The house rises from a bower of greenery, relieved here and there by flowering shrubs and the more formal accents of bay trees and cedars, 
while the partly wooded hillside, left purposely in its natural state of wilderness, forms a striking background 
An Italian House in New England 
HOW THE EXOTIC ELEGANCE OF A FOREIGN STYLE HAS BEEN FITTED TO AMERICAN SURROUNDINGS 
—“VILLA-AL-MARE,” THE SUMMER HOME OF MR. GEORGE LEE AT BEVERLY FARMS, MASSACHUSETTS 
Walter A. Dyer 
Photographs by Mary H. Northend 
E VERY departure from the strictly native in domestic archi¬ 
tecture is always attended with difficulties, and some of our 
worst architectural blunders have been due to the attempt to 
transplant exotic elegance into an uncongenial environment. 
Perhaps no style has suffered more from this treatment than the 
Italian. Our New England hillsides and mid-Western prairie 
landscapes are dotted with mistakes of this nature. Shorn of 
its proper surroundings, the style is coldly formal and lacking in 
homelike quality. 
But such crimes against good taste are by no means unavoid¬ 
able, and it is quite possible to handle the Italian style of archi¬ 
tecture in such a way as to make it seem entirely at home in its 
New World setting. On the shores of Lake Michigan, at Bar 
Harbor, and in other places, architects with a true feeling for 
the meaning of the style have succeeded admirably in adapting 
the style and adjusting the environment so that there is no hint 
of incompatibility, no suggestion of impropriety. 
An excellent example of such adjustment is to be found in 
“Villa-al-Mare,” the summer home of Mr. George Lee at Beverly 
Farms, Mass. Here the architect, Mr. William G. Rantoul, was 
given a sufficiently free hand in the matter of design and planting 
to produce, in a brief time, an effect of settled beauty, 
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