20 
House & Garden 
At the left is a 
gardener’s cottage, 
with the garage at 
a lower level. Here 
the character of 
the surrounding 
landscape, the 
treatment of the 
walls and the pro¬ 
fusion of flowers 
are strongly sug¬ 
gestive of Italy 
suburban lot, as long as 
it had a red roof and 
white walls, became an 
“Italian villa.” But 
these Dago - Colonial 
buildings as they might 
be called in the East, or 
Neo-Mediterranean as 
they might be called in 
the West, though they 
follow the outward 
forms, do not have the 
Latin spirit. 
When is the picture 
complete, when does it 
rightly recall the har¬ 
monious combination of 
all the elements of de¬ 
sign? It seems to me 
that for this the forms 
and materials should 
first of all be strongly 
reminiscent of what we 
have seen in Italy. This 
does not in any sense 
mean that we are re¬ 
stricted to the use of red 
tiles and stuccoed walls, 
for the materials used 
Outside stairs lead 
down . from the 
main floor to the 
terrace level and on 
to the garden be¬ 
low. T-he planting 
was done less than 
two years before 
these photographs 
were taken—a trib¬ 
ute to the Cali¬ 
fornia climate 
set in a landscape that 
either naturally or as a 
result of skilful land¬ 
scape treatment recalls 
the Italian, there is no 
reason why an American 
country house should not 
have all the Italian 
charm which one actual¬ 
ly sees in Italy. 
I do not of course 
mean to imply that only 
what is Italian can be 
charming, for many of 
the adaptations of for¬ 
eign types are charming 
in themselves. Much of 
our own indigenous 
architecture of pre-Revo- 
lutionary times is clean 
cut and satisfying. We 
are really concerned for 
the moment only with 
the Italian type. The 
trouble has been that 
much which is only a 
crude imitation has been 
wrongly named. A 
house put up on a small 
