Vol. 25—No. 1 
January, 1914 
H hat Style Shall We Choose 
J^r. \ .The New House 
FACTORS THAT SHOULD INFLUENCE US IN DETERMINING THE KIND OF HOUSE TO BUILD—SITUATION 
DEMANDED BY THE MORE COMMON ARCHITECTURAL TYPES—A WORK ON AMERICAN ARCHITECTURE 
by Allen W. Jackson 
Photographs by Thomas Ellison, Harry Coutant and Others 
W HILE individual predilection should have a voice in deter¬ 
mining the style of the new house, it is not a sage guide 
unless balanced by an appreciation of its esoteric qualities so 
thorough, and subtile, that it carries with it an acute sense of that 
style’s dependence on its geographical, historical and topog¬ 
raphical environment. It has been said “that the tasteless man 
has no right to realize his ideas of a house in the presence of a 
great multitude of his fellow beings. It is an indecent exposure 
of his mind and should not be permitted.” 
In an old New England village with its white clapboarded 
houses of Colonial lineage set back of a double row of giant elms 
lining the wide street, with all the atmosphere of the place form¬ 
ing a congruous entirety, it would be a jarring note, if not a 
vulgar one, to intrude a plaster Mission bungalow, however well 
designed. The'most callous will have a vague feeling that there 
is something wrong, and it will be noticeable to the most observant 
that not only does the new house appear less attractive than it 
ought, but that the old buildings, with their more quiet motives, 
have had the force of their appeal strangely weakened. The inhi¬ 
bitions which are part of an architectural environment are equally 
present in a topographical one. A bold landscape will demand 
a style of vigorous forms, a flat insipid district will call for more 
quiet motives, and delicate scale. The flimsy, jerry-built frame 
houses with which our suburbs are overrun are bad enough as 
they jostle each other in their cheap effrontery on their narrow 
lots, but one must see them on the rocky shores of a forest lake 
or in the clearing at the foot of some mountain to see all their 
pitiful meretriciousness stand revealed. 
We must never, then, in our own minds, divorce the house from 
its site; and even if one has always had his heart set on a Colonial 
house, if the conditions are not right he must be adamant. It is 
hardly necessary to say that the districts in which the various 
styles had their birth were perfectly suited to them. The Swiss 
chalet can nowhere look so exactly right with its bold, vigorous 
outlines as it does among the rugged mountains. The Tudor 
and Georgian work is never so inevitable as when surrounded by 
the swelling meadows and umbrageous copses, and the same is 
true for all the others. 
Let us now run over the historic styles that practically we 
have at our disposal. For our purpose we may take the avail¬ 
able styles for our house to be: Colonial, in both wood and 
masonry, as we find it in different sections of the country; the. 
(ii) 
