Building the Summer Home 
HOW A GRADUAL CHANGE IN OUR MODE OF LIVING IS AFFECTING OUR ARCHI¬ 
TECTURE-LESSONS FROM THE LARGER SUMMER HOMES APPLIED TO THE SMALLER 
by Aymar Embury, II 
Photographs by Julian Buckly, L. H. Dreyer and others 
r I ^ HE social life of England presents points of considerable 
A variance from that of America; the leisure class there is 
large, especially as compared with that of the United States, 
! where for all practical 
intents and purposes 
none exists, and in 
England the members 
of wealthy or even 
well-to-do families 
who claim the city as 
their residence are 
few and far between. 
They go to the city 
for their vacation, 
much as we are in the 
habit of going to the 
seashore, and the so- 
called “season” in 
London is limited to 
the few short months 
in the late spring and 
early summer. Their 
real homes are in the 
country, often-times in 
places inaccessible to 
the city, and the com¬ 
muters’ life as known 
to us here plays there 
but a small part. Their 
country houses are 
distinctly homes; 
places where families 
go to live for from 
seven to ten months of the year, keeping when possible their 
town house or apartments for the “season.” This life in Eng¬ 
land is by no means a tendency of modern development, but is 
rather the outgrowth of the old feudal times when the barons and 
their retainers came yearly to the court of London to pay homage, 
to consult regarding the laws, and to indulge for a little while in 
the brutal pleasures of the day, while the balance of their time 
was spent on their estates. 
In this country the problem has from the beginning been dif¬ 
ferent, except for that portion of the population whose living was 
made directly from the soil. The farmers and planters of the 
Colonial period occupied in the social life of the nation a place 
which since the Civil War has been denied to them. With the in¬ 
dustrial development 
has grown up the city 
life ; people make their 
money in the cities 
and, knowing no bet¬ 
ter, live in them; but 
within the past decade 
a great change has 
taken place. First the 
very wealthy, then the 
intelligent members of 
the artisan and me¬ 
chanic class, and last 
the well-to-do, as op¬ 
posed to either of the 
other classes, have 
been moving to the 
country, and moving 
as far in the country 
as they could go and 
still get to and from 
their several busi¬ 
nesses. The enormous 
growth of the sub¬ 
urbs, not alone around 
New York but around 
all cities of the East, 
many of the West and 
even a few of the 
South, is sufficient 
proof that this has been a fact. Taking my own city for an ex¬ 
ample: where the suburbs of New York fifty years ago were 
almost exclusively the residences of very few of the wealthier 
men engaged in business in New York, they are now increasing 
faster in population than New York itself. The neighboring 
counties, King's and Queen’s and Suffolk in Long Island, Rich¬ 
mond County in the City of New York, Westchester County 
north of it and Bergen, Hudson, Passaic and Union counties in 
New Jersey, are now practically one vast suburban city. The 
majority of American houses not in the city are, then, suburban 
There is no reason why the smallest house should not be designed with all the care 
of the larger country places. This is the gate lodge of William K. Vanderbilt, Jr.’s, 
place at Deepdale, L. I. John Russell Pope, architect 
( 4 U) 
