October, 1913 
45 
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architect 
Once a Luxury, Now an 
Essential — Flowers the 
Year Around — Structural 
Facts and Cost Tables 
MAY WILKINSON MOUNT 
Photographs by Jessie Tarbox Beals, Inc. 
and the manufacturers 
Frank Lloyd Wriyht, 
The living-room of a Buffalo house 
opens onto this cement and tile 
conservatory, built into the dwell¬ 
ing 
H ALF a dozen years ago people of mod¬ 
erate means owned a greenhouse or 
a conservatory; now nearly everybody pos¬ 
sesses both in a happy combination that is 
neither the one thing nor the other. 
This modern development of home-mak¬ 
ing grew out of human desire to begin the 
day in a sunny breakfast room amid plants 
and flowers, and greenhouse architects and 
amateurs’ experiments have shown a way 
by which almost anyone with a little yard 
space may enrich his life by surrounding 
himself with the beauty and interest of 
growing plants. Indeed, a greenhouse to 
play in was the stipulation made by a gay 
3 r oung wife, who abhorred what she con¬ 
sidered the dullness of country life, and 
not until she obtained one would she ab¬ 
stain from the amusements of the city. 
With the furnishing of this greenhouse- 
playroom, contentment and happiness were 
restored to the lives of two people whose 
conflicting interests were dragging them 
apart. 
Many and many a greenhouse portal has 
proved the door to happiness, to health or 
to prosperity. Mr. C. W. Ward, of Long 
Island, is not the only one who began to 
cultivate carnations in order to improve his 
health in that occupation, and ended by 
producing some of the finest in the world, 
realizing a large fortune and accumulating 
75,000’ of glass devoted to the culture of 
this flower. And with the fortune came the 
health he sought. 
A great many more greenhouses than 
conservatories are now erected because the 
improvement in greenhouse architecture en¬ 
ables charming unions to be made of these 
with residences. Sometimes this is secured 
Another view of the same conser¬ 
vatory shows how easily flower 
boxes and drainage can be ar¬ 
ranged in a house 
through the “nature chapel,” an increasing¬ 
ly popular feature with country residences. 
A beautiful arrangement of the nature 
chapel is expressed in the one built on the 
garden terrace connected with the loggia of 
the Eastman home, in Rochester. More 
often, however, the nature chapel is at¬ 
tached to a side entrance of the house, and 
the same plan is carried out when green¬ 
houses erected in Greek temple or Oriental 
mosque effects form part of residences. 
The day of wet-floored and plant-crowd¬ 
ed conservatories, of dank-smelling, roof¬ 
dripping greenhouses is past. New drain¬ 
age and ventilating methods now enable 
people to make living-rooms of these. Here 
breakfast is served when tiled floors have 
been dried after their morning bath; here 
house parties are entertained and women 
read and embroider, and even attend to 
their correspondence, in the balmy, equable 
temperature of the greenhouses, sur¬ 
rounded by everything conducive to pleas¬ 
ant thought. Afternoon tea is sipped in 
the greenhouse or upon glass inclosed, heat- 
