90 
House & G a r d 
e n 
LOCAL MATERIALS AND LOCAL LABOR 
The House That Appears At Home On Its Site Is Usually 
Made Of Indigenous Materials 
I N traveling through the country by¬ 
ways of England and France, of 
Spain and Italy, and elsewhere up 
and down the world, and in many a book 
that illustrates the domestic architecture of 
the old countries, people who think of 
building a house are greatly taken with a 
quality called charm which they feel to be 
lacking in the modern dwelling. 
It seems, indeed, an impossible thing to 
copy, and instead of creating it the usual 
procedure is to give it up as hopeless, and 
add another house to the row on this or 
that street. The crux of the situation does, 
indeed, lie in the difference between copy¬ 
ing and creating, for the old houses of Eu¬ 
rope, and the oldest houses in this country 
were not copied by the builders from other 
houses, nor were they a product of self- 
conscious, synthetic design. 
The half-timbered house, for instance, 
was not evolved as a means of devising 
patterns in timber: the pattern was simply 
the exposed framework of the house, with 
the spaces between the timbers filled in 
with brick, and sometimes plastered. Its 
charm is purely accidental and purely an 
expression of structural facts and obvious 
means of construction. 
In exactly the same way certain distinct 
styles have grown in certain localities 
through the existence of peculiar local ma¬ 
terials and the methods of handling these 
by generations of local artisans. 
The old inn at Tintagel, in Cornwall, 
is not built all of shaggy slate, walls and 
roof, because someone thought slate would 
be a clever thing to use in its construction, 
but because slate was the only building 
material at hand. 
There is a distinct analogy between the 
stone houses of the Cotswold country in 
England and the stone houses of the Chest¬ 
nut Hill vicinity near Philadelphia be¬ 
cause both are direct results of building 
with local labor in local materials. 
A VERY frequent query of the prospec¬ 
tive builder is “What sort of a house 
shall I build?”—and the answer is 
not a difficult one because in many cases it 
hinges very directly upon the locality. What 
is the local type? And why is the local type? 
The earliest houses in any locality gener¬ 
ally give the clue, because they were built 
before transportation facilities made it pos¬ 
sible to import alien materials, and these 
early houses look as though they belong to 
their sites because they do belong, simply 
and logically. 
Chestnut Hill, for instance, is fortunate 
in having a native ledge-stone which splits 
and shapes readily to lay up in a certain 
kind of masonry, and the earliest builders 
were not long in putting it to use. Suc¬ 
ceeding generations of stone masons built 
with Chestnut Hill ledge-stone as their 
fathers had built, and so a distinct and col¬ 
loquial style was involved which, with its 
minor variations, furnishes the real answer, 
in that locality, to the question of what 
“style” to choose for a country house. 
Most of our communities and counties 
are architecturally polyglot, because of too 
many whims and unreasoned architectural 
fads and fashions, and too little architec¬ 
tural conviction and regard for consistency. 
From the dark days which began about the 
time of the civil war, when Swiss chalets, 
scroll-sawed Gothic castles and French 
mansarded “mansions” were considered 
quite the thing to build anywhere, there has 
been too much architectural self-determi¬ 
nation, too much of what the higher criti¬ 
cism calls “eclecticism”. 
I NDIVIDUALITY and self expres¬ 
sion are all very well in architecture, 
and no one wants to see anything like 
architectural monotony or the blind follow¬ 
ing of a formula. I do not know of any 
architectural style, especially in dwellings, 
which is not susceptible to the utmost de¬ 
gree of personal expression, or of any valid 
reason for building a Spanish Mission villa 
in a New England village. 
Discriminating and resourceful archi¬ 
tects have taken local styles and evolved 
from them houses which are in every sense 
modern and in every sense individualistic, 
and in doing this they have taken local 
materials and, sometimes, local labor, as 
their surest means of attaining their ob¬ 
jective. 
Local types are not, necessarily, such 
definite models as the Italian villa, the 
French chateau or the English manor 
house; their similarity in type is more a 
matter of feeling. And, for that matter, all 
Italian villas are not alike, but vary with 
locality, just as French chateaux and Eng¬ 
lish manor houses are not all alike. It is 
as great a mistake to have ideas too hard 
and set in the matter of stylistic types as it 
is to have ideas too vague and undefined. 
Wherever there is anything resembling a 
local type, the prospective builder will do 
well to study it, and to think of his house 
in terms of local materials, if there are any 
which could be regarded as characteristic. 
It is not so easy to generalize on local 
labor as on local materials, because the 
nature of labor varies so greatly, and con¬ 
sequently, the advisability of its employ¬ 
ment. Much of the picturesque quality of 
old buildings, both here and in Europe, is 
the result of the individual technique of 
comparatively unskilled labor. Materials 
were roughed out by hand, often on the 
site, and put together in a necessarily in¬ 
dividualistic way. Unskilled labor did not 
mean poor labor, for no matter how un¬ 
skilled were some of the old builders 
they were very thorough and conscien¬ 
tious. Time was when men built their 
own houses, or co-operatively helped 
with each others’, and when poor and 
slovenly workmanship would have been like 
cheating at solitaire. Their day’s work was 
not affected by wage scales, or by how much 
work (or how little) they should perform 
in a given number of hours, and something 
of their integrity, and their personal in¬ 
terest in the work was built into it for our 
own age to appraise and wish to revive. 
T ODAY, from the nature of the newer 
order of specialization in the building 
trades, local labor is generally no 
more than incidental, and principally con¬ 
fined to local stone-masons who have de¬ 
veloped a special skill and technique in 
handling the stone of their locality. They 
have seen it used from boyhood and are 
naturally adept builders in it. Wherever 
local stone plays a conspicuous part in local 
building, there is usually an old stone¬ 
mason who goes about the countryside, 
building walls and chimneys and founda¬ 
tions, and to secure his services is to achieve 
not only the best possible vernacular use of 
the local materials, but to relate your house 
to its locality more closely and humanly. 
These old country artisans take a per¬ 
sonal pride in their work, not only because 
they are uncontaminated by competitive 
methods, but because they will have fre¬ 
quent occasion to pass by and see their 
handiwork, and have it commented upon 
by their cronies. “See that there chimney? 
... .1 built it. They ain't no better built 
chimney anywheres aroun’.” This kind 
of pride in artisanship is seldom to be 
found in outside local labor, and to utilize 
the local stone-mason is also to make many 
friends through the countryside, for every 
one of them is an inveterate gossip. 
Local carpenter work, especially for in¬ 
terior finish, is not so likely to be as good as 
local mason work, though many have util¬ 
ized it with profit and entertainment. Max- 
field Parrish built his own house at Cornish, 
according to tradition, with only one local 
carpenter to help him, and it is safe to say 
that it means far more to him than any 
half-million dollar “show-place” can mean 
to its owner. But the exceptional instance 
is not the general rule, and local carpenter 
labor needs a great deal of supervision on 
anything but plain work. 
In relatively simple building projects, 
especially in the remodeling of old farm 
houses, local labor in all possible parts of 
the work often represents a distinct econo¬ 
my. The carpenter, who may also be a 
farmer living near your site, will give you a 
figure on the whole job, and, with a 
(Continued on page 110) 
