March, 1914 
HOUSE AND GARDEN 
207 
Those causes of increased cost that re¬ 
sulted from increased value I have never 
regretted, but a cause that quite equaled 
the total of these I have often regretted, 
and yet, were I to do it over again, I 
could hardly reduce it. As I have said, 
my house was the first of this group of 
five to be started; it was also the last to 
be completed. Time was more important 
to the owners of the other houses than 
it was to me, so that my house received, 
as it were, the overflow labor. Waiting 
time on the other houses was filled in on 
mine, with a resulting increased efficiency 
for them at my cost. 
But the house is now finished; we have 
been settled in it for some time, and we 
find that the small troubles that arose 
while we were building are forgotten, 
and only the satisfaction of having a 
house that is so completely to our liking 
remains. 
Making a New House 
( Continued from page 173) 
parently Venetian, of the school of Ve¬ 
ronese, artist unknown. 
Our hall, with white walls and ceiling, 
gray floor, and with no noticeable color 
anywhere, forms the transition to the 
dining-room, which is: 
Gray — walls and floor; 
White—woodwork, table and ceiling; 
Mahogany — sideboards, chairs, etc.; 
Green, blue and yellow in platters on 
the wall and in rug. 
Throughout the house, the paler wall- 
treatment has seemed the more satisfac¬ 
tory because simpler and quieter. I sup¬ 
pose, because the woodwork is white, and 
a darker paper brings out too strongly 
the window and door frames and the 
baseboard. Furniture outlines become of 
great importance because so strongly sil¬ 
houetted. Each detail of curvature counts. 
A Hepplewhite or a Chippendale tells, 
where, with a darker background, they 
might be unnoticeable, wasted, and little 
more efifective than any commercial type. 
Perhaps this old-style wall treatment was 
a cause of their perfect development of 
form. Most of the old wall papers had 
a white or grayish background, or they 
were designed as large paintings, land¬ 
scapes generally, inserted in panels or 
forming a high frieze. 
Whether the woodwork was always 
painted white, J doubt; under layers of 
paint on part of the stair-work of the 
house I found a highly glazed surface of 
pale gray with what seemed to be vein- 
ings on it of a darker gray, as if the 
attempt had been to imitate marble. Our 
“Colonial” style is an architecture of 
stone forms' built of wood, as the fre¬ 
quent rusticated corners and door jambs, 
or the omnipresent keystones show; so, 
why is it improbable that the ? ? ? ? 
Such is the story of our house and its 
transfiguration; from a bare, uninhabit¬ 
able barn it has become a home. We 
wanted a place we could play with; de¬ 
velop if we desired, or leave as it was, 
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