July, 1923 
37 
The studio that is to 
be: Its main portion, 
as already built, con¬ 
templates the addition 
of two music rooms 
and an upstairs bed¬ 
room in the extension 
PROGRESSIVE BUILD 
Planning a House That Grows is an Intelligent Solution 
of Today’s Building Problem 
I N G 
ALWYN T. COVELL 
C ONDITIONS that have confronted 
prospective builders since the war con¬ 
tinue to shatter many dreams of the ideal 
house, and to curtail plans to a_ point where 
many people have indefinitely abandoned 
their building projects as hopeless. 
It is an unfortunate situation, and one 
which has caused the rental, or even the 
purchase of houses already built, but 
houses very far from the home owner’s 
mental picture of the home he always 
meant to have. In countless cases it has 
been “any port in a storm”—anything 
with walls and a roof is a house and can 
be lived in. Most leases have sixty-day- 
notice clauses empowering the owner to 
sell, a condition w’hich has driven many 
harassed country and suburban dwellers 
to buy houses which they thoroughly dis¬ 
liked, simply to escape the necessity of 
moving every year. 
Unfortunate and unhappy as the situa¬ 
tion is, architectural ingenuity has a solu¬ 
tion, and the architect is eager to cooper¬ 
ate if the prospective builder will bring 
to the project, as his share, some degree 
of patience, imagination and plain intelli¬ 
gence. The logical answer to the present 
high building cost question is progressive 
building, or the planning and commenc¬ 
ing of a house which will grow through 
two or even three stages, to be the ideal 
establishment of the owner's dream. 
In other words, if the house you meant 
to build, before the war, at a cost of ten 
thousand dollars is now estimated by the 
best bidder to cost twenty thousand, it 
might prove an excellent idea to build ten 
thousand dollars’ worth of it to start with, 
carefully planned so that with a minimum 
of alteration you can later build five thou¬ 
sand dollars’ worth more of it, and still 
later, perhaps, bring it to triumphal com¬ 
pletion with another expenditure of five 
thousand dollars. 
The planning of a house to be built 
thus, in progressive stages, appeals to the 
ingenuity which is one of the salient char- 
<,Tark 
The studio that is. A music studio in Montclair, N. J., planned for building in 
two installments. The essential part was built first and the enlargement, seen 
in the sketch above, will be added later. Francis A. Nelson was the architect 
