H ouse and Garden 
The house is of cement plaster on wood construction, with a rough tile roof. Trowbridge & Ackerman architects 
Designing a House for Its Site 
THE HOME OF MR. ALEXANDER B. TROWBRIDGE AT PORT WASHINGTON, LONG ISLAND 
BY JARED STUYVESANT 
O NE hears a great deal these days 
about designing a house in this 
or that architectural style, but very 
little about the far more important 
matter of designing a house to make 
the most of the chosen site. After all, 
the matter of architectural style is 
largely a secondary one; if the house 
is so planned that it takes advantage 
of every peculiarity of the site and its 
surroundings it matters little to those 
who are to occupy the house as a home whether the porch 
has Georgian columns as supports for the roof, or dark- 
stained rough-hewn timbers, plaster and half-timber for its 
walls, or white painted clapboards. 
A study of the available site for a house is as necessary 
a preliminary to the building of a home as a physician’s 
diagnosis of a case is necessary for a successful treatment 
of the patient. 
If a home is to be practically successful we cannot merely 
say that we shall have the dining-room here and the library 
there, basing our decision on the fact that such a disposi¬ 
tion of these rooms has worked out well in another house 
of our acquaintance. The points of the compass in relation 
to the site, the direction of the available view, the location 
of approaches, the presence of existing trees and other 
buildings, the topography—all these things will have to 
enter into our calculations in planning the new house. 
Perhaps the last-named consideration receives as a rule 
less attention than any of the others. If the site we have 
obtained is not level, or nearly so, our impulse is to cut 
and fill until the face of Nature has been transformed 
into a level plateau in the immediate vicinity of the build¬ 
ing itself. Now this course is expensive, and it is fre- 
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