28 
House & Garden 
The house depends for its charm on simple masses and long, low lines. It can be built of 
brick painted white or of stucco on terra cotta tile. The chimneys are of dark burnt red) 
brick. The windows throughout are casements 
A SURREY COTTAGE for the AMERICAN COUNTRYSIDE 
The Construction Details and Spirit of a Small Home , Especially Designed 
for the Readers of House & Garden by 
LEWIS COLT ALBRO 
W EST SURREY, England, abounds in 
farm cottages of unusual charm. They 
are generally long and low, built of stone or 
stucco, and with bare wall surfaces often un¬ 
broken by windows. Their thatched roofs are 
generally hipped rather than gabled. 
The house designed here depends for its 
charm, like the Surrey cottages, on simple 
masses and long low lines. 
It is, of course, distinctly a 
small house design. This type 
should not be used in a cottage of 
very much larger dimensions than 
the present example. Just as the 
Mount Vernon type is the “mansion” 
type, and utterly inappropriate if 
used in a very small house, so is a 
glorified English farmhouse rather 
absurd. 
There is a genuineness about this 
English work that is often lacking 
in our Colonial architecture. Here 
you see no flimsy molding to warp 
out of shape; hardly a scrap of orna¬ 
ment in any material, and there is a 
minimum of woodwork to be kept 
painted. 
Genuine Details 
The entrance door must be very 
thick and should be of oak. The 
hardware should be of wrought iron 
and not of conventional design. 
The entire woodwork around this 
door, including the window frames, 
should be of oak or chestnut. The 
door frame especially, since it is the 
one point of architectural interest, 
should be genuinely built up and be 
the full thickness of the wall. The 
woodwork should be put together 
with hard-wood pins. 
The walk leading to the entrance 
should be of flag stone with turf 
growing between and balls of box¬ 
wood should flank the doorwav. 
and entirely out of scale with the house. 
The chimneys should be of dark burnt red 
brick with the joints raked and capped with 
chimney pots. 
The sash throughout should be casement 
sash, opening out, which, thanks to our Ameri¬ 
can weather-stripping, can really be made 
water-tight, but it would be much finer if metal 
casement sash were used with the 
glass set in lead muntins. 
While this house would look par¬ 
ticularly well in brick painted 
white, we have indicated the walls as 
of stucco on terra cotta tile. If of 
stucco, it should be of a rough tex¬ 
ture, but not of the affected “pebble- 
dash” variety. 
The plan is as simple and straight¬ 
forward as the exterior design, yet 
contains all the conveniences of mod¬ 
ern day living in this country. 
The Rooms 
Both the living room and the din¬ 
ing room have two exposures, and 
these rooms both in size and shape 
are agreeable. 
The loggia, which becomes the 
sun parlor in the winter, should have 
a floor of tile or brick. 
While the second floor contains 
three master’s bedrooms and two 
baths, the dressing room of the 
owner’s bedroom can be utilized as a 
child’s room, or a separate guests’ 
room on occasion. 
The service is especially complete, 
comprising a large butler’s pantry, 
kitchen, laundry, kitchen porch and 
refrigerator room, and private back 
stairs leading to two good servants’ 
rooms and bath above. 
In making the drawing of the liv¬ 
ing room, we have treated it simply 
as we believe the type of house de¬ 
mands. A simple English fireplace 
The roofs are of cedar shingles laid with un¬ 
even exposures to the weather and slightly in 
the “thatched” effect, which unfortunately 
has been fearfully overdone by house builders 
all over this country who are ignorant of the 
proper method of laying ordinary shingles to 
produce this effect. Too often the shingles 
are piled up so thickly as to look unwieldy 
The entrance door, which is the one point of architectural 
interest, should be of thick oak pinned with hardwood pins, 
and with wrought iron hardware 
