is something no prospective builder 
realizes in the faintest degree, unless he has been through the 
experience of building before. 
Even with previous experience, it is doubtful if the real 
situation unfolds itself to the mind not trained to see it. 
Otherwise, why should it be an axiom that a man must build 
three houses that he does not like in order to learn how to 
build a fourth that will come somewhere near suiting him ? 
The Plan and the Planting 
The secret of the matter generally lies in the failure to 
consider house and grounds together. There is just one best 
layout for the house built on any given plot of ground; and 
that layout is not the best for a house built on some other 
plot of ground, save in rare instances. Each must take his 
own problem and no other. What someone else has done, 
in some other place, may help by suggestion and inspiration; 
but the ideal plan for any given 
place can only be discovered 
through long and patient and 
careful study of that place 
itself and of that place compre¬ 
hensively, outdoors and in and 
indoors and out. 
Never lose sight of the fact 
that the readymade plan is fail¬ 
ure’s ally, and guard against it 
particularly when it seems to 
fit; such seeming is one of the 
greatest snares to catch the un¬ 
wary. 
Let us consider, for example, 
the house plan made use of in 
the first problem here given— 
the original plan of the de Sin¬ 
clair House shown on pages 20 
and 21—anti see how this is so. It is an unusual little house, 
charming within and without, excellent in its exterior lines and 
likewise excellent in the convenience and compactness of its 
plan—an English cottage inspiration. No type suits our 
domestic requirements better, and out of a great number of 
designs it has been chosen for use on this particular plot of 
ground—which, by the way, is not an imaginary 7 home site but 
one actually submitted to the House and Garden Reader’s 
Service as a problem in development. 
It is rather high land, well above the road on which it fronts 
and sloping up very slightly from its front boundary back for 
a distance of about 150', then falling away as gradually to the 
steep bank of the brook which crosses at the rear. In addition 
to these east-west slopes, there is a general fall towards the 
north, slight but sufficient to be taken into consideration in 
planning. And there is an extended view north, northeast 
and northwest along practically the entire property. 
The Drive and the View 
A fundamental rule of landscape planning immediately pre¬ 
sents itself—and immediately we face point one in the problem. 
The rule is that an entrance driveway must never approach 
on the “view” side of a dwelling; and point one of the problem 
against which we bump in¬ 
stantly is that the house en¬ 
trance—as originally planned 
—is on the wrong side. 
We turn the house around 
—and the kitchen and service 
yard are at the front and to¬ 
ward the road, with living- 
room and loggia in the rear; 
not, let me hasten to say, in 
itself inherently a wrong dis¬ 
position of apartments, but 
certainly wrong here, where no 
reason exists for so disposing 
them. So we try it turned 
across the land; and find, 
whether its entrance faces east 
or west, that there will be a 
tremendous waste in reaching 
The layout of the grounds (see page 30) calls for a 
summerhouse by the creek. It could be developed 
along these lines 
