April, 1923 
The 
HOUSE & GARDEN 
BULLETIN BOARD 
I T IS gratifying to learn that— 
The Architectural League of New York 
has just awarded its gold medal for resi¬ 
dential work to Dwight James Baum, with a 
special commendation for the simplicity in his 
house designs. Most of Mr. Baum’s houses have 
appeared in House & Garden. He belongs, to 
the younger school of architects who appreciate 
the need in this country for small and medium 
size houses of meritorious design. The medal was 
well awarded. 
The fashion competition conducted by Vogue 
in its Thirtieth Anniversary Number has awarded 
its first prize to Mrs. John Williamson of 
Ridgewood, N. J. It appears that Mrs. Wil¬ 
liamson is almost as faithful a reader of House 
& Garden as she is of Vogue, since the design 
of a house she recently erected was chosen from 
the pages of this magazine. 
The Cloister Clock Corporation which has been 
conducting a competition for clock case designs 
has awarded its first prize to E. Stetson Craw¬ 
ford, of Nutley, N. J. Behind such a competition 
lies a great idea. It awakens country-wide inter¬ 
est among designers and artists. It is hoped, 
now, that our manufacturing corporations will 
go still further. Apart from painting and sculp¬ 
ture, creative art in this country is anonymous. 
The pian who designs a good chair, the woman 
who designs a remarkable bottle for perfume, 
the artist who creates a new style for silver must 
be satisfied with monetary compensation, the 
manufacturer taking all the credit. On the 
Continent the individual artist is given credit 
for his designs. Credit, of course, is a form of 
flattery, of public acclamation; but what artist 
doesn’t thrive under acclamation? 
The Metropolitan Museum of Art has been 
holding its seventh exhibition of Industrial Art, 
made from designs found in old work in the 
museum. This use of a museum as a laboratory 
is a great step forward. 
I T IS only human 10 believe pleasant pre¬ 
dictions, and to believe the things we 
wish to believe—and in this happy frame 
of mind we welcome the building forecast for 
1923, as carefully prepared by our professional 
contemporary “The Architectural Forum.” Ob¬ 
viously, the' division which concerns itself with 
the forecast for house building is the one in 
which we are most interested, and we find it 
divided into dwellings estimated to cost “under 
$20,000.00,” “from $20,000.00 to $50,000.00,” 
“over $50,000.00,” and “Apartments.” In the first 
group an expenditure of over two hundred and 
twenty-two million dollars is forecast for 1923; 
in the second group, nearly one hundred and 
nineteen million, in the third, over seventy-three 
million, and for apartments, $662,885,000.00. The 
aggregate is $1,000,077,017.00—over a billion dol¬ 
lars. 
These figures are based on actual data obtained 
from one thousand seven hundred and sixty- 
seven architects, and, proving the soundness of 
the forecast, there is printed a comparison of 
the figures predicted last year for 1922 and the 
figures taken from the construction records of 
the past year. The approximation of the actual 
figures achieved by the 1922 advance figures was 
so dose that the forecasters of the “Forum” can 
go on record as being something more than 
good guessers. 
They tell us that 1923 promises well for house 
building, and for our part we hope that their 
figures will be realized in actual construction as 
closely as they were in 1922. 
9 
A PRIL 22nd to 28th is to be observed as 
a National Garden Week. The Movement 
has been endorsed by President Harding 
and other prominent men and its details are 
being developed by the General Federation of 
Women’s Clubs, which include programs for 
lectures and demonstrations. Behind this scheme 
is the fundamental fact that the beautifying of 
one’s home grounds makes for better citizenship, 
that an interest in the preservation of our wild 
flowers, in the creation of school gardens and a 
general understanding of horticultural methods all 
lead to a fuller life and a. better community 
living. If your local garden club is planning to 
join this celebration, give it your support. 
T HERE may be some wearied souls who 
are bored by this idea of a Garden Week 
or any sort of a “week.” We pity them. 
Frankly we have never missed an opportunity 
for a party. We believe that life should be a 
series of celebrations, that the household should 
constantly be either looking forward to a fete or 
just recovering from one. The garden offers 
many excuses for such celebrations. Last month 
we suggested planting a tree or group of trees 
for each child in the family—and having a party 
to celebrate the event. Of course, we have al¬ 
ways marked the legal holidays by garden events. 
St. Patrick’s Day we celebrate by planting sweet 
peas; on Memorial Day we decorate graves and 
come home and plant dahlias; on Independence 
Day we have a little family shindig to mark the 
last planting of sweet corn; on Election Day we 
vote early and spend the rest of the time setting 
out bulbs. In a garden book which will appear 
very soon we suggest a way to celebrate the 
planting of a new rose bed—while part of the 
family is getting the plants into the ground, the 
other part is mixing a good fruit punch (with 
a dash of Jamaica rum in it) and, your labors 
finished, you all drink to the health of the roses. 
S OME of our garden flowers are taken too 
casually, and not the least of them is the 
sweet pea. People say. “Of course, sweet 
peas”, and forthwith neglect it or grow them in 
a careless fashion, with mediocre results. 
The sweet pea deserves a revival in popular 
favor. It is an intimate flower, of delicate 
tints and form, of subtle fragrance. One enjoys 
it best close at hand. Its beauty stands as a 
rebuke to those garden monstrosities whose sole 
claim to favor is their size. We Americans are 
too much apt to gauge flower value by size. 
To be sure, the sweet pea is not a flower to 
grow casually, and yet the preparations for its 
sowing and its maintenance are no more difficult 
or arduous than that demanded by the dahlia 
and other garden favorites. It requires and de¬ 
serves good soil, speedy and constant growth 
aided by stimulants and cultivation, but its com¬ 
pensation is an abundance of flowers through 
a long season. 
M OST countries have their bad days in 
architecture; especially in the matter of 
houses. England had hers early in the 
19th Century. Ours followed England’s quite 
naturally. Since then the curse fell upon France. 
Tradition seems to play no part whatever in 
these slumps. When England fell into the bad 
habits of building jig-saw Gothic and card-board 
Classic there were examples of beautiful and 
extremely sensible architecture all about which 
she might have followed. In the same way, 
when we took up the fashion here for pseudo- 
Gothic and neo-Classicism toward the middle 
of the century, and built the houses which we 
now refer to as belonging to the Garfield-Grant 
period, the Colonial work all along the Atlantic 
seaboard, whose lovliness of design and honesty 
of construction' have still to be excelled, was 
completely ignored. In many ways this is the 
sort of thing in which France has been engaged 
until today. No other country has finer and 
more picturesque traditions in native domestic 
architecture than that of the stone and brick and 
half-timber manior and farmhouses of Nor¬ 
mandy, the brick cottages of the North of 
France, and the stone and stuccoed houses of 
Burgundy. Very little of the splendid spirit of 
these, however, is encountered in the great 
majority of the domestic work of the past 
twenty-five years. But an encouraging note is 
now to be seen in the designs which are being 
made now for the reconstruction of the villages 
throughout the devastated areas. Ever since the 
armistice, competitions have been held in which 
the architects have devoted themselves to a 
sympathetic study of original native types in 
the districts concerned, and it is possible that 
the great calamity of the war will have a for¬ 
tunate phase in the regeneration of the domestic 
architecture of a country that was, for a time, 
almost sterile. 
W EYMER MILLS, whose name is familiar 
to readers of House & Garden and Vogue, 
is an essayist on furniture and antiquities, 
residing in Newport, R. I. 
Miss Gheen, who writes of furnishing dining 
rooms, is a practising decorator whose work is 
known both in New York and in the Middle 
West. 
Karl Freund, who writes on painted glass doors 
is a decorator and antiquarian, practising in 
New York. 
A new department starting with this issue is 
a page of period furniture characteristics by 
Mr. & Mrs. G. Glen Gould. These pages are 
so arranged that they will show graphically the 
salient period points. Decorators and students 
of decoration should find them of value. 
D. E. Newell, who contributes the article on 
Chinese furniture, is an authority on Oriental 
decorating and furnishing, and resides in San 
Francisco. 
Lucy D. Taylor, who is writing a series of 
articles on the uses of wall paper in various 
types of rooms, is a lecturer on interior decora¬ 
tion. Her first article appears in this issue. 
Julia Lester Dillon, who is doing a series of 
articles on gardening in the South, is the land¬ 
scape architect of Sumter, S. C. She has recently 
published a book on Southern gardening, “Blos¬ 
som Circle of the Year in Southern Gardens”, 
which should prove of great service to our 
readers who reside south of the Mason and 
Dixon line. 
