116 
House & Garde 
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Childs’ Catalog 
The Pathfinder to Greater 
Garden Delights 
Personality is the thing! 
Your garden reflects your 
personality. Plant it With 
the unusual! 
Among the many unusual flowers we 
offer, none excel in large size, splendid 
substance and exquisite coloring, Childs’ 
strain of Gladioli. These include many new 
and rare sorts now recognized throughout the 
world as being of unsurpassed merit. 
Special Introductory Offers 
To familiarize House & Garden readers with the 
dependability of the special Childs’ strain of Gladioli, 
we offer the following: 
7 Finest named Pink sorts...$1.50 
7 Finest White varieties.. . 1-00 
10 of the Grandest Blue Gladioli (including Bluebird).. 3.50 
7 most outstanding Yellow sorts. 1.50 
7 most dazzling ruffled Gladioli. 1.50 
Or we will mail the entire collection of 38 distinct 
and beautiful named varieties for $7.50 postpaid. All of 
the above will come to you separately named so as to 
afford you a chance to study the individual merit of 
each variety. 
Due to the initiative of the founder of this business, it has been our privi¬ 
lege to introduce many unique and rare plants; kinds and varieties that have 
made American gardens take on new interest. We are constantly striving 
to raise the standard of Childs’ introductions. We are sure that House & 
Garden readers will find the catalog well worthy of study. Our Landscape 
Department presents this year special instruction in garden problems. Send 
for catalog and mention House & Garden. Regular customers will receive 
their copy in January. 
John Lewis Childs , Inc. Floral Park , L. N.Y. 
Harrisons* Evergreens are Distinctive 
Fit Our Evergreens 
Into Your Home Picture 
You can construct a home picture as charming and invit¬ 
ing as the one shown here. Use Harrisons’ Evergreens freely 
about the foundations and for screening. They are thrifty, 
comely and well-rooted, grown in the bracing salt air of the 
Maryland coast. Every specimen is carefully dug by hand so 
as to retain the original earth about the roots. This root ball 
is securely wrapped in burlap. Even a novice can succeed with 
Harrisons’ Evergreens. Your choice of more than thirty varie¬ 
ties, native and exotic, needle and broad-leaved. 
Write today for two FREE Booklets 
A postal request will bring you two handsome booklets—our 1923 “Planters* 
Guide” and “Home Beautifying Suggestions.” With these helps even the begin¬ 
ner can work out a delightful arrangement and selection. Write for your copies now. 
Dep’t 51 Berlin, Maryland 
“Largest Growers of Fruit Trees in the World” 
BUILDING HOMES AS REAL ESTATE 
INVESTMENTS 
The curious restlessness of our 
country, the ebb and flow of individual 
financial well-being, the instability of 
business success, all combine to make 
the practical man who is going to 
build try to construct a type of house 
that is a good real estate investment 
as well as a comfortable and possibly 
a luxurious home. 
Off-hand one might easily imagine 
that a good home and a good invest¬ 
ment were one and the same thing, 
but this is not quite true, for there 
is an immeasurable distance between 
the personal and the universal expres¬ 
sion in house building, as well as in 
art. In building a home that you 
intend to make an inheritance for your 
children, and some people still feel 
this way about housebuilding, the 
structure could be designed with as 
much personal feeling as you exercise 
in selecting furniture or clothes, but in 
building an investment there is always 
one eye on the prospective buyer and 
inevitably a much more average house 
is planned. 
Because most buyers are afraid of 
the unusual, they do not seek an 
expression of taste, their own or any 
other man’s, when they start out to 
select a house. They want, rather, 
something in advance of their youth 
and yet something they are really 
familiar with. For this reason forty 
people out of fifty people buy a Colo¬ 
nial house. They do not feel particu¬ 
larly Colonial, they are neither prim, 
nor austere; but the Colonial type of 
architecture is established. It is no 
mental strain to decide upon a Colo¬ 
nial dwelling; no flight of the imagi¬ 
nation is involved in deciding upon 
a Dutch Colonial type or a Planta¬ 
tion or a New England Colonial. And 
that settled, all that is necessary is 
to match the architecture with furni¬ 
ture and fittings. 
Undoubtedly most people who are 
going to buy want a house that has a 
neighborly air. They rely upon the 
agent to make sure that the house 
contains the best possible fittings the 
market can afford. And so, although 
we might economize for ourselves in 
building, even overlooking some archi¬ 
tect’s or contractor's blunders; but not 
so, if we expect someday to put our 
house on the market. In a way this 
thought of selling brings about a 
more conscientious building attitude, 
though the finished house may not 
be as satisfactory or as close to our 
ideals. 
With real estate in mind you are 
bound to consider the other owner 
of your home at almost every step. 
You may prefer a site deep in the 
woods, with trees enfolding your 
bungalow, with apple-blossoms blow¬ 
ing in your window in Maytime, 
and a daily fall task of raking up 
red and yellow leaves. But that 
Average Buyer, nine times out of ten, 
thinks of a hilltop, with a hard wind 
blowing the year round, and a house 
that you can see coming up the river 
or from the railroad station. You 
may want your house and porch hid¬ 
den all summer under roses, woodbine 
and deep green ivy; but a buyer 
usually regards vines as a detriment 
to building material, he will show you 
beautiful green or rusty stains on. your 
brick or cement wall or a bit of 
crumbled surface, and ask what it 
will cost to tear down your living 
draperies and repaint the house. At 
least he may, so remember the possi¬ 
bilities when you plan for vines. 
And then as to the type of house. 
How can your home be made indi¬ 
vidual yet salable? Perhaps all your 
life you have dreamed of high pitched 
roofs that render the English cottage 
so picturesque in line, that dip from 
the ridge pole to the foundation wall, 
but this roof is wasteful, robs the 
upper floors of space, is expensive to 
build and to keep in order. Also the 
buyer wants a roof that is showy, that 
is made once and for all, that gives a 
high ceiling in the attic. 
You have paid more for a bungalow 
than a good-sized two-story cottage 
would have cost, because of the extra 
expense for roof, cellar, foundation, 
and exterior walls. But the Buyer has 
never “slept on the ground floor, he 
likes bedrooms upstairs”. You have 
sacrificed much for a great fireplace, he 
thinks it makes the room draughty. 
Perhaps you have thought it a very 
charming as well as a wise idea to 
have the kitchen at the front of the 
house—more cheerful too for the maid, 
and personally you like best the out¬ 
look on the garden, you like to live in 
the summertime where you can see the 
flowers and the vegetables grow. The 
Average Builder is shocked at the idea 
of living at the back of the house, and 
“what would the neighbors think of 
cooking in front”. More and more 
people desire to have their house to suit 
their own tastes and ideals of comfort, 
but this does not make the house a 
selling proposition. 
A sleeping-porch is expensive. The 
cost of one must go in to the selling 
price of the house. How many people 
nowadays sleep out-of-doors? So in 
building your home, as much as you 
like to sleep out-of-doors, you increase 
your chance of selling by giving up the 
sleeping porch; for you never can con¬ 
sider it an asset—much more likely a 
liability. A sun porch? It is of little 
use to anyone. If you were building 
for yourself exclusively, you would not 
waste a cent on one, what you really 
want in your house is a commodious 
living room with sunlight and a fire¬ 
place, but one of the first questions 
asked by the Average Buyer is whether 
you have a sun parlor. This useless 
room will help sell the house. A showy 
entrance also counts, yet who would 
not rather keep down to a little hall 
and use the space in the house other¬ 
wise. The sun room is a costly room 
and one that often has to be refitted, 
but there is a vogue for sun parlors 
and they are good sellers. 
A well developed period in architec¬ 
ture may help to sell a house. It makes 
an interesting picturesque talking point. 
A Tudor house, a house Spanish or 
Italian in construction suggests elegance. 
They are all facts, wheras the home 
of one’s dreams must tell its own story. 
However, the elaborate period house will 
only attract the very wealthy buyer, 
and of course, more and more, the very 
wealthy man is having his house built 
for him so that his own individual 
ideas may be represented. And he does 
not often build as a real estate invest¬ 
ment. 
But there are points of contact be¬ 
tween the home owner and the home 
searcher. For instance, if you were 
going to buy a home, almost the first 
question you would ask is about the 
plumbing. You would want to know 
the manufacturer, the price, the method 
of installation. And in planning your 
own house you would naturally take 
every precaution in regard to plumbing 
as you would if you were going to buy. 
