38 
House & Garden 
EMILY W. HATCH 
The place really started by being a garden. Then came the brilliant idea of planting a house in its 
midst. This photograph was taken two days after the house arrived. Including all costs it repre¬ 
sented an outlay of $800 
THE HOUSE THAT WAS BUILT IN AN AFTERNOON 
And Grew Up in the Midst of a Flower-Garden—A Portable 
Summer Residence of Modest Lines and Reasonable Cost 
T HIS is the story of a gay little house 
that came and sat down beside a gar¬ 
den and made itself a home. 
Of course, no sensible grown-up house 
would ever do a thing like that. It would 
first get itself properly built in the most 
prominent spot on the site, and then have its 
garden added, like the trimming on a gown. 
But this was not a sensible, grown-up house. 
It was an impulsive, irresponsible little 
house, and its story began just the other 
way, as befitted its nature. 
It began with a clump of blue corn¬ 
flowers, which led to the digging of a long- 
garden bed on the lawn near a big, comfort- 
Door hoods and lattice panels for each side 
of the doors were among the extras that 
were added 
EDITH BROWNELL 
able old white house on the Hudson. Then 
the long flower-bed expanded into a rect¬ 
angle, with a privet hedge around it and 
a sundial in the middle, and became an old- 
fashioned formal garden, mostly filled with 
annuals. All that first season it lay on the 
grass spread out like a brightly colored rug. 
Next an arbor entrance was added ; tall fox¬ 
gloves, hollyhocks, and larkspur lifted their 
spires; a flowering peach was planted at 
one end of the enclosure, and three slim 
white birches, half surrounding a bird path 
in the grass, were grouped at the other end. 
It was a charming place by this time. 
Still, it lacked something. Here was a gar¬ 
den that should be lived in, not visited. On 
the long side opposite the arbor entrance, 
it seemed waiting for something to complete 
it. In short, it was exactly the kind of 
garden that ought to lead into, or out from 
a little white house. 
It Came in a Week 
And so an order was given and a few 
weeks later the little white house appeared, 
literally overnight. One day it was not 
there and the next day it was. The neigh¬ 
bors rubbed their eyes. Gazzola, the griz¬ 
zled, kindly-faced fruit man who drove over 
from Tarrytown every morning, whoa’ed 
his ambling little yellow horse at sight of it, 
and gazed open-mouthed. Only yesterday 
he had driven past as usual, and there had 
been nothing but the garden, afloat with 
Lady Lenox cosmos. Now here sat a mir¬ 
acle of small clapboarded house, with blue- 
green crescented shutters and tiny square- 
paned windows. It had nestled down at 
the very garden’s edge, and thrust its face 
gently in among the flowers. The lattice at 
the doorway had stepped so cautiously in 
among the California poppies that not a 
satin blossom had been bruised. Tall pink 
and white cosmos clustered around its en¬ 
trance and nodded in at the windows. It 
looked as if it had been there for years. 
“Portable?” stammered one neighbor, in¬ 
credulous. “Why, they don’t make portable 
houses that look like that.” 
“Oh, don’t they just!” exulted the owner. 
“Well, but they do. There are 1917 models 
in portable houses just as there are in auto¬ 
mobiles. Isn’t it funny that we thought 
The cosmos was planted with the view to 
being tied to the trellised porch when it 
arrived 
