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you don’t understand their 
ways, respect their virtues 
and conquer their shortcom¬ 
ings. Aside from intrinsic 
worth, a building material 
may be good for one design 
and landscape and bad for 
another; hence it is neces¬ 
sary to consider concrete or 
brick, wood or stone in re¬ 
lation to supply, expense, 
location and design. 
The only wall material 
today which can be used in 
its natural state is stone. 
All others are either manu¬ 
factured or artificially col¬ 
ored. Stone as a wall mate¬ 
rial is expensive unless 
taken from the locality in 
which your house is to be 
built. Even then, it can 
never be the most economi¬ 
cal of building materials, 
for the cutting, carting, han¬ 
dling and laying of a stone 
wall is a difficult job. And 
yet the reward of doing this 
is great. No wall so quickly 
acquires a semblance of age 
as a stone wall well laid. 
And unless the mortar is too 
wide, or too white, or too 
protruding, no wall texture 
is richer, more friendly, and more quickly wel¬ 
comed by the landscape. If local stone is used 
you will soon find your walls fitting into the 
garden, for their color has been toning to the 
soil through aeons of association. A stone wall 
does not require frame work. The wall struc¬ 
ture is laid up with mortar and is a continua¬ 
tion of the foundation. No other building 
material requires such intelligent handling; it 
can be made picturesque or a blight on the 
landscape by the method of 
cutting and the use of mor¬ 
tar. If naturally rough or 
split stones are used, a 
thicker mortar is necessary 
to hold them together. It 
must not be forgotten that 
the width of the mortar 
joint and its color have a 
great deal to do with the 
tone of the finished struc¬ 
ture, and that in the main a 
wide mortar joint gives a 
richer aspect to the house 
than a hidden or routed out 
joint, also that at a distance 
stone and mortar seem fused 
together, making one tint 
rather than a combination 
of different tones. 
Stone 
Rough stucco lends it¬ 
self to a number of 
styles, the English 
cottage being espe¬ 
cially suitable 
Brick nogging above 
and a lower wall with 
advanced headers 
give this house an 
aged character 
Gillies 
Against old stone houses 
here was the well-founded 
•bjection of dampness. The 
vails were often laid up 
vith clay or mud and in 
nany cases the plastering 
..iTT"." ~ 
on the inside was put di¬ 
rectly on the stone work. 
Today a well laid stone wall 
is put up with cement mor¬ 
tar. The back is painted 
with a tar product to keep 
dampness out, the plaster on 
the inside is done on lath 
nailed on vertical strips of 
wood secured to the wall, 
forming an air chamber be¬ 
tween the plaster and the 
stone. There are so many 
good features about the 
stone wall that even with its 
expense it is a most satisfac ¬ 
tory building material. 
Laying Up 
You have, no doubt, seen 
stone walls that looked as 
though they were held by 
the mortar in a tight clutch, 
and others that seemed to 
have a fine immutable ap¬ 
pearance as far from any 
sense of materials being 
forced together as the face 
of a rocky mountainside. To 
avoid the tight banded look, 
the rocks in a stone house 
should be so well laid that 
they would stand up with¬ 
out mortar, and then the mortar simply 
added inconspicuously for protection from 
weather. Of course square stone blocks, 
used so much by the Dutch Colonial architects, 
were laid up with mortar, stone by stone as 
you would brick; but even when seeking the 
effect of the old Philadelphia stone house— 
which was often whitewashed—avoid a mosaic¬ 
like appearance, or the bulging of stones that 
seem about to spring out of the clasp of the 
mortar. If your wall is 
built up of small irregular 
pieces of stone, mortar must 
be used to fill every gap and 
allowed to remain in nar¬ 
row or wide joints as the 
case may be. The beauty 
of a stone wall will depend 
upon two things: color and 
a wise combination of stone 
and mortar. In using the 
narrow stones, walls must 
be laid by hand, and a great 
deal of careful measurement 
is involved to keep the 
rough surface plumb. 
Brick is a sort of “gen¬ 
eral houseworker” among 
wall materials. It is suited 
to almost every type of house 
construction and character 
of climate. We have only to 
remember the architecture 
A modern Colonial house 
designed with wide clap¬ 
boards and shingle roof. 
The small pane windows, 
.“wwi-Jiutuuiw^ wooden shutters and dou¬ 
ble porch with narrow col¬ 
umns fit the type 
