until the room warms up a bit. But 
there are times when a snug little 
warm dressing room is essential and I 
provide for this by a room or rather a 
closet, about two and a half by five, 
just off the landing, half way up the 
stairs to the balcony. This room con¬ 
tains a wash basin with hot and cold 
running water and also a chemical 
toilet that looks like an ordinary flush 
toilet, but won’t freeze. The place is 
so small that even a kerosene lamp will 
remove the larger chunks of chill on a 
wintry morning. Finding the overhead 
space for this little room required con¬ 
siderable wrinkling 
of brows. To have 
added a dormer 
window would have 
done the trick, but 
I had my heart set 
on an unbroken 
roof line. My car¬ 
penter, A1 Dodd, 
and I finally hit on 
the scheme of hav¬ 
ing one step down 
from the stair¬ 
landing into the 
dressing room. 
This encroached on 
space in the kitchen 
but we took part 
of what would 
have been the 
upper half of the 
kitchen cabinet, 
followed the same 
dimensions above, 
and now nobody 
can tell where the 
kitchen cabinet 
leaves off and the 
room overhead be¬ 
gins. 
Right here it 
may be well to 
mention that one 
can’t be too careful 
about the name of 
his carpenter. My 
own belief is that 
the most satisfac¬ 
tory carpenters, taking them in the 
long run, are named Al. I don’t know 
why this is, but my experience has 
been confirmed by others of whom I 
have made inquiry. Bill is also a good 
carpenter name, though the Bills are 
rarely as good at small neat work as 
the Als. Elmers are fairly good car¬ 
penters for rough outdoor work. 
The space beneath the stairway is 
enclosed for storage and a clothes 
closet. At either side of the fireplace 
are window seats, hinged and tin- 
lined for storage of blankets. The 
bathtub, too, makes an excellent mouse- 
proof storage bin when the house is 
closed. One step on the stairway is 
\ . 
hinged to make a lid over additional 
storage space for small articles. It is 
so hinged, however, that it drops back 
into place when not held open, thus 
obviating the danger of somebody 
stepping into, a hole in the dark and 
upsetting his moral standards. I 
doubt if anything is more downright 
vexatious than putting one’s foot un¬ 
expectedly on a stair step that isn’t 
there. 
Several times I narrowly escaped 
dormer windows, either to gain more 
overhead space or to provide upstairs 
ventilation. But the cabin sets on the 
crest of a hill running back into the 
woods and by dropping first the kitchen 
and then the little stone kitchen porch 
down the hillside, I succeeded in getting 
the needed overhead space, even with 
the straight roof line that seemed de¬ 
sirable in the interest of simplicity. 
Upstairs ventilation was difficult be¬ 
cause while there was room for a 
window at one end, the chimney took 
up most of the space at the other end. 
But we contrived to work in little tri¬ 
angular windows alongside of the 
chimney, tucked closely under the eaves 
and these provide enough cross draft 
to keep the balcony comfortable even 
in hot weather. 
Now, if a building is going to be 
compact and simple, surely it ought to 
have the simplest kind of color scheme. 
In the kitchen I noticed so many blue 
enameled utensils on the shelves that 
blue became the logical color for the 
table, chair and curtains—the attrac¬ 
tive shade of blue that one finds in the 
best enameled ware. The same blue 
is to be in the linoleum for the kitchen 
floor. 
For the colors in the main part of 
the cabin, I appealed to my friend, 
Arthur S. Allen, who is a sort of color 
engineer. He showed me how to make 
scientific tests that 
colors are in 
harmony, and we 
picked on an al¬ 
most neutral buff 
that would blend 
with the dull red 
brick in the fire¬ 
place. The heavy 
timbers were stain¬ 
ed dark brown. 
Inasmuch as the 
cabin is to all ap¬ 
pearances just a 
rough shack with 
the exterior made 
of boards from an 
old barn, stained 
brown, my first 
notion was: 
“No use employ¬ 
ing a decorator 
for a job like this. 
Any old curtains 
will do here.” 
But when you’re 
striving for the' 
simple, logical 
thing, one can’t 
always trust his 
own judgment. I 
might have gone to 
a store and per¬ 
mitted a blonde 
saleswoman to sell 
me a roll of cre¬ 
tonne and made 
my woodland cabin 
look like a cross between a blacksmith 
shop and a debutante’s boudoir. My 
decorator earned her fee by the first 
remark she made: 
“You want burlap curtains — brick- 
red burlap to go with the fireplace.” 
That settled that. Burlap it is. Noth¬ 
ing else would have been so thoroughly 
in keeping with the informality of the 
place. In the autumn the curtains 
seem to melt right into the foliage. 
The furniture is all old hickory rustic 
stuff that looks as if it had been grown 
and built on the premises. 
A simply arranged house would be 
useless unless one also eliminated need¬ 
less complications from work within 
Page 684 
Drawn by Robert W. Dickerson, Architect. 
