House and Garden 
MR. DAVIs’ OFFICE 
waiter, to the butler’s pantry off the dining¬ 
room. d here are two doors between the kitchen 
and the rest of the house, and these, like all the 
other doors intended to stay shut at all times, have 
no latches hut are closed by pistons. In the kitchen 
are no closets. As a result, nothing can he stowed 
away out of sight. Everything can he seen at a 
glance, and cleanliness on the part of cooks is insured. 
A large laundry takes care of the linen, and a com¬ 
fortable servants’ hall is provided for the domestics. 
Strange though it may seem to those who crave what 
is modern because it is modern, no built-in ice chest 
serves “ 1 he House of the Seven Chimneys.” Two 
chests, a large and a small, with multitudinous traps 
and breaks in the drainage to the cellar,—not the 
sewage line,—in a room of their own, keep things 
cool. “Saves ice,” says Mr. Davis. “Big family, 
both chests. Little family, small chest. Built-in 
chest must he kept full all the time, or it does not 
refrigerate. Wouldn’t have it!” And there you are! 
Four beautiful servants’ rooms (besides the nurse’s 
room off the night nursery) all but one of which has a 
double outlook, are provided, opening into a common 
hall, and with a common bath-room. It is charac¬ 
teristic that the closets and the chests of drawers 
built-in, and the plumbing of the bath-room, are 
as carefully made and provided, as those the master 
of the house provides for himself and his guests. 
But there is no heat m the servants’ rooms. “If they 
don’t want to be cold, they must open their doors 
into the hall, or their ventilating hall windows,” ex¬ 
plains Mr. Davis. “They must let in the heat from the 
hall, where there is plenty of it, or go without. Thus I 
automatically prevent my domestics from shutting 
themselves up at night in an air-tight room, as domes¬ 
tics love to do, to come down the next morning, 
good-for-nothing, with a headache, due to bad air.” 
The writer has an uneasy feeling that he has done 
but scant justice to the beauty of the whole, in his 
eagerness to tell of the comfort and the cleverness of 
“The House of the Seven Chimneys,” and the way 
in which it was made. But while, from the stand¬ 
point of the architectural worshiper of Grecian, 
Roman or other distinct style of building, the house, 
as a whole, has no individualized beauty, to the eye, 
its rambling sky-line, tbe way it spreads over the 
landscape at its own sweet will, and the general air of 
mystery which pervades any house so much of a 
mystic maze as this one is, are charming. 
Is there any better way of closing, than to em¬ 
phasize the statement made in beginning this story— 
and which is, after all, the greatest of “The House of 
the Seven Chimneys’ ” many charms; although an 
expensive house, and the house of a man of plenty of 
means, it is, above everything else, and before all 
else, a comfortable and a beautiful home. 
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