/ uly, 19 2 3 
57 
Brix Duryea 
Jt would be difficult to 
imagine a more peaceful 
sight than that, beyond 
the placid foreground, of 
the house set under its hill 
otherwise almost unattain¬ 
able beauty. After all, it 
matters very little how 
many different materials 
are used in a house if they 
are used honestly and not 
with an eye to the merely 
spectacular. 
The layout of the 
grounds is just about as fine 
as it could possibly be. No 
lengthy pondering over a 
plan could have produced 
a more suitable, direct or 
beautiful arrangement. 
First there is the open lawn, occupying the 
space between the house terrace and the 
stream—an example of the most admirable 
restraint; for the intrusion there of trees, 
shrubs, or even small herbaceous plants, 
would have spoiled the setting. Then, like 
great arms, the arbor on one side, and the 
lower garden on the other, come down to the 
water and enclose the lawn with flowers and 
foliage. The arbor and the lower garden 
were not placed where they are simply to en¬ 
close the lawn and give the house an effec¬ 
tive setting, but are there to supply the need 
of the place for passageways to the river 
from each end of the house. If they were 
nothing but purely decorative massed plant¬ 
A long terrace skirts the 
front of the house con¬ 
necting the flower garden 
at one end with the ser¬ 
vice yard at the other 
ings they might be lovely, 
but, with no practical 
raison d’etre, they might 
also be stupid. 
There are two gardens: 
the upper and the lower. 
To distinguish the charac¬ 
teristics of the two the up¬ 
per garden might be called 
the “formal” one and the 
lower the “informal”; the 
former because it occupies 
a rectangular space at the 
east end of the house and 
because it is designed ap¬ 
propriately to fill such a space. Lying on 
sloping ground its beds and paths and open 
spaces have been graded to various levels 
and retained by walls of dry stone masonry. 
No garden, by the way, can flaunt a more 
restless air than one laid out in a rectangu¬ 
lar pattern and then set upon a slope that 
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