August, 10 2 2 
61 
IF YOU ARE GOING TO BUILD 
Look to the Skyline of Your House and the Part the Chimneys 
Will Play in Its Picturesque Dignity 
MARY FANTON ROBERTS, 
Y OU may not make your roof into a 
flower garden, as l ime has done for 
some of the lovely old continental 
houses; but you can, if you are going to 
build, study the details of roof-making so 
that from form, line and color all possible 
beauty is obtained. There is no greater 
mistake in architectural detail than a misfit 
chimney and stack, and no greater charm 
than, added to graceful roof lines and win¬ 
dow grouping, a chimney 
stack and pot in harmony 
with the type and period 
of your house. 
What an entrancing 
spectacle is an old house 
in Strassbourg with a tall 
wide stone chimney stack, 
opening at the sides for 
the smoke and capped with 
stone—and there on the 
little chimney roof, resting 
season after season, a 
beautifully fashioned Al¬ 
satian stork’s nest. But 
can you imagine that fas- 
dilating chimney, weather 
worn, roughly outlined, on 
a modem neat white Col¬ 
onial house, with its fresh, 
red shingle roof! The Col¬ 
onial house must have, to 
realize its own perfection, 
the square strong chimney 
stack of brick or stone. 
And where the side walls 
are white, painting the 
stack white also is one of 
the new-old effective fash¬ 
ions. On the other hand, 
the white painted stone 
stack would be frightfully 
misplaced on a little dark 
California bungalow or on 
a flat-roofed, dignified 
Italian villa. 
One cannot picture a 
stately Tudor house with 
the low battlemented chim¬ 
neys of an old Castilian 
palace. The definitely cor¬ 
rect detail for an Eliza¬ 
bethan house is the twisted or decorated 
chimney stack, used either singly or in 
group. These tall slender brick stacks may 
be decorated with fleur de lis patterns, in¬ 
herent in the brick structure, or with a 
family coat-of-arms beautifully set in brick. 
And the slender stacks, topped by decora¬ 
tive chimney pots, lift the whole structure 
with a Gothic upward swing. 
Only a shade less ornamental are the old 
round stone chimney stacks of Normandy, 
having the quality and style of battlemented 
turrets, sometimes climbing high up into 
slender pinnacles, like the famous chimneys 
at Bayeux. The round chinmeys also pre¬ 
vailed centuries back in old Spanish towns, 
running like pilasters up the outside wall 
and sometimes ending half way to the roof 
in quiet bulging pots like the chimneys on 
that picturesque group of old buildings 
resting on the river bank at Orehuela. 
Except for our modernized Tudor houses, 
the round chimney stack has very little 
place in American architecture. Our love 
of luxurious comfort, which rests more or 
less on a perfect system of heating, reduces 
our chimney, stack and pot to a utilitarian 
detail closely associated with heaters, fur¬ 
naces and pipes. Happily we can still 
claim beauty for the outside chimney 
whether of brick, stone or cement. It con¬ 
tinues to rest with gracious charm on our 
outside walls where it is made an orna¬ 
mental architectural detail, in time half hid¬ 
den under drooping vines, the home of 
birds’ nests from season to season. 
But the chimney stack itself is made first 
and always to carry the flue or flues so that 
the utmost benefit accrues from it to the 
heating system, and the chimney pot, which 
has been such an ornamental feature for 
centuries in Europe, is mainly a practical 
detail which encourages 
the smoke to leave the 
chimney and vanish away 
in the wind. We expect 
our chimneys to perform 
their duty in a righteous 
Puritan fashion, doing 
yeoman service for the 
comfort of the household. 
Occasionally, they are 
merely projections up from 
the outside chimney, cap¬ 
ping its fine form at each 
end of the house, or they 
may be of brick, square, a 
few feet high, like little 
towers on the top of a 
hipped or gambrel roof, 
with a row of terra cotta 
pots in good proportion to 
control the smoke. 
In the English cottage 
type of house, a strong 
brick chimney just where 
the body of the house meets 
the ell gives a further lift 
to the chimney and binds 
together the two roof lines. 
A chimney especially suit¬ 
ed to the real California 
bungalow is roofed over 
with Spanish tile and has 
somewhat the effect of a 
Mission bell tower, tall, of 
plaster, with a series of 
arched openings; it might 
easily send out a call for 
prayer. It is the ideal 
bungalow chimney stack, 
lifting the entire architec¬ 
tural form to a dignity and 
grace often impossible with 
ordinary bungalow construction. 
A fine chimney detail for a little cement 
cottage with low sweeping roof line is to 
have the stack start from the first story, half 
way up the roof slope; square, of good pro¬ 
portion and not very wide, it should extend 
up well above the ridge. The treatment of 
a chimney stack so that it will be in har¬ 
mony with other roof details, as for instance 
with Mansard windows, is well worth care- 
(Continued on page 78) 
Hewitt 
Circular Tudor chimney stacks that embellished some of the finest old 
nth Century English houses are equally appropriate to the type of archi¬ 
tecture embracing half-timber construction combined with stone, as em¬ 
ployed by Walker & Gillette in W. R. Coe’s Long Island residence 
