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 The Dutch colonial house; its origin, des 
 
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Cornell University 
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 There are no known copyright restrictions in 
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THE COUNTRY HOUSE LIBRARY 
 
 BUNGALOWS By Henry H. Saylor 
 
 THE HALF-TIMBER HOUSE 
 
 By Allen W. Jackson 
 
 CONCRETE AND STUCCO HOUSES 
 
 By Oswald C. Hermg 
 
 ARCHITECTURAL STYLES FOR 
 COUNTRY HOUSES 
 
 A symposium by architects 
 
 RECLAIMING THE OLD HOUSE 
 
 By Chas. Edw. Hooper 
 
 THE DUTCH COLONIAL HOUSE 
 
 By Aymar Embury, II. 
 
 THE COLONIAL HOUSE 
 
 By Jos. Everett Chandler 
 
 FURNISHING THE HOME OF 
 GOOD TASTE 
 
 By Lucy Abbot Throop 
 
 With other titles in preparation 
 
 Price of each, $2 net; postage, 20c. 
 
 McBRIDE, NAST & CO., Publishers 
 
THE 
 
 DUTCH COLONIAL 
 
 HOUSE 
 
 THE COUNTRY HOUSE LIBRARY 
 
 A SERIES OF ARCHITECTURAL BOOKS 
 
 FOR THE LAYMAN 
 
The front entrance of the Vreeland house at Nordhoff, N. J. 
 
THE 
 
 DUTCH COLONIAL 
 HOUSE 
 
 ITS ORIGIN, DESIGN, MODERN PLAN 
 AND CONSTRUCTION 
 
 ILLUSTRATED WITH PHOTOGRAPHS OF OLD EXAMPLES AND 
 AMERICAN ADAPTATIONS OF THE STYLE 
 
 BY 
 
 AYMAR JgMBURY, II 
 
 Author of 
 ''One Hundred Country Houses" 
 
 NEW YORK 
 
 McBRIDE, NAST & COMPANY 
 
 1913 
 
Copyright, 1913, by 
 McBride, Nasi & Co. 
 
 ?Hia^ 
 
 
 ,C,i.; a 
 
 Published, April, 1913 
 
Contents 
 
 Page 
 
 Introduction i 
 
 The Genesis of the Style 1 
 
 Materials 13 
 
 The Treatment of the Roof 28 
 
 Doors and Windows 47 
 
 Plan 61 
 
 The Treatment of the Principal Rooms ... 81 
 
 Furniture and Decoration 93 
 
The Illustrations 
 
 The front entrance of the Vreeland house at Nordhoff, 
 
 N. J Frontispiece 
 
 Facing Page 
 
 Bake-oven of stone in Dutch Colonial house 2 
 
 The Vreeland house at Nordhoff, N. J 3 
 
 An old house at Hackensack, N. J 3 
 
 The Sneden homestead at Sneden's Landing 6 
 
 An old farmhouse at Sparkill, N. Y 6 
 
 The John Peter B. Westervelt house, Cresskill, N. J. . 7 
 
 The Brinckerhoff homestead, Hackensack 7 
 
 House at Teaneck, N. J 10 
 
 A Dutch variant of the New England Colonial at Demarest, 
 
 N. J 10 
 
 Two views of the C. Z. Board house at Hohokus, N. J. . . 11 
 
 "Sunnyside," Hewlett, L. 1 14 
 
 An old Dutch house at Hackensack, N. J 14 
 
 Large stucco columns at New Orleans, La 15 
 
 A gambrel roof at Chesterfield, Md 15 
 
 Brick pavement at Cresskill, N. J 15 
 
 The Jerome C. Bull house at Tuckahoe, N. Y 16 
 
 The Lydecker homestead, Englewood, N. J 17 
 
 A modern house with gambrel roof 17 
 
 A real estate company's office , ... 18 
 
 The Marie house at Chappaqua, N. Y 19 
 
 An old Dutch house . 19 
 
 A fireproof house of Dutch character at Riverdale, N. Y. . . 22 
 
 A summer kitchen of shingles, clapboards and stone ... 23 
 
 A detail showing old stonework and wooden lintels over windows 23 
 
 The Lady Moody house at Gravesend, L. 1 26 
 
THE ILLUSTRATIONS 
 
 Facing Page 
 
 A modern cottage with Dutch roof 26 
 
 The Speer residence at Los Angeles, Cal 27 
 
 The St. George Barber house, Englewood, N. J 28 
 
 The old library at Stonington, Conn 29 
 
 A gambrel roof on the main house and single-pitched roof on 
 
 extension 29 
 
 Superimposed, recessed and projecting dormers .... 32 
 
 A gable roof with a long dormer 32 
 
 The residence of Dr. Teeter, Englewood, N. J 33 
 
 A house at Woodmere, L. 1 33 
 
 The residence of Ernest F. Guilbert, Newark, N. J. . . .36 
 
 A house at Greenwich, Conn 36 
 
 A house at Scarsdale, N. Y 37 
 
 A house at Garden City, L. 1 37 
 
 The Swift residence, Larchmont, N. Y 38 
 
 A house at Colonia, N. J 39 
 
 A house at Kensington, L. 1 39 
 
 A house at Cynwyd, Pa 40 
 
 An extreme modernization of the Dutch type 40 
 
 A house at Sayville, L. 1 41 
 
 A house at Fox Point, Wis 44 
 
 A gardener's cottage 44 
 
 An old house at Annapolis, Md 45 
 
 A gable end of typically Dutch shape 45 
 
 The Guilbert house, Newark 48 
 
 An old Louisiana plantation 48 
 
 The Bull house, Tuckahoe 49 
 
 The Orr house at Garden City, L. I. 49 
 
 A house at Woodmere, L. 1 50 
 
 The doorway of the C. S. Fay house 51 
 
 Front entrance porch, Gerrettsen house, Brooklyn, N. Y. . . 52 
 
 The entrance door of the Vreeland house, Nordhoff, N. J. . 52 
 
 The door of the old Cortelyou house at Flatbush, L. I. . . . 53 
 
 The doorway of the Jordan house at Kensington, L. I. . . 53 
 
 A simple modern doorway 56* 
 
THE ILLUSTRATIONS 
 
 Facing Page 
 
 A lovely old doorway in the Vreeland house 56 
 
 A doorway in the Willett's house at Flushing, L. I. . . . 57 
 
 An old Dutch doorway 57 
 
 An old Dutch house with "lie-on-your-stomach" windows ' '. . 58 
 
 An old house in New Jersey 58 
 
 Excellent traditional treatment of windows and entrance door 59 
 
 The Frederick S. Jordan house at Kensington, L. I. ... 64 
 
 A house at Kensington, L. I. 65 
 
 A well-equipped country place near Syracuse 70 
 
 The Stanley G. Flagg, Jr., cottage at Stowe, Pa 71 
 
 The residence of Henry S. Orr, Garden City, L. 1 76 
 
 The Charles J. Fay residence, Dongan Hills, Staten Island, 
 
 N. Y 77 
 
 Living-room in the Starr house, Tenafly, N. J 82 
 
 Living-room in the Orr house 82 
 
 An old enclosed stairway 83 
 
 A fireplace with colored tiles from Holland 83 
 
 Hall in the Stephen Nash house, Short Hills, N. J. . . .84 
 
 Dining-room in the Guilbert house 85 
 
 A corner of the Lady Moody house hall 85 
 
 A simple fireplace in the Gurd house, River Edge, N. J. . . 88 
 
 A Colonial mantel in the Vreeland house at Nordhoff, N. J. . 88 
 A Colonial room in the Marshall Fry house at Southampton, 
 
 L. I 89 
 
 The living-room of the Lady Moody house 90 
 
 The stairway in the King house at Great Neck, L. I. . . .91 
 
 The hall in the Orr house at Garden City, L. 1 91 
 
 Colonial dressing table 94 
 
 A Flemish chest of drawers 94 
 
 Colonial bureau 94 
 
 A Colonial rocker 95 
 
 A Georgian armchair 95 
 
 An Adam armchair 95 
 
 A William and Mary armchair 95 
 
 Flemish caned beds 98 
 
THE ILLUSTRATIONS 
 
 Facing PagB 
 
 Beds of early Dutch type 98 
 
 Colonial four-poster 98 
 
 Dutch desk 98 
 
 English chest 98 
 
 American Empire chairs 99 
 
 Chairs of the period of William and Mary 99 
 
 A living-kitchen in Holland 100 
 
 A living-room in the John A. Gurd house ...... 100 
 
 A sideboard of the period of William and Mary .... 101 
 
 A china closet of the period of William and Mary .... 101 
 
 A dining-room in the King house 104 
 
 A dining-room in old Holland 104 
 
 Dining-room in the Starr house 105 
 
 Panelling in a Holland interior 105 
 
 Wing chair with valence 106 
 
 Upholstered chair 106 
 
 Real Colonial Dutch chairs 106 
 
 Colonial stand 107 
 
 An early Dutch table 107 
 
 Sheraton side table 107 
 
 English gate-leg table 107 
 
THE 
 
 DUTCH COLONIAL 
 
 HOUSE 
 
Introduction 
 
 In taking up the subject of Dutch Colonial houses as 
 one of the series of books on various architectural styles 
 suited to country work, I feel that a few words of gen- 
 eral explanation are necessary. \ Practically speaking, the 
 Dutch Colonial house passed out of existence one hundred 
 years ago, and can never be revived. The modern houses 
 which we denominate as "Dutch" in style are in so many 
 respects different from the genuine New Jersey farm- 
 houses that often it is more or less difficult to see the con- 
 nection between them.^The principal feature which dis- 
 tinguishes them as descendants of Dutch architecture is 
 their employment of the gambrel roof, but it is used not 
 in the true Dutch manner, rather following the practice 
 common in New England — although the New England 
 type was itself probably derived from the Dutch, if we may 
 trust the old books and newspapers, which in describing 
 new buildings covered with these characteristic roofs speak 
 of them as "Dutch." <fcertain types of Colonial work fit 
 in with modern needs and requirements with no substantial 
 change in their general composition, and the evident value 
 of these houses as prototypes for modern work has been 
 
ii INTRODUCTION 
 
 very fully appreciated, not only by the architects, but by 
 the public at large, and the knowledge and sympathy with 
 New England Colonial work is becoming so general that 
 at times we almost feel as if the Victorian era had never ex- 
 isted, and the Colonial tradition had persisted unbroken. 
 The same thing cannot truthfully be said of the Dutch 
 work; there is a distinct break between the traditional type 
 and that of to-day, but that some of our most interesting 
 country houses, architecturally, have been inspired by 
 Dutch work is very evident^ and the purpose of this book 
 is to illustrate its applicability to modern construction, 
 especially in the smaller types of houses. 
 
 For these small houses there is probably no other style 
 so good; it was originally devised as an architecture for 
 small buildings, and because of the long sloping roofs, with 
 the single story of vertical wall surface, it appears to spring 
 more naturally f rami the ground than would any building 
 of full two stories and of the same ground area. What 
 the cultivated American public desires to-day is a "long, 
 low house," and as lowness is dependent, not upon the 
 actual height in feet and inches, but upon the relation be- 
 tween the height of the cornice from the ground and the 
 length of the house, it is not very difficult to secure the 
 effect of a rather long, low house by the use of a gambrel 
 roof starting at the second floor line, when it Would be 
 quite impossible to secure this effect in a building of two 
 
INTRODUCTION in 
 
 full stories. The style is the only one which, within a cer- 
 tain rather narrow range of limitations, perfectly meets re- 
 quirements, since it is the only one which gives a satisfactory 
 second story under the sloping roof. Outside of these 
 limits I freely admit that other types better meet require- 
 ments of modern living, but wherever a fairly informal and 
 homelike house of moderate size — and by moderate size I 
 mean up to one hundred feet in length — is preferred to a 
 more formal type, the style is unsurpassed. 
 
 There are given in the book a great many illustrations 
 of the old houses which remain to us in the counties of Ber- 
 gen, Passaic, Essex and Hudson in New Jersey, and Kings 
 and Queens in Long Island and New York, beside a cer- 
 tain number of other Colonial houses from which American 
 architects have borrowed, perhaps with advantage, to add 
 to the somewhat limited repertoire of the Dutch architec- 
 ture, /it is probably impossible to pick out any one of 
 these old houses and copy it exactly, as we could copy a 
 New England Colonial house if we so desired; but archi- 
 tecture in this country at the present day is by no means 
 the cut-and-dried affair that it was only a few years since; 
 we are endeavoring to reproduce, not the form but the 
 spirit, and in considering the old work of any nation or of 
 any epoch, we try to get at not just how the thing was done, 
 but what was the result finally achieved. 
 
 The Dutch field has been long neglected, probably be- 
 
iv INTRODUCTION 
 
 cause it was so close under our noses, and in the eager 
 search of England, Europe, the South and New England 
 for inspiration, we have overlooked the obvious. It is only 
 a comparatively few American architects, who for some 
 reason have had the old Dutch work directly called to their 
 attention, that have endeavored to work out a new applica- 
 tion of the old methods. The fact that the results obtained 
 have been so livable and so artistic speak volumes for the 
 flexibility of the style, which, radically changed in form, 
 still manages to preserve its identityj^and it is with the hope 
 that more Americans, both architects and their clients, may 
 perceive the possibilities of the work that this book has been 
 undertaken. 
 
The Genesis of the Style 
 
 AMERICA was settled by very diverse elements, 
 which came to the new country in three principal 
 streams; to New England on the north, Virginia 
 on the south, and New Holland in the center of eastern 
 America. Curiously enough the types of architecture em- 
 ployed by all three of these settlements bore little resem- 
 blance to that of the countries from which they came, and 
 while the settlers both in New England and Virginia were 
 of common blood (although in sentiment and in religious 
 denomination widely separated) , the types which they 
 established for their country homes in their new land re- 
 sembled each other no more than either of them resembled 
 the architecture of the Dutch settlers in the neighborhood 
 of New York. The houses were unconscious expressions 
 of the new conditions, and were in most cases so simple and 
 unostentatious that it may be that, in speaking of most of 
 them, "architecture" is too dignified a term to employ, since 
 the term implies a conscious attempt towards artistic ex- 
 pression in these buildings^ 
 
 (To anyone interested in the early life of our Colonial 
 ancestors the thing which will most immediately appeal as 
 
 1 
 
2 THE DUTCH COLONIAL HOUSE 
 
 interesting and extraordinary is, as said before, the un- 
 likeness of most of the Colonial buildings to those of the 
 parent countries. We have, fortunately, preserved to us 
 a considerable number of the old houses and a few of the 
 public buildings, in most cases not of the years immedi- 
 ately following the first settlement. However, when one 
 considers that settlement in America was not a process 
 which took place once and for all and then ceased, leaving 
 the Colonists with only tradition to recall to them the styles 
 of their parent countries; but was a continuing process dur- 
 ing which there was a constant addition of Colonists born 
 and brought up in England and in Europe, thoroughly 
 familiar with the styles of houses there customary, it is 
 amazing indeed to find how- easily they fell into the ver- 
 nacular architecture of the time, so that its growth was 
 apparently, as far as country houses went, little influenced 
 by foreign ideas, and, even when so influenced, these ideas 
 were transmuted into forms quite unlike those of the home 
 countries. J Thus we find Mount Vernon, the best known 
 of all our American country houses, because of the unique 
 position its builder enjoys in American history, absolutely 
 unlike not only the English country houses constructed at 
 the same period, but those of any date. : This very radical 
 change in architectural ideas has been attributed to various 
 causes; for example, to the climatic conditions, to the 
 changed list of convenient materials, to the fact that skilled 
 
The bake-oven of stone on the gable end. The front of stucco, the rest 
 
 of clapboards 
 
 An old house at Gravesend, L. I., covered with wide white shingles 
 
The Vreeland house at NordhoiT, N. J. An excellent example of the late 
 Dutch work. Date, 1812 
 
 An old house at Hackensack, N. J., built of many materials. Date, 1732 
 
THE GENESIS OF THE STYLE 3 
 
 mechanics were scarce and many of the houses were built 
 by amateur craftsmen, and to numerous other causes. The 
 probability is that all of these carried weight, but I think 
 that the principal reason for the change in style was the 
 absolute break in the traditional life of the peopleA 
 
 The seventeenth and eighteenth centuries were years 
 when architecture as a profession could scarcely be said to 
 exist, and architects as such were employed only for build- 
 ings of considerable importance. The lovely little English 
 cottages, of which we see so many, of the seventeenth and 
 eighteenth centuries in England, were not designed at all, 
 but were built without plans by local carpenters and masons, 
 who learned their trades from their parents and handed 
 their skill and traditions to their children until they con- 
 stituted almost a caste of their own. Men of these classes 
 were scarce among the early immigrants, who came in the 
 main from the cities, and in New England were of the shop- 
 keeping and manufacturing classes, rather than mechanics, 
 or, when mechanics, were those familiar with city and not 
 country work. 
 
 Virginia, of course, as we learned from our school his- 
 tories, was founded by so-called gentlemen adventurers, 
 people without trades and without any productive excuse 
 for being. The mechanics there were mostly transported 
 and indentured men, who, criminals in their own country, 
 became under favorable circumstances at least useful and 
 
4 THE DUTCH COLONIAL HOUSE 
 
 excellent citizens in the new. (in New Amsterdam and the 
 Dutch colonies around it, the first comers were merchants, 
 traders of furs and the like, to whom were soon added many 
 of the Dutch peasants, the ancestors of the sturdy farmers 
 of New York and Long Island. Thus, among the earliest 
 settlers, in no one of these three parts of the country was 
 there any great proportion of the mechanics, who in their 
 native villages preserved the traditional styles; and requir- 
 ing houses, the settlers must needs huild them as best they 
 might.N 
 
 Just why conditions not at all dissimilar in Virginia, New 
 Jersey and Massachusetts should have produced types so 
 radically unlike, is hard to tell, but what we do know is that 
 in each of these three centers was developed a certain style 
 of house, not very flexible in design, and each of which has 
 furnished a mine of material for the country house archi- 
 tects of this later day. To me the most curious of the re- 
 sulting anachronisms was the rather extraordinary exchange 
 of materials between the various settlements. Everybody 
 knows that Holland was preeminently the land of brick 
 construction, but I do not recall a single Dutch farm- 
 house built entirely of brick, although I do know of two or 
 three in which some brick was used elsewhere than in the 
 chimneys. On the other hand the English country cot- 
 tages were built largely of stone, or of stucco over stone, 
 with a considerable amount of half -timber construction; 
 
THE GENESIS OF THE STYLE 5 
 
 that is, a heavy wooden framework filled in between the 
 uprights with brick and plaster. I do not recall in all 
 the South, or in fact anywhere else in this country, a build- 
 ing of half -timber construction in the English sense. The 
 typical Southern house was of brick, and, in most of the 
 earlier cases, of brick imported from England. In New 
 England, wooden construction was universal in the country- 
 districts, although old England itself has not had, since the 
 time of the Romans, forests enough to furnish even interior 
 woodwork for the English houses, and certainly the clap- 
 board and shingle house is almost never seen there. In 
 Virginia there were probably no fewer trees than in New 
 England, and as to why the Virginians did not use wood 
 as freely as the New Englander we have no information, 
 although a guess that the Virginian, vain of his assumed 
 superior station in life, sought to imitate the English houses 
 of those of similar station, may not be far wrong. This 
 surmise is perhaps strengthened by the fact that in so far 
 as the Virginia architecture resembled that of England at 
 all, it was that of the town and not of the country, and it 
 was certainly the towns with which the Virginians Were 
 most familiar. It is nevertheless curious to find that in the 
 early Colonial work stucco was practically unused in Vir- 
 ginia and New England, but was occasionally found in 
 Philadelphia, and was at least not uncommon around New 
 York, in spite of the fact that the Dutch were primarily a 
 
6 THE DUTCH COLONIAL HOUSE 
 
 race of brickbuilders. In such curious facts as these lies one 
 of the most interesting phases of architectural history. 
 - In searching for the genesis of the Dutch style we look 
 for it first in the consideration of materials at hand. 
 Northeastern New Jersey was at some remote age the ter- 
 mination of the glacial drift, and the fertile fields which 
 offered such an alluring bait to the Dutch settler were cov- 
 ered with red sandstone, not native to the country, but 
 brought there long ago by the glaciers. These stones had 
 to be removed from the fields before these could conveniently 
 be worked, and since they had to be moved, in the natural 
 sequence of things it was as convenient to pile them on top 
 of each other to form walls for the fields and walls for the 
 house, as to dispose of them in any other way. The earliest 
 Dutch farmhouses in New Jersey are, then, of stone. In 
 Long Island, on the other hand, building stone was about 
 as common as diamonds, and the houses were built of wood 
 and covered either with shingles or with clapboards, al- 
 though in a few cases a frame wall was filled in with brick 
 and plastered over the whole surface — the wood as well as 
 the masonry^ «;The New Jersey type of construction very 
 probably led to the development of the most familiar char- 
 acteristic of Dutch work, the long overhanging roof. In 
 building their walls the early settlers did not have proper 
 materials with which to build ; lime had to be imported, and 
 cement had not yet been invented; time and labor they did 
 
The Sneden homestead at Sweden's -Landing on the Hudson River 
 Date, about 1700 
 
 An old farmhouse at Sparkill, N. Y v with a single-pitched roof 
 Date, about 1750 
 
A perfect example of the old Dutch farmhouse — the John Peter B. Westervelt 
 house, Cresskill, N. J. Date, about 1800 
 
 Columns at the porch only. The Brinckerhoff homestead, Hackensack N J 
 
 Date, 1704 
 
THE GENESIS OF THE STYLE t 
 
 have, and in consequence instead of being built of rough, 
 irregularly shaped stones, with the interstices filled with 
 mortar, their walls were built of square stones with level 
 beds, competent to stand without any cementing together, 
 and secured against intrusion of the wind and rain J)y ^he 
 filling of the chinks with clay, just as had been the case in 
 the log cabins which had been their first homes. 
 
 Clay in a dry climate is nearly as good a material for 
 wall building as cement, but exposed to the weather under 
 the action of rain and frost, it soon disintegrates and 
 washes out. To protect it from moisture the settlers there- 
 fore extended the roofs, a condition which, in the two-story 
 houses of Philadelphia, led to the development of the 
 familiar "Germantown hood," since a single projection at 
 the top of the house was not sufficient to protect the full 
 height of the wall, and a secondary roof had to be intro- 
 duced at the second-story level. As the Dutch houses were 
 nearly all of a single story height below the roof, a single long 
 overhang was sufficient, and at first this was a straight con- 
 tinuation of the main roof; they were later swung out in a 
 wide sweeping curve whose purpose is not at once apparent, 
 but which was probably intended to raise the eaves suf- 
 ficiently above the windows to permit the rooms to be fully 
 lighted. / 
 
 The earliest houses had roofs of a single pitch; the later 
 ones were covered with the familiar gambrel shape, so oom- 
 
8 THE DUTCH COLONIAL HOUSE 
 
 monly associated with the Dutch farmhouses as to be called 
 a "Dutch" roof, although it was by no means uncommon 
 in New England, and not entirely absent from Pennsyl- 
 vania and the S«uth. This gambrel r®of is America's 
 principal contribution t© the science of building; it was 
 almost, if not absolutely, unknown in Europe, including 
 England, and if any cases did occur there they were not 
 a part of the real development @f architecture, but were 
 sporadic and without real influence in the evolution of any 
 style. As a contribution to country house design, espe- 
 cially for small houses, it is invaluable, for the reason which 
 probably caused its invention, since it permits a greatly in- 
 creased space in the second story without making a roof of 
 tremendous height. The Dutch always applied this methed 
 of construction rather timidly, the lower set of rafters being 
 pitched not much more than the upper set, and the gain of 
 space was correspondingly inconsiderable, but its employ- 
 ment in the Dutch fashion, with the ends of the rafters still 
 swinging out into a wide curve to protect the walls, pro- 
 duced a roof shape of peculiar beauty, which can seldom 
 now-a-days be imitated, because of the labor involved in 
 curving the rafter ends, and because the pitch is too flat 
 to give good space for rooms below it. 
 
 As the style developed, these roofs were not uncommonly 
 extended, on one side at least, far enough to give space for 
 a narrow porch or piazza, and were supported on columns. 
 
THE GENESIS OF THE STYLE 9 
 
 Sometimes there was only a single pair flanking the en- 
 trance door (of which type there is one example illustrated) , 
 designed apparently to emphasize the entrance; but more 
 commonly, as in the Demarest and Vreeland houses, the 
 roof was upheld by a row of square columns which added 
 immensely to the picturesque appearance of the front. 
 
 The latest development of the Dutch farmhouse before 
 it fell, with the rest of the world's architecture, into the 
 wretched tastelessness of the Victorian era, was charac- 
 terized by the reduction of the cornice projection and the 
 introduction of a row of second-story windows along the 
 front, usually of the low kind sometimes called "lie-on- 
 your-stomach" windows; the projecting hood of the piazza 
 was then placed between the windows of the second story 
 and those of the first. 
 
 Another curious development of this period was that at 
 this piazza roof line the material often changed; below the 
 roof it was still of stone, while above it it was of wood. 
 This last change in the Dutch farmhouse may be attributed 
 to two causes: first, the introduction of good lime mortar, 
 which did away with the necessity of protecting the wall 
 surfaces, although many shingle and wooden houses which 
 needed no protection, had, because of the strength of the 
 tradition previously established, been built with them; and 
 second, because the Dutch no longer constituted an isolated 
 community, but in the early years of the nineteenth cen- 
 
10 THE DUTCH COLONIAL HOUSE 
 
 tury gradually became familiar with current Colonial work 
 of all parts of the United States, and especially of New 
 England, so that its provincial characteristics disappeared, 
 and about 1820 or 1830 the work around New York had 
 little to distinguish it from the Neo-classic which then con- 
 stituted the national style. 
 
 In detail indeed, the Dutch work was very widely dif- 
 ferent from that of the rest of the Colonists, and although 
 no Colonial architecture, either in mass or in detail, was 
 very subservient to tradition, the Dutch was perhaps the 
 freest of all. Taking, for example, such an important 
 piece of the design as the column shapes, we find that in 
 the South they followed the classic proportion quite closely; 
 in New England, while the classic forms were in a rough 
 way retained, the proportions were tremendously attenu- 
 ated; and in both sections the columns were generally round 
 and often fluted. This was not characteristic of Dutch 
 work; many of the old columns were octagonal and hexa- 
 gonal, with the capitals totally unlike the classic, and 
 strongly reminiscent of Gothic work. Side by side with 
 these curious examples, which are not found elsewhere than 
 in Dutch houses, we find the square carpenter-built type 
 of columns, sometimes with paneled sides, and sometimes 
 plain, common to all late Colonial styles. The doorways 
 of the earlier houses were only rarely ornamented, but with 
 the growth of wealth and knowledge, the Dutch made quite 
 
r-.f — ir in, 
 
 I fl! ,Kf lliitllhllillim limilli.imiM Mhimiiii'i: ' ,..„., 
 
 The last type of Dutch work. House at Teaneck, N. J., built about 18S0 
 
 A Dutch variant of the New England Colonial at Demarest, N. J. 
 Date, about 1795 
 
The finest old garden in the neighborhood of New York — the C. Z. Board 
 house at Hohokus, N. J. 
 
 The C. Z. Board house at Hohokus. An unusually large country place 
 
 built in 1754 
 
THE GENESIS OF THE STYLE 11 
 
 as much of their doors — although in somewhat different 
 fashion — as did their New England confreres. )) 
 
 The style never was, and never can be, perfectly ad- 
 justed to houses of great size or formal character; it was 
 essentially informal and picturesque. The genius of the 
 Dutch race did not lend itself to formality in building any 
 more than it did to the pomp of public life ; we do not find 
 in Holland itself any buildings, either private or public, of 
 such a character; the Dutch simply do not know how to be 
 stately. But if a country house is wanted which shall be 
 homelike, quaint and lovely, the style is admirably adjusted 
 to its use, especially since in a small house the lower the 
 roof comes, the more intimately the building will fit its 
 landscape, and houses of the Dutch type are essentially low 
 in appearance. Up to a certain size the style certainly has 
 possibilities beyond the ordinary, and even for a house as 
 big as the Board house it can hardly be surpassed. 
 
 Before concluding this chapter on the genesis of the style, 
 I Want to say a little about this, which is perhaps the finest 
 of all the Dutch places still existing. Like most of the 
 Dutch houses it is placed with its gable end close to the 
 road, and consists of a low central mass with a gambrel 
 Toof , flanked by two still lower wings with simple roofs of 
 single pitch. The lower story in the main part of the build- 
 ing is of stone, stuccoed under the piazza on the side which 
 is shown in the illustration, on the other side pointed up 
 
12 THE DUTCH COLONIAL HOUSE 
 
 with mortar joints. The wings are of frame, probably- 
 built long after the rest of the house. The entrance drive 
 passes by the long piazza, and across the drive from the 
 main piazza is what I believe to be the finest old formal 
 garden in America, symmetrical in plan, the paths edged 
 with box trees, and the intersections of the paths strength- 
 ened by trellised arches, while a summer-house marks the 
 center. The garden is raised above the public street by 
 a stone terrace wall surmounted by a wooden fence. On 
 the other long side of the house a small porch faces a plain 
 lawn studded with tremendous and magnificent trees. It 
 is a place quite as important architecturally as any of the 
 famous Virginia houses, but possibly because of its near- 
 ness to New York, and possibly because it is not associated 
 with any historic incident, it has passed almost unnoticed, 
 although in its setting and surroundings it is very superior 
 to many of the famous Southern houses. In itself it is ex- 
 quisitely designed, and not less beautifully detailed. It 
 is the sort of house which one should seek to have in the 
 country, unostentatious, elegant and comfortable; the home 
 of a gentleman. 
 
Materials 
 
 THERE is no single factor in the construction of 
 the old Dutch houses to which more of their 
 pleasing effect is due, than the materials of which 
 they were built. This is not because they selected a single 
 material which seemed absolutely appropriate to the style 
 and held fast to it, but because every material which they 
 used was so delightfully handled. 
 
 We find in New England that a great part of the charm 
 of the Colonial houses is determined by the color scheme 
 of white with green blinds and roof, and that the materials 
 were clapboards and shingles, the former for the walls and 
 the latter for the roofs. While there are a goodly number 
 of New England houses of which the walls are shingled and 
 possibly even some few of which the walls were of brick, 
 the prevalence of clapboards for the side walls was so strong 
 as to constitute a type; similarly the typical Southern 
 house is of brick. Another thing, which is noticeable in 
 both New England and the South, is that the same material 
 was used for all parts of the building; this sounds like such 
 a reasonable thing to do that one is surprised to find that 
 in the Dutch colonies it was just about the last thing they 
 
 13 
 
14 THE DUTCH COLONIAL HOUSE 
 
 did. Of course there were certain localities, especially in 
 Long Island, where only a single material was available, 
 and the houses were accordingly covered with shingles ; but 
 where a variety of materials was available one may be sure 
 that the Dutch did not forget them. The little summer 
 kitchen at Cresskill, New Jersey, for example, a building 
 certainly not over fifteen feet by seventeen or eighteen feet, 
 has four of the five possible materials used in its exterior; 
 the end walls are of stone, the front and back of clap- 
 boards, the roof of shingles, and the chimney of brick. 
 While I do not find among the illustrations at hand any 
 in which all five materials were used in the lower walls 
 alone, there are such houses still in existence, and it is by 
 no means so rare as to excite comment to find a farmhouse 
 where the end walls are of stone, the front of stucco, the 
 back of shingles and one extension of clapboards and 
 another of brick. The old farmhouse in Hackensack, 
 illustrated in this chapter, shows three of the materials used 
 in conjunction, the lower part of the walls being of stone, 
 the front of stucco, and the gable of shingles; while the 
 Lady Moody house has the gabl£ ends of shingles and front 
 and rear walls (protected by the overhanging hood) of 
 stucco. 
 
 Quite a common trick among the Dutch builders appears 
 to have been to construct a square block enclosure of stone 
 up to the height of the bottom of the rafters, and then to 
 
"Sunnyside," Hewlett, L. I., built of stucco, brick and shingles in an interesting 
 
 combination 
 
 An old Dutch house at Hackensack, N. J., with entrance porch and side piazza 
 
MATERIALS 15 
 
 finish the gable end walls with shingles or clapboards, a 
 type illustrated in the houses at Cresskill and Demarest. 
 The material varied with the locality; the Dutch had no 
 hard-and-fast rules about appropriate materials, but were 
 governed entirely by what was convenient and easily ob- 
 tained. This flexibility in the use of materials affords the 
 modern architect wide latitude in his choice, and that the 
 architects of to-day have very fully availed themselves of 
 this privilege will be later shown; but even with the much 
 greater command of materials of the present day, we have 
 still failed to reach the interesting qualities of the older 
 work. I .think of all the materials used in these houses the 
 most agreeable and most valuable to study was the red 
 sandstone of which many of the Dutch houses in Bergen 
 and Essex Counties in New Jersey were built. This is 
 due to two reasons: first, the interesting character of the 
 stone itself, which, as it was not a quarry stone, came in a 
 wide range of shades from which the Dutch masons made 
 no attempt to select those of uniform color; and second, 
 because of the very excellent way in which these were cut 
 and laid. 
 
 Two photographs of portions of the Westervelt house 
 illustrate, as far as any photographs without color can, the 
 method employed. One observes immediately that the main 
 portion of the building was better executed than the 
 extensions, and although there is a difference of some fifty 
 
16 THE DUTCH COLONIAL HOUSE 
 
 years in the dates of these two parts of the building, this 
 does not account for the variety of workmanship. The 
 Dutch certainly believed in putting their best foot fore- 
 most, and we invariably find that the entrance fronts of 
 the houses are of better material and of better workman- 
 ship than the sides and rear, and where extensions are added 
 these commonly followed in workmanship the rear of the 
 house. It has been a source of a great deal of speculation 
 as to how in these valleys, which, fertile as they may have 
 been, could never have made the possessors of the small 
 farms into which they were divided very wealthy, the 
 farmers could have afforded to construct their buildings 
 of materials so finely executed. The stonework in the main 
 fronts of these buildings was beautifully cut, carefully 
 squared, with a finely finished surface, and laid so close as 
 hardly to require mortar.. The sides and backs of the 
 buildings were also laid of squared stone, but of much 
 rougher surface, and with a much wider joint, needing no 
 such careful surfacing of the top and bottom as did the 
 better finished ones. The stones vary in color from a rich 
 purplish red to a light brownish yellow, and while the 
 courses are as a rule kept at uniform heights, the stones 
 are all sorts of different lengths, although they are always 
 laid to retain the bond; that is to say, each stone overlaps 
 the ones above and below it and no two vertical joints come 
 on the same line. Now-a-days the effort is always made 
 

Octagonal porch columns supporting the overhang on the Lydecker homestead 
 
 Englewood, N. J. 
 
 A modern house two stories high with gambrel roof and Dutch materials 
 
MATERIALS 17 
 
 to make window-sills of a single piece in masonry houses 
 of any kind, but in the older houses, while sometimes full 
 stone sills were built in, as a rule the window openings were 
 simply punched through the wall, and no especial provision 
 made for sills. This was distinctly bad practice, since rain 
 running over the top of the upper joints, especially with- 
 out cement mortar, washes out the crevices and makes the 
 walls leak. But the most curious feature to be observed 
 in the stonework Was the fact that stone lintels were un- 
 common, their places being taken by hewn chestnut or oak 
 beams. In looking at the photograph of the end of the 
 Westervelt house, we find what is apparently a lintel with 
 a carved key block; as a matter of fact it is merely of 
 board, covering the rough wooden lintel, and painted and 
 sanded to imitate stone. This feature was not unique in 
 the Westervelt house, but was common practice in all the 
 stone farmhouses, and indeed in Colonial stone houses in 
 all parts of the country, and I have observed similar 
 methods of treatment of the lintels in localities as far sep- 
 arated as Germantown and North Carolina. 
 
 The shingles used were always hand-split shingles, and 
 of great durability, the original shingles in many cases still 
 being in good, condition after one hundred years of use. 
 To the roughness of their surfaces, especially when white- 
 washed, may be attributed the interesting character of the 
 frame Dutch work. The stucco that the builders used, on 
 
18 THE DUTCH COLONIAL HOUSE 
 
 the other hand, was a very perishable material, similar to 
 the old-fashioned lime plaster of our interiors, and was 
 in constant need of repairs, especially at the bottom, 
 which was not fully protected by the overhanging roofs. 
 These repairs were concealed by the lavish use of white- 
 wash. 
 
 Another of the reasons for the very picturesque quality 
 of many of these old houses is to be found in their lovely 
 color schemes, which were again the result, not of fore- 
 thought, but of a happy limitation in the choice of materials. 
 We all know the dull blue green of the blinds; this was not 
 their original color, but is simply the fading out of the 
 most brilliant of all greens — so-called Paris green, or oxide 
 of copper, which was the only cheap green then available. 
 That and whitewash and red oxide of iron were about the 
 only colors they had at hand, and were we to use these 
 colors as the Dutch must have used them one hundred 
 years ago, the effect would be startling in the extreme. 
 The oxide of iron paint is a brilliant vermillion; white- 
 wash, about the whitest white known; and the green, a raw 
 pea green. Time has softened these colors into harmony, 
 not only with each other, but with the grayish black to 
 which the roofs have turned and the pleasant reds and 
 browns of the stonework, which was relieved by pointing 
 up with white mortar composed of lime and sand. Now 
 we consciously imitate these colors, and seek to produce 
 
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Alfred Busselle, architect 
 The Marie house at Chappaqua, N. Y. — stone, stucco and shingles 
 
 An old Dutch house with the same combination of materials as the modern house 
 
 above 
 
MATERIALS 19 
 
 and sometimes actually do produce the quiet and yet rather 
 daring harmonies of the old color schemes. 
 
 The modern houses of so-called Dutch character are for 
 various reasons quite different from the genuine old ones, 
 the principal one being in the roof shape, as will be ex- 
 plained in a subsequent chapter; but not a small part of 
 the change lies in the fact that we have unconsciously 
 adopted into our flock of Dutch prototypes a number 
 drawn from other sources. The big round columns, for 
 example, used by Mr. Keen in the Woodmere Land Com- 
 pany's office, and by Mr. Gardner, have no place in the 
 strictly Dutch type, but are adaptations from any one of 
 three possible sources, of which the well-known Italian 
 stucco columns used for supporting trellises in the vine- 
 yards are the most probable; although the other two are 
 both American types. It was not uncommon in eastern 
 Pennsylvania to find the lower story of farm barns used 
 as wagon sheds, and the upper stories supported on fat 
 stuccoed columns; while the illustration of the old house 
 on the Bayou St. John at New Orleans, illustrated in this 
 chapter, is a familiar Southern type which may have been 
 incorporated, perhaps unconsciously, into the modern work. 
 These big columns have become almost a distinctive feature 
 of the type of current architecture generally classed as 
 "Dutch," although I must confess that with a few excep- 
 tions, most of it, including my own work, shows little re- 
 
20 THE DUTCH COLONIAL HOUSE 
 
 semblance to the original style whose name it bears. The 
 most we can claim for the modern work is that it is, to 
 some extent at least, Dutch in spirit, and the sort of thing 
 which the Dutch architects might have done had they hap- 
 pened to think of it. It is a fact that none of the other 
 Colonial types was handled by the designers with anything 
 like the freedom from traditional precedent that the Dutch 
 work showed, and it is because the modern interpreters of 
 the Dutch work have not hesitated to use the style with the 
 same freedom, that makes some of the modern so-called 
 Dutch houses interesting and picturesque. About the 
 only thing which is really a common meeting-ground in 
 both the old and the new work, is the use of a gambrel roof, 
 and a certain picturesque and informal method of treat- 
 ment in which perhaps lies its strongest claim, not to sim- 
 ilarity, but to a continuation of the traditions. Much of 
 the modem work bears a closer resemblance to the gambrel- 
 roofed brick houses at Chesterfield, Maryland, than it does 
 to the genuine Dutch architecture of Long Island and 
 New Jersey, in proportion and in material. 
 
 The Graeme house at Englewood has followed the Dutch 
 materials, although in proportion it is more nearly like the 
 New England type, but the stone gable ends and chimneys, 
 the stucco front and rear, and the gambrel roof, are suf- 
 ficient to indicate that its genesis is Dutch, although a 
 two-story Dutch house of the old period probably never 
 
MATERIALS 21 
 
 had its full wall height extending through the second story. 
 
 The Woodmere Land Company's office, designed by Mr. 
 Charles Barton Keen, has the ground floor of stucco, with 
 white shingle gable ends and dormers, and a brown shingle 
 roof, and while it is one of the best examples of what we 
 loosely call "Dutch," it is in detail much more like the 
 Pennsylvania Colonial than the genuine Dutch work. 
 The projecting roof with its long sweeping curve is here 
 transformed into a break; the hood over the entrance door 
 is a thing unknown in the old work, and in its stucco form 
 and supported on brackets, is purely a Pennsylvania devel- 
 opment. Mr. Keen has confined himself in the wall sur- 
 faces to two materials, stucco and shingles, painted white, 
 diversifying the surface by shutters of solid pattern, and 
 a considerable number of breaks in the plan; and his color 
 scheme is of three colors only, white for the shingles, a 
 slightly yellowish white for the stucco, and a soft brown for 
 the roof. 
 
 It may be interesting to note at this time that while the 
 old stucco in Pennsylvania had a very rough surface, the 
 New Jersey variety was troweled smooth, like a white- 
 finished plaster wall, and of the two the modern architects 
 have almost unanimously adopted the rougher surface as 
 the more suitable for the design. The method of applica- 
 tion most in vogue is to spatter it on with a brush-broom, 
 no troweling being applied to the upper coat. The dead 
 
22 THE DUTCH COLONIAL HOUSE 
 
 white of the older work is almost impossible to get to-day, 
 not because the same materials are not at hand, but because 
 *they are of little permanence. We hesitate a long time 
 before using plaster outside, and while there are various 
 white cements on the market, there are none of them quite 
 as white as plaster, and they all have, when used without 
 the addition of coloring matter of some kind, a slight bluish 
 cast which makes a disagreeable surface. We generally 
 get rid of this color by mixing a little yellow ochre with 
 the cement mortar, which turns the mixture a light ivory 
 if used with white cement; or, when ordinary cement is 
 used, a warm buff is the result. Curiously enough the 
 color of the sand seems to have little effect on the color of 
 stucco; yellow seashore sand and red river sand do not, as 
 one would naturally suppose, respectively make a gray or 
 brown stucco, but each with ordinary cement makes a gray 
 color, which without a little yellow in it is rather dreary 
 and forbidding. 
 
 Hand-split shingles, similar to those in the old houses, 
 are neither particularly difficult to obtain, nor especially ex- 
 pensive, and how good the effect of these shingles can be 
 may be judged by the Speer house at X<os Angeles, of 
 which Messrs. Myron Hunt and Elmer Grey were the 
 architects. Most of the modern shingles of this type are 
 cypress, and while their cost per thousand is much greater 
 than that of the ordinary shingles, each shingle covers so 
 
MATERIALS 23 
 
 much more space that the cost is by no means prohibitive. 
 For example, a good quality red cedar shingle, sixteen 
 inches long, costs, in the neighborhood of New York, $7.50 
 a thousand, or three-quarters of a cent apiece, and covers 
 on the wall a space three and a half inches wide and four 
 and a half inches high — let us say sixteen square inches. 
 The hand-rived shingles are seven inches wide and twenty- 
 four inches long; they lost $22.50 a thousand at New 
 York, and cover seventy square inches when laid ten inches 
 to the weather; in other words they cost perhaps three 
 times as much each, and cover four times as much space, 
 and the labor of laying them is approximately the same. 
 The effect with them is of course incomparably better than 
 with the smoother sawn shingle. 
 
 Several other houses illustrated in this chapter show vari- 
 ous combinations of materials for the first story; the house 
 at Hewlett, for example, having gray brick piers with red 
 brick panels below the triple windows in the first story; and 
 a stucco extension. In the Marie house stone is used in 
 connection with stucco in the first story, and shingles above. 
 These combinations of materials are of course somewhat 
 different from that of the Dutch buildings, but I think no 
 one can deny that they are suitable for their uses and 
 attractive in themselves. The methods of construction 
 used in these houses are not very different from those em- 
 ployed by the Dutch builders, in that the walls in most 
 
24 THE DUTCH COLONIAL HOUSE 
 
 cases are of masonry up to the second floor level, and above 
 that of frame, although now the masonry, instead of being 
 stone, is terra cotta blocks covered with stucco, the stone 
 being too expensive to cut and lay and too difficult to ob- 
 tain to permit its use. The natural substitutes are, of 
 course, the manufactured materials, terra cotta, cement and 
 brick. The interior walls and floors in all these houses are 
 of frame, and the roofs are of shingles, as was the case in 
 the old construction, and this may not be a bad place to 
 say a few words about the so-called superior construction 
 of Colonial days. 
 
 Nothing is more common, in talking of old houses, than 
 to hear someone say, "I have just bought an old house. 
 It is magnificently constructed. You know they really 
 used to know how to build in those days; they put the tim- 
 ber in them, such as we, with our slip-shod, cheap build- 
 ing, do not do." This in spite of the fact that the supposi- 
 titious house which has been bought has probably all of its 
 floors sloping to various corners, the walls full of cracks, 
 and no two doors and windows at the same level. It is 
 true that our ancestors did use better materials; kiln-dry- 
 ing was then unheard of, and it was customary, when a 
 man wanted to build his house, to go out into the woods 
 and chop down such trees as were suitable; he hewed them 
 out by hand, and left them to air-dry for a year or two 
 before he started work; but when he came to put his house 
 
MATERIALS 25 
 
 together, that was where he fell short. He used heavy 
 timber, it is true, but he did not use it in the right way; 
 his floor beams were perhaps six inches by ten inches, 
 spaced three feet apart, but laid with the flat side upper- 
 most. Now the strength of a beam varies directly with its 
 depth, and a two-inch by ten-inch beam on its edge is much 
 more rigid than a six-inch by ten-inch on its side. The six- 
 inch by ten-inch will sag of its own weight, where the two- 
 inch by ten-inch will not sag under a load of perhaps a ton. 
 Besides this, a number of smaller beams placed compara- 
 tively close together make much better construction than a 
 few larger ones spaced further apart; the floor is more 
 nearly level, windows and doors are less liable to stick 
 because of sagging floors or ceilings, and partitions resting 
 on these beams do not get so far out of line. In one old 
 house at Farmington, Connecticut, I measured up the dif- 
 ference in level at the two ends of a room, and found that 
 one end was four inches lower than the other. This was 
 not the result of time rotting out the ends of the beams, 
 but was there from the beginning, as was proven by the 
 fact that the wainscot, put in when the house was built, 
 fitted the wall perfectly, and all the moldings and panels 
 were larger at one end of the room than at the other, in 
 order to conceal as far as possible the difference. The 
 same slovenly, or perhaps we had better say ignorant, 
 methods were observable at the most important part of a 
 
26 THE DUTCH COLONIAL HOUSE 
 
 frame house, where the sill rests on the foundation Wall. 
 ~No provision was made to prevent dampness from enter- 
 ing the sill and rotting it out; not infrequently it rested 
 directly on the ground and the only reason that so many 
 of the old houses have stood up until to-day is because the 
 timber was thoroughly seasoned oak or chestnut, which is 
 perhaps as little liable to decay as any wood. Contrary 
 to the general belief, I have no hesitation in asserting that 
 any reasonably well-built frame house of the present time, 
 except for the shingles, will last as long with as few repairs 
 as those of the Colonial times, and if hand-rived cypress 
 shingles are used, even that weak spot is avoided. 
 
 However, the era of frame construction will soon be at 
 an end; the price of lumber is steadily advancing, while 
 the price of cement has experienced a steady decline, and 
 before many years we will have seen the last of frame con- 
 struction in those districts not immediately contiguous to 
 what is left of our forests. The forerunner of those days 
 is the very lovely house at Riverdale, designed by Robert 
 Gardner, illustrated in this chapter, which is entirely of fire- 
 proof construction. The first-story walls of this building 
 are of stone of excellent shape and beautifully laid; the 
 upper walls are of terra cotta blocks, covered with cement 
 stucco; the roof is of flat shingle tile, which is, to my way 
 of thinking, of all tiles the best suited to moderate-sized 
 country houses, and the floors are of a combination of terra 
 
MATERIALS 27 
 
 cotta and reinforced concrete construction. That this need 
 not necessarily eliminate the Dutch Colonial type from the 
 list of possible styles from which to draw, in the days when 
 masonry construction is universal, is better proven by such 
 a concrete example as this house than by all the abstract 
 arguments which we can bring to bear. The building is 
 evidently inspired by Dutch methods, although they are 
 handled in the freest possible way, and bear at most a very 
 superficial resemblance to the prototypes; but when archi- 
 tecture becomes reduced to mere literal copying of historic 
 methods, its future is small indeed, and the true life and 
 growth of an architectural style is dependent upon its 
 treatment in just such a. manner, both as to materials and 
 to design, as Mr. Gardner has used in this most satisfying 
 residence. 
 
The treatment of the Roof 
 
 THE crucial point in the design of any Dutch 
 house lies in the treatment of the roof. The 
 principal cause of the charm of the old Dutch 
 houses was, as already explained, their lovely soft roof 
 lines, and these have been rarely reproduced with anything 
 like exactitude in current work. The reason for this may 
 he most readily explained by reference to the accompany- 
 
 zxvMiBz neaaos 
 ■y : o"fieainnB£. 
 
 ing diagram, which should be compared with the end ele- 
 vation of the Demarest hbuse. It will be seen that only a 
 comparatively small portion of the second story has a flat 
 ceiling; the rest slopes down to within two or three feet of 
 the floor, and dormers (indicated by dotted lines) intended 
 
A New England gambrel roof on the old library at Stonington, Conn. 
 
 A gambrel roof on the main house and single-pitched roof on extension 
 
A summer kitchen of shingles, clapboards and stone. The front was once of 
 
 stucco 
 
 ... , 'rrSf 
 
 A detail showing old stonework and wooden lintels over windows 
 
THE TREATMENT OF THE ROOF 
 
 29 
 
 to light this second story were they sufficiently high to 
 allow anyone to walk into them without hitting his head, 
 would be very long at the top and would have triangular 
 shaped sides, interfering materially with the lighting of the 
 rooms behind them and cutting off possible air currents. 
 Of course the steeper the lower part of the roof is made, 
 the shorter is the distance from the window to the point 
 
 
 where the side of the dormer intersects with the sloping 
 wall of the room. This flat roof was a marked character- 
 istic of Dutch work and it is very seldom that one of the 
 Dutch farmhouses has a roof of anything like the character 
 that we find in the old library at Stonington, Connecticut, 
 or the farmhouse at Chesterfield, Maryland, a cross-section 
 of which is shown in the second diagram. One can. readily 
 understand from this diagram how much more available 
 space there is under the same roof. In the old house at 
 Annapolis, Maryland, we find both the lower and upper 
 
30 THE DUTCH COLONIAL HOUSE 
 
 portions made still sharper, and the cross-section shows 
 how a full square room, with none of the walls sloping, 
 may be obtained on the second story, and very fair room 
 on the third story. 
 
 Any dormer, however, in a roof of this character, where 
 the interior wall is brought back from the face of the win- 
 dow, leaving a small triangular space in the walls, is still 
 placed in what appears a recess from the interior of the 
 room, which to some minds adds picturesqueness, and to 
 others appears awkward. There are various methods 
 devised for -taking care of this difficulty: one is to extend 
 the window-sill back to the face of the wall of the rest of 
 the room, so that the window itself is set in a deep recess, 
 such as we sometimes find in houses of stone construction, 
 making a window-seat below it; sometimes the window 
 itself is set back flush with the face of the interior wall, 
 letting the roof project beyond it at the bottom; and some- 
 times a compromise between the two is effected, in which 
 the upper part of the dormer projects beyond the roof and 
 the lower part is set back. Illustrations in this chapter 
 show all of these various methods, and as to a choice be- 
 tween them, it may be said that too much depends upon 
 the design of the rest of the house to give any definite 
 advice. The recessed or cut-in dormers are comparatively 
 inconspicuous and can be used to supplement the more 
 usual type, where the plan of the second story demands 
 
THE TREATMENT OF THE ROOF 
 
 31 
 
 light and an additional dormer would confuse the com- 
 position of the exterior. This three-cornered space, as 
 shown in the third diagram, is not necessarily wasted; 
 shallow closets could be put in, although closets of this 
 shape do not give very good hanging space. Chests of 
 drawers in which the drawers get deeper at the bottom than 
 
 '/MKMXfiBf] 
 
 Jcasfia' 
 
 they are at the top give an excellent method of utilizing it; 
 and where, as suggested above, the window-sill is extended 
 to the wall line, an excellent shoe box can be made by hing- 
 ing the sill to lift up. 
 
 Of the three different types of roof illustrated by the 
 diagrams above, the third scheme is often required by the 
 modern housekeeper who needs some servants' quarters — 
 which of course Dutch settlers never had — as considerable 
 space is available for various rooms in the third story. 
 
32 THE DUTCH COLONIAL HOUSE 
 
 Practically all of the new houses of the Dutch type have 
 rooms of some sort in the third story, and these are by no 
 means as uncomfortable as they would appear to be from 
 the exterior. All of them have fair-sized windows in the 
 rear. Some have windows in both the front and rear, per- 
 mitting through ventilation of the rooms. It is often 
 argued that these servants' quarters must be very hot, and 
 in fact that all the bedrooms of the Dutch houses must be 
 uncomfortably warm, because they lie under the roof." It 
 is of course true that rooms in the third story are warmer 
 than those of the first or second, but it is no more true than 
 it is with any other type of house, since the heat of the 
 third story is due not so much to the direct warming of the 
 rooms by the sun on the roof, as to the fact that all 
 the warm air in the house rises to the third story through the 
 stairways and halls, and generally has no means of exit 
 given it. If in the ceiling of the third-story rooms 
 registers are placed, connecting with ventilators in the roof, 
 or if the small three-cornered space over the tops of the 
 third-story ceilings is ventilated at either end, the heat 
 which rises to the third story will have a chance to escape, 
 and an air current thus passes constantly through the 
 house in a vertical direction. If the rooms in the third 
 story are well insulated, say by eel-grass quilt or hair felt, 
 or by some other material known to make good insulation, 
 the rooms will be no more liable to become heated from the 
 
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Hays & Hoadley, architects 
 
 The Dutch roof raised to the third story on the residence of Dr. Teeter 
 
 Englewood, N. J. 
 
 Charles Barton Keen, architect 
 
 A house at Woodmerej L. I., with interesting window and chimney 
 
 treatments 
 
THE TREATMENT OF THE ROOF 33 
 
 direct rays of the sun than any other part of the house. 
 The way in which I have generally applied this insulation 
 is to nail it between the beams before the lath is put on, 
 and I have found it very effective in cooling the third 
 story, even where the windows are rather small and not 
 close to the tops of the rooms. Insulation and ventilation, 
 as described here for the third story of Dutch houses, might 
 be used with advantage on all third stories, and were it so 
 used the difficulties of the servant question would be found 
 to be very much less. Adequate provision for servants in 
 the shape of comfortable sleeping-rooms is now-a-days re- 
 quired, not only for humanitarian reasons, but because the 
 demand for competent servants is so great that they can 
 always get positions where they are comfortable; and while 
 in a book of this character the observation may be out of 
 place, I have invariably found that clients who were care- 
 less of the comfort of their servants were the ones who 
 complained most about the difficulties of getting them and 
 keeping them. In his "Yellow Plush Papers," Thackeray 
 says that "Jeames used to sleep three in a bed and six in 
 a room, and was required to appear for duty, neat, washed 
 and well groomed." It is no easier for servants to dress 
 and take care of themselves in inadequate space than it is 
 for any of the rest of us, and in this day when for economic 
 reasons employers are trying to make their factories well 
 lighted and ventilated because they find that this gives 
 
34 THE DUTCH COLONIAL HOUSE 
 
 increased efficiency, so housekeepers should be intelligent 
 enough to recognize that a hot, stuffy and ill-ventilated 
 room affects the physical condition of the maid, so that she 
 cannot do a full day's work. I believe it is as thoroughly 
 a part of the architect's duty to look after the practical 
 working of a household in such details as this as it is to 
 design an attractive and artistic exterior, and every archi- 
 tect who is worth his salt feels the same way about the 
 matter. 
 
 To proceed with the subject of keeping the rooms under 
 the roof cool, the impression that the second-story rooms 
 of a Dutch house are any warmer than those of any other 
 type of building of frame construction, is a mistaken one. 
 The lower part of the roof is constructed in precisely the 
 same manner as are the vertical walls; that is, the frame- 
 work is covered on the outside with layers of boards, build- 
 ing-paper and shingles, and plastered on the inside. Now 
 it cannot possibly make any difference as regards the 
 transmission of heat through this wall whether it stands at 
 ninety degrees with the floors, or at eighty, and in those 
 houses (to return to the third diagram) where the exposed 
 walls of the interior are vertical and there is a triangular 
 space under the roof, the rooms are actually cooler than in 
 the typical Colonial building, because they have two walls 
 between them and the sun. Roofs such as these have not, 
 of course, the grace and charm of the flatter and purely 
 
THE TREATMENT OF THE ROOF 35 
 
 Dutch type, but they do form a very admirable compro- 
 mise between the full two-story house and the lower Dutch 
 type, and still give plenty of room in the second story. 
 
 The old Dutch farmhouses were undoubtedly warm, 
 since they had no windows whatever on the sides, and com- 
 paratively small ones on the ends. The main body of the 
 Vreeland house, for example, is about fifty feet long; the 
 first story has a ceiling nine feet or nine feet and six inches 
 high, and above that is a long roof entirely without 
 dormers. As this is one of the few old houses which has 
 been preserved in practically its original condition, the 
 curious device employed for securing circulation of air is 
 worth recording. The lower story of the house is, as will 
 be seen in the succeeding chapter on interior work, ex- 
 quisitely detailed; arriving at the head of the stairs upon 
 the second floor, the whole framework of the house is ex- 
 posed, much as was the interior of an old barn; the hewn 
 oak posts and rafters, built without knowledge of truss 
 construction but still forming a sort of truss, are absolutely 
 uncovered, but at each end of the house two square rooms 
 are partitioned off, plastered and left without ceilings. 
 Looking at the end elevation of the building, we find three 
 small windows at the top, two of which come directly in 
 front of the chimneys, but the chimneys are built suffi- 
 ciently far back so that they still permit some light and air 
 to enter the interior. As the whole top was open from end 
 
36 THE DUTCH COLONIAL HOUSE 
 
 to end, there was a free circulation of air permitted through 
 the entire house, and a certain amount of coolness was thus 
 gained at the expense of privacy. I am unable to say with 
 any certainty as to whether this was characteristic of all 
 the old houses or not; of course, in many of them sleeping- 
 rooms were provided on the ground floor, but for the multi- 
 tudinous children of our ancestors' families, considerable 
 accommodation had to be provided, and in the Vreeland 
 house it was obtained as above described. 
 
 The requirements of living in the earlier days provided 
 for a number of rooms in the first story in excess of those 
 above stairs, because in the first place certain bedrooms 
 were put on the first story; in the second, the people 
 doubled up a lot more than they are inclined to do now; 
 and third, because there were no servants' rooms. It is 
 not infrequent to find on the ground floor of the old houses 
 a parlor, a sitting-room, a dining-room, a kitchen, one or 
 two bedrooms, and a store room big enough to be really 
 called a room and not a closet; while on the second floor 
 two bedrooms were often the rule, and the presence of four 
 was a luxury. Now-a-days the same family would require a 
 living-room, dining-room, kitchen, a small pantry, and 
 possibly a study, while in the second floor they would want 
 four bedrooms and a couple of bathrooms, besides maids' 
 rooms somewhere in the house. An economical distribu- 
 tion of space requires, therefore, that the second story shall 
 
Ernest F. Guilbert, architect 
 A gable in the second story instead of dormers. Mr. Guilbert's residence at 
 
 Newark, N. J. 
 
 Theodore Blake, architect 
 A house at Greenwich, Conn., with two full stories 
 
A house at Scarsdale, N. Y. Dormers half recessed and half projecting 
 
 A modern edition of the late Dutch work at Garden City, L. I. 
 
The Lady Moody house at Gravesend, L. I. Stucco on the first story and 
 
 shingles ahove 
 
 m^' 
 
 em 
 
 BWgg'V , *u ' WH i > ' j ] wtjwiM.fc i ^ HaMftwi;<Mig.i'Kgag^^*r\'y:v: y mi-K,^7« »n 
 
 A modern cottage with Dutch roof and big columns supporting a pergola-piazza 
 
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THE TREATMENT OF THE ROOF 37 
 
 be practically as large as the first, and the maids' rooms as 
 a rule are pushed up into the third story. The problem 
 facing our architects then, when they attempt to work in 
 the Dutch style, is to get a second story which shall be 
 adequately lighted and ventilated, and a third story which, 
 though small, will still contain a number of servants' rooms. 
 In the Teeter house and the house at Greenwich, this dif- 
 ficulty has been frankly met bv putting two full stories 
 below the roof, and the effect is rather that of New Eng- 
 land Colonial than of a Dutch Colonial house, although in 
 the Teeter house the Dutch roof shape, with its swinging 
 curve, has been carefully preserved. In most of the other 
 modern houses which can be roughly classified as Dutch, 
 the steeper pitch similar to the New England and Mary- 
 land houses illustrated above, has been adapted success- 
 fully, preserving a very considerable proportion of the 
 space, and the problem of the roof has been reduced to an 
 attempt to discover some method of adequately lighting 
 the second story without cutting up the roof so much that 
 its original shape should be entirely lost. 
 
 In the very charming little house at Great Neck , de- 
 signed by Forman and Light, the architects have made a 
 serious attempt to preserve a generally Dutch character, 
 and have succeeded in getting a sufficiency of light into the 
 second story by using very wide dormers without cutting 
 the roof up so that its shape is entirelv lost. This house, 
 
38 THE DUTCH COLONIAL HOUSE 
 
 by the way, is one of the most interesting of those which 
 have been designed in the Dutch style, since certain of its 
 motives are entirely foreign to really Dutch work, while 
 other parts of it resemble the original style more closely 
 than any other modern house of which I have knowledge. 
 The outside chimney for example, was, as far as I know, 
 not a feature of any Colonial house, probably because the 
 craftsmen of those days, limited in their knowledge, and 
 without proper materials, were unable to make the junc- 
 ture between the mason work of the chimney and the frame 
 wall weatherproof. The piazza, too, has the large round 
 columns which have come to be almost a standard feature 
 of present-day Dutch work, with the ends of the roof beams 
 projecting, and sawn in a manner reminiscent of the Italian 
 pergola, a resemblance which is strengthened by the trellis 
 at the ends of the piazzas. On the other hand, the lower 
 part of the front below the hood has exactly the quality 
 of Dutch work, and the interesting way in which the rake- 
 molding, forming a sort of cornice on the gable ends, is 
 painted black, has plenty of good examples from one hun- 
 dred years ago. 
 
 Quite a common method of lighting the upper story is 
 that shown in the Barber house, where a single very wide 
 dormer takes in three rooms in the interior, and is roofed 
 by a continuation of the upper slope, the edgre being faced 
 with a cornice relieved by small brackets Dlaced each side 
 
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 George Nichols, architect 
 
 A house with varied roof lines at Colonia, N- J. 
 
 Plans in text Forman & Light, architects 
 
 A modern house with typically Dutch roof at Kensington, L. I. 
 
THE TREATMENT OF THE ROOF 39 
 
 of the windows. The porch and piazza are of a type not 
 dissimilar from that of the Great Neck house, and the 
 woodwork of the whole first story is stained brown, but the 
 treatment of the porch and piazzas suggests modern Eng- 
 lish methods rather than truly Dutch ones, and the roof 
 slopes resemble more nearly those of the Annapolis house 
 than the New Jersey type, although the lower ends are 
 worked with a curve as were the original ones. Yet the 
 house has evidently been inspired in the main by Dutch 
 methods, and, in spite of its many variations from type, is 
 an excellent example of how far from the traditional we 
 may go and still get results which belong to the same 
 general family and are in themselves artistic adaptations. 
 
 The residence of Joseph Norwood at Columbia, South 
 Carolina, has about it just a trace of Dutch ancestry. The 
 piazza and porch are like those of the Barber house, but 
 the method of lighting the second story is a different one. 
 Secondary gable ends have been introduced instead of the 
 long dormers, and where dormers were needed they were 
 made as inconspicuous as possible by staining them to 
 match the roof so as not to disturb the general roof 
 impression. 
 
 The Woodmere house, by Charles Barton Keen, has a 
 second-story treatment much like that of the Barber house, 
 but to light the third story another pair of small gables 
 has been added, and these have been so managed, partly 
 
40 THE BUTCH COLONIAL HOUSE 
 
 recessed and partly projecting, as not entirely to distract 
 the attention from the roof shape, which is and always must 
 be the dominant factor of the Dutch type of house. Like 
 the Great Neck house, this has an outside chimney, also 
 of stone, which fits extremely well with the balance of the 
 composition, and across the gable end at the second-story 
 level has been carried the so-called Germantown hood, 
 which was sometimes a feature of the older Dutch homes 
 as well as of the Pennsylvania ones. One of the amusing 
 features of this extraordinarily clever design is to be found 
 in the hoods over the second-story windows in the gables, 
 which, with the strong and heavy blinds, are characteristic 
 of Mr. Keen's delightfully picturesque houses. 
 
 Of course the most simple treatment is simply to run a 
 row of single dormers along the front and rear of these' 
 rooms. This was done in the house at Scarsdale Estates, 
 and in the farmhouse on the estate of Mrs. Robert Stafford 
 at Lloyd's Neck, rather more successfully in the second 
 case than in the former. The dormers on the Lloyd's Neck 
 house are placed rather high above the bottom of the roof 
 and appear slightly attenuated for their position, but those 
 in the Scarsdale Estates house are a little too close together, 
 and the photograph was taken on such a bright day that 
 the heavy shadows cast by the dormer roofs rather accentu- 
 ate this defect. The method of partly recessing and partly 
 projecting the windows has, in this Lloyd's Neck house, 
 
Mcllvain & Roberts, architects 
 Two secondary gables and a long dormer between, at Cynwyd, Pa. 
 
 Edwards & Walter, architects 
 
 An extreme modernization of the Dutch type 
 
THE TREATMENT OF THE ROOF 41 
 
 helped the interior, since the vertical wall surface of the 
 rooms is on a line with the dormer itself, and starts to slope 
 only at the point where the roof cuts across the side of the 
 dormer. 
 
 The house at Hewlett, and the Bull house, both illus- 
 trated in the chapter on Materials have s imil ar treatment 
 of the dormers, but with the rather abrupt transition from 
 the projecting to the recessed dormer disguised by a little 
 trellis Jeading up on either side of the windows from the 
 flower-boxes. 
 
 The house at Cynwyd, Pennsylvania, has a little differ- 
 ent method of treating the dormers, in which large gable- 
 roofed dormers are placed at either end of the house, 
 enclosing a long dormer in the center. This forms a com- 
 position which in itself is very agreeable, although it 
 naturally makes such an important motive that it rather 
 distracts attention from the main roof itself. The archi- 
 tect of this house has, in order to get sufficient room in his 
 second floor, frankly projected this story over the piazza, 
 a method which is usually a complete failure, but in this 
 case seems to be a striking success. The reason for this 
 success is, I believe, to be found in the fact that he has 
 carried his stone side walls out to the face of the piazza, 
 opening the piazza up by means of low wide arches at each 
 end, and supporting the center of the house on two big, 
 round, stuccoed columns. This is a trick of design which 
 
42 THE DUTCH COLONIAL HOUSE 
 
 seems to be peculiar to Philadelphia architects, and one 
 which might be adopted with advantage in many cases 
 when the overhang of the second story above the piazza 
 makes the whole building seem insecure and insufficiently 
 supported. The beautiful stonework of this house com- 
 mands respectful attention. Philadelphia is fortunate in 
 having in its neighborhood a great deal of stone which 
 readily splits up into small horizontal layers and which, 
 when laid flat in a heavy bed of mortar and pointed up with 
 wide white joints, is extremely effective. 
 
 As before remarked, the last development of the true 
 Dutch style was the detaching of the piazza roof from the 
 roof of the main house, and introducing a row of low win- 
 dows between the two. The house at Garden City was de- 
 signed to retain the picturesque effect of this style, but 
 increasing the window sizes to get more light in the second 
 story than could possibly be obtained from the little win- 
 dows of the type. This Garden City house has also fol- 
 lowed the Dutch work in the association of brick, stucco 
 and shingles in the same exterior, and although the shingled 
 wing appears somewhat detached from the rest of the 
 house, it still has much the interest of the kitchen extensions 
 so common in the older work; in this case it is used for a 
 living-room, the ceiling raised completely up to the rafters. 
 
 A little further development in this last type of Dutch 
 house is the one at Larchmont, New York, designed by 
 
THE TREATMENT OF THE ROOF 43 
 
 Messrs. Ewing and Chappell, in which the central part of 
 the whole roof has been raised so as to give windows of the 
 full size across the front, and the piazza has been developed 
 with pairs of columns with trellis between them. 
 
 Of course certain exigencies of plan demand even fuller 
 lighting of the second story than can be obtained in any 
 of the preceding methods, and the house at Colonia, New 
 Jersey, designed by Mr. George Nichols, as well as the 
 house at Newark, designed by Mr. Ernest Guilbert for 
 his own occupancy, are unusually good examples of how 
 such informalism in the treatment of the roof can be suc- 
 cessfully accomplished. The Colonia house has a very 
 high central portion with a good third story, while lower 
 wings at either end have roofs of two distinct shapes. The 
 building as a whole is so different from the accepted type 
 as to be almost bizarre, but it is an unusually attractive 
 and well-designed house. Mr. Guilbert's home has for its 
 principal feature a great two-story room, lighted by the 
 studio window at the side of the gable, and in the rear by two 
 dormers, one perched on top of the other, a composition 
 which would not on paper commend itself as satisfactory, 
 but which as executed leaves little to be desired. This 
 house is very much more broken up by projections and 
 dormers than most of the Dutch work, which as a rule de- 
 pends for its success upon absolute simplicity of outline, 
 and the complication of detail in this way requires an ex- 
 
44 THE DUTCH COLONIAL HOUSE 
 
 ceedingly clever man to make it successful. Most archi- 
 tects with a problem like this before them would have 
 destroyed all the sense of peace and quiet which is the 
 distinctive feature of the Guilbert house, but in spite of the 
 crowd of secondary motives which succeed in making each 
 little portion of the house individually interesting, the 
 building forms a single unified whole, possibly because of 
 the reduction of its color scheme to white walls and a brown 
 roof. 
 
 A more extraordinary contrast to this than the cottage 
 of Miss Maria Grey at Fox Point, Wisconsin, could hardly 
 be imagined; here the roof has been frankly permitted to 
 dominate the whole scheme, a single small dormer over the 
 entrance porch being the only feature which breaks up its 
 quiet and restful lines. The architect has relied abso- 
 lutely upon the proportion of the roof and the accent of 
 the chimney to secure his result ; of ornament there is none, 
 and yet the house is no less successful than any of the 
 others. * 
 
 In considering the roof from the standpoint of design 
 then, we must first think of its shape as seen from the end, 
 so that the proportion of the upper and the lower slopes 
 may be agreeable, and then discover some means of lighting 
 the second story without detracting too much from the 
 appearance of the house. The exigencies of the plan all 
 largely determine just what this means shall be, and in 
 
Elmer Grey, architect 
 The simplest possible roof treatment. House at Fox Point, Wis. 
 
 Lionel Moses, II., architect 
 A gardener's cottage with a row of dormers lighting the second story 
 
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THE TREATMENT OF THE ROOF 45 
 
 looking over the illustrations included in this chapter, I 
 fail to find that any one method has much advantage over 
 the others. The Colonial scheme of lighting the second 
 story was, of course, hy dormer windows with peaked raft- 
 ers when any dormers were employed at all. They were 
 generally three in number and placed symmetrically, but 
 dormers like this do not come anywhere near fulfilling the 
 requirements of modern life as to light and air, and we 
 must accordingly seek some further means of lighting the 
 upper stories. This may be done either by secondary 
 gables, which, unless very carefully handled, confuse the 
 composition, or by long dormers covered by an extension 
 of the upper portion of the roof, or by some combination 
 of these means. The recessing of the dormer, either par- 
 tially or completely, is a way of getting the window flush 
 with the interior wall that is sometimes adopted, but put- 
 ting any considerable number of these across the front of 
 a house cuts the roof to pieces in a most unpleasant manner. 
 As used in the Orr house, illustrated in the chapter on 
 Plan, one at either side of the square projecting dormer 
 they are not disagreeable, but this is about the extent of 
 their utility. Secondary gables, such as are found in the 
 Guilbert house and the Norwood house, are dangerous in 
 the extreme, and, unless designed by a master hand, de- 
 stroy the simple lines which in designing a Dutch house 
 the architect so laboriously strives to build up. I for one 
 
46 THE DUTCH COLONIAL HOUSE 
 
 am frankly afraid to use them, and I think in general the 
 less evident the projections from the roof are in the Dutch 
 type of house, the better the scheme works out. 
 
Doors and Windows 
 
 FROM time immemorial in any style of architecture 
 some special treatment has been considered neces- 
 sary for the doorway. This feeling is partly in- 
 spired by the natural desire to put the best foot forward 
 and make the entrance to the house as agreeable as possible, 
 but another and more cogent reason is to attract the atten- 
 tion of anyone approaching the building, to the point of 
 entrance. Of course, in an ordinary white house the easiest 
 way to do this would be to paint the door a different and 
 striking color, and, as a matter of fact, doors are very fre- 
 quently painted green when the rest of the trim and even 
 the shutters are white. However, the usual way is to frame 
 the door with some composition of interesting motives which 
 shall focus the interest of anyone approaching the house 
 upon it, and this decoration must be carried beyond that of 
 any other part of the building, so that there shall be no con- 
 fusion as to how the building shall be entered. In thus 
 treating the door the usual method is to employ motives 
 suitable to the building against which it rests, but reduced 
 to a smaller scale, since the doorway is the one portion which 
 is usually viewed from near by. Another requirement of 
 
 47 
 
48 THE DUTCH COLONIAL HOUSE 
 
 the doorway is that it should afford a shelter where people 
 waiting to enter the house may he to some extent protected 
 from the rain. Of course, in a great many houses the front 
 entrance is from the piazza, which often in the old Dutch 
 work, as in modem, extended completely across the front 
 of the building. This is probably not the best practice; the 
 piazza has been developed from Dutch times into a sort of 
 outdoor living-room, and it is just as desirable to have this 
 somewhat secluded from the entrance as it is to have any of 
 the rooms within the house entered from the hall and not 
 directly from outside. This practice was not uncommon in 
 Colonial times, and a doorway was frequently accessible 
 only from a small porch, which was, especially when there 
 was a sufficient overhang of the roof, reduced to a mere 
 frontispiece applied directly against the building. Another 
 reason for the embellishment of the doorway was that it 
 constituted a different problem from that of any of the 
 other openings in the older houses; usually opening into a 
 narrow hall which was lighted by side lights and a fan-light. 
 This grouping of motives in itself required some thought 
 as to their treatment, and the fact that there was only one 
 door where there were a great many windows, permitted a 
 considerable expense which would have been impossible 
 were it to have been repeated many times. 
 
 The earlier Dutch houses had front entrances marked in 
 no particular manner; either there was not sufficient ability 
 
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Windows grouped with columns between on the Bull house, 
 Tuckahoe, N. Y. 
 
 Plans in text 
 
 A recessed porch of pronounced modern type on the Orr house at 
 Garden City, L. I. 
 
DOORS AND WINDOWS 49 
 
 to design or execute the work, or the builders of the earlier 
 houses did not have the means sufficient to pay for it; but 
 the later of the Dutch houses invariably had front entrances 
 to which a good deal of attention had been paid. The nar- 
 row mullions between the doors and windows had pilasters 
 or small columns placed in front of them, with similar col- 
 umns and pilasters on either side of the side lights; below 
 the side lights were placed panels; and fan-lights, either 
 over the door itself,, or over the door and side lights both, 
 
 • 
 
 formed an important part of the composition. The older ' 
 trim was carved and decorated with the utmost of the very 
 considerable artistic skill that the biulders had, and the 
 resulting effects were comparable for beauty with the Co- 
 lonial work of any other part of the country, and with the 
 best that we have in these days been able to develop. 
 
 T,he fan-lights and side lights were always divided into 
 panes of glass arranged in a pattern of some kind either by 
 wooden bars — muntins, as they are called — or by leads ; and 
 it was a curious commentary upon the construction methods 
 of that day that people who knew so little of metal work 
 that the gutters were of hollowed-out wood, and who hardly 
 dared apply dormers because they did not know enough 
 to make them watertight, were able to execute the compli- 
 cated patterns of the Colonial leaded glass with such skill 
 and precision. The best of modern leaded glass is no more 
 neatly done, and as a rule less well designed, than the Co- 
 
50 THE DUTCH COLONIAL HOUSE 
 
 lonial work, and the most interesting little cast lead orna- 
 ments with which these Colonial designers were wont to 
 decorate the intersections of the leads are frequently copied 
 to-day without any variation. 
 
 The fan-lights, which are so attractive and important a 
 feature of the Colonial doors, are not so much used to-day 
 because we are unable to get the door, the transom bar 
 above it, the fan-light and the trim above the fan-light,' in 
 the height of an ordinary story, although our stories are 
 about the same as were those in the Colonial houses. They 
 economized- the space by making the doors very short; a 
 door six feet in height was not uncommon, and I would say 
 that about six feet and four inches was the average, while 
 now, from six feet and eight inches to seven feet in height 
 is considered about as low as a door should be made. 
 
 Another interesting feature of Colonial work was the 
 manner in which the doors themselves were paneled. In the 
 older doors illustrated in this chapter, two of the exterior 
 ones are unfortunately concealed by screens, but these were 
 similar to the interior door of the Vreeland house; that is, 
 there were two small panels above, two rather -long panels 
 in the center, and two rather short panels at the bottom, 
 with a very wide rail in which the lock was set. The 
 Colonial designers made this lock rail wide so as to give 
 space to the big rim locks — that is, locks applied to the .face 
 of the door, and not set in the edge, which Were the only 
 
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Plans in text Aymar Embury, II., architect 
 
 The doorway of the C. S. Fay house — delicate woodwork between heavy piers 
 
DOORS AND WINDOWS 51 
 
 kind of which they knew. Now all our locks are set into 
 the doors, and they are never set on the rail because the 
 joint between the rail and the upright sides or stiles, as they 
 are called, is the weakest part. The frame is there dove- 
 tailed together, and if enough is cut away to permit the 
 setting in of a lock, the door is so much weakened that it is 
 liable to come loose at that point. This seems a compara- 
 tively trivial reason for the change in the style of doors, but 
 there is an additional one in the fact that when the young 
 man of the house was given the latchkey and the freedom 
 of the house, the key was often six or eight inches long, so 
 that it could pass through the thick door and into the lock 
 behind it. Now that we are accustomed to the convenience 
 of the small light key of the Yale lock we are not very 
 willing to give it up for the sake of a slight difference in 
 the design of our front doors. 
 
 One of the other doorways shows a different type: two 
 long vertical panels side by side. This style of door is one 
 which fits modern needs well enough, but is not nearly as 
 pretty to look at as the other type, and was of a much later 
 period 1 , say about 1830. 
 
 There are illustrated in this chapter, five of the old doors, 
 of which the door to the Gerretson house is the plainest and 
 probably the oldest, and, while interesting from the histori- 
 cal side, is not an especially beautiful piece of design. The 
 door to the Willetts house is of the latest period, dating 
 
52 THE DUTCH COLONIAL HOUSE 
 
 from probably about 1830, and both this and the Gerret'son 
 door have the side lights, square transom light, fan-light 
 and doorway itself treated as a single opening and framed 
 by a pair of pilasters. Here is a sort of architrave 
 and cornice used as a head, and in it the lightness 
 and grace of the earlier Dutch work have been lost and the 
 motives have degenerated into coarser and less agreeable 
 ones. 
 
 The other three doors are all of about the same period; 
 the Vreeland door is a New Jersey one, while the doors of the 
 Cortelyou and Lefferts houses are Long Island examples. 
 It is hardly necessary to call the reader's attention to the 
 exquisite beauty of these three doors; they are typical of 
 the best Colonial work, in that the functions of the classic 
 column and entablature have been remembered, while the 
 motives have been changed to suit the artistic conceptions 
 of their designers. In the pilasters used in the Vreeland 
 house and the Cortelyou house, the surface has been worked 
 into a series of moldings reminiscent of the flutes of the 
 classic pilasters, although quite different from them. The 
 frieze in the Vreeland house is decorated with a series of 
 ornaments recalling the sunburst and daisy patterns, but 
 worked with a gouge, and the architrave around the fan- 
 light has in both cases an ornamental band quite as fitting 
 to its place as the classic egg-and-dart motive, but which 
 was evidently designed by the builder. The ttfey-bloeks in 
 
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DOORS AND WINDOWS 53 
 
 both have been given much thought, and not merely copied 
 from some book of designs. 
 
 I think the real difference between Colonial architecture 
 and that of any other period, except the Italian Renais- 
 sance, is that it was designed by a race of architects or 
 builders who were without precedent to follow. They could 
 not look up their ornament in any book, because they had 
 no book, but they did have a lively appreciation of the func- 
 tions of the column and entablature, a just understanding 
 of the reasons for the proportions of these two members, 
 and, when they came- to execute the work, had to originate 
 all decorative features themselves and to design the pro- 
 portions of the principal parts either by eye or following 
 those remembered. The result was that Colonial architec- 
 ture, like Renaissance architecture, was oftentimes crude, 
 oftentimes badly executed and badly designed, but it is 
 never uninteresting and never without indications of strong 
 individuality of design. It is for this reason that the 
 Colonial work is so well worth while studying, not so much 
 that we may copy it exactly, as rather that we too may feel 
 free to forget the classic training we have received in school 
 and in college and follow the bent of our fancies. 
 
 The interior doors were usually very much plainer than 
 the exterior, so plain indeed that in most cases they had 
 little of interest about them, except to the architect who 
 studies his moldings to obtain minute differences of shadow, 
 
54 THE DUTCH COLONIAL HOUSE 
 
 the reasons for which are not apparent to one untrained in 
 architecture, but we occasionally find interior doors as 
 lovely as the exterior ones. One of the best of these is 
 again from the Vreeland house; it is similar to the exterior 
 door before illustrated, and conforms to it in a like treat- 
 ment of pilasters and central fan-light. The beautiful 
 leaded glass of the Colonial period is excellently shown in 
 this illustration, and the interesting carved work of the 
 frieze between the door and the fan-light is of the best 
 Dutch Colonial, and rather different from any other orna- 
 mentation that I can recall. I know of few other door- 
 ways in this country, excepting some of the Salem ones 
 designed and carved by Samuel Mclntyre, as good as this, 
 and though the Mclntyre doors surpass this in architectural 
 knowledge, and in beautiful wood-carving, this door for 
 sheer beauty of proportion fully holds its own. 
 
 Some modem doorways, also illustrated in this chapter, 
 have much to commend them; the Fay door has the side 
 lights much wider than those of the typical Colonial work, 
 some well-designed leaded glass, and the setting, between 
 the heavy stone piers, is an interesting transition from the 
 big scale of the house proper to the very small scale of the 
 doorway. 
 
 In the Orr house a projecting door has been replaced by 
 a sunken vestibule, with a couple of large stucco columns 
 flanking the entrance. It is as little like genuine Dutch 
 
DOORS AND WINDOWS 55 
 
 architecture as it is like English work, but there is some- 
 thing sympathetic in its treatment to the building of which 
 it forms a part, and the sunken vestibule is a sufficiently 
 good scheme for affording shelter to the waiting guest 
 without breaking the front as a projecting piazza would. 
 The door of the Jordan house is a thoroughly modern com- 
 bination of different motives: the hood is rather Pennsyl- 
 vania Colonial than Dutch, and the doorway itself cannot 
 lay claim to any particular style as its precedent, but it 
 certainly is well fitted to the house on which it is placed, 
 and this is a better test of good design than is any 
 archeological correctness. 
 
 The windows pf_ the old Dutch farmhouses are never 
 placed in pairs, but are as a rule uniformly spaced across 
 the front. In the modern work no such rule is adopted, 
 and windows are placed either singly or in pairs, or in sets 
 of three, as the plan may require or the wish of the designer 
 dictates. One thing was invariable in all the old work, and 
 that is that the windows were divided into small panes, and 
 the older the house, as a rule, the smaller the pane of glass. 
 The first-story windows in the Flagg house at Stowe, Penn- 
 sylvania, are very much like those of the old houses. They 
 have six-light sashes, with heavy solid shutters bearing the 
 characteristic crescent-shaped saw-cut in the upper panel 
 of the shutter. The dormer windows on the same house are 
 truly Colonial dormers, with key-blocks over the centers of 
 
56 THE DUTCH COLONIAL HOUSE 
 
 the sashes and painted pediments. In the Bull house the 
 windows are in sets of three, in order to get as much sun- 
 light as possible into the interior, which is finished in dark 
 wood. As sets of three windows in a house of this length 
 would have made the wall appear frail and insecure, pairs 
 of columns were placed between the windows to strengthen 
 the support. Gable-end windows were frequently of un- 
 usual shapes, and among those illustrated in either the new 
 or the old houses will be found some quadrant-shaped, some 
 elliptical, and some with circular heads. A very interesting 
 window in the gable end is that shown in the old plantation 
 house, which, though a Southern building, has some of the 
 mannerisms of Dutch work. This window is particularly 
 weir adjusted to its position, and though somewhat more 
 elaborate than the usual example, might be used to advan- 
 tage in the modern house of Dutch character. 
 
 Returning again to the Guilbert house, we find that the 
 windows in the dormers are rows of small casements divided 
 into very small panes, while a circular-headed window with 
 side lights and a circular transom give light to the stairs. 
 
 In the Woodmere house the row of long dormers has 
 been brought forward to form a sort of balcony, with ver- 
 ticals to support fly-screens, while on the ground floor the 
 porch has been enclosed in glass. 
 
 In the McDaniel house the typical Colonial window is 
 used with frieze and cornice above it. This harmonizes 
 
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DOORS AND WINDOWS 57 
 
 excellently with the frontispiece which marks the doorway, 
 and is a simple and comparatively inexpensive way of filling 
 up the space between the heads of the windows and the 
 soffit or under side of the roof eaves. The one thing which 
 will be noticed in all these houses, and which is absolutely 
 essential to a successful Dutch house, is that the sash be 
 divided into small panes. The large sheets of glass so com- 
 mon in contractor-built houses, and often insisted on by 
 prospective house builders, because they are easy to clean, 
 do more to ruin the exterior of an otherwise attractive house 
 than could the mishandling of any other single detail. The 
 windows show as big black holes in the wall, and the one 
 place where a certain delicacy of treatment is absolutely 
 
 • 
 
 essential does not get it. This is one of the factors of 
 what the architects call "scale," the meaning of which I can 
 only indicate by saying that a well scaled house is one in 
 which the details bear a proper relation to each other. Of 
 course, if one starts to use a large scale and carries it all 
 the way through, one does not feel that there is anything 
 out of the way in the scheme, although the building will 
 invariably look smaller than its actual size, and the doors 
 from a little distance will seem too low for a man to pass 
 through. On the other hand, small scale — that is, making 
 all the details small and the size of the windows a little less 
 than ordinary, makes the house appear bigger, and it is by 
 such devices as changing the scale at the doorway that es- 
 
58 THE DUTCH COLONIAL HOUSE 
 
 pecial attention is fixed on the one part. When one does 
 attempt to change scale at the doors, one finds that while 
 each member of the doorway may be made a good deal finer 
 than corresponding members in other parts of the building, 
 the effect from a little way off must be that of a size com- 
 
 Saw-cut patterns for the upper panels of solid shutters 
 
 mensurate with the balance of the building. It is a thing 
 always hard to do successfully, and still harder to explain. 
 The shutters or blinds in the Colonial house are one of 
 the few features in which color can profitably be employed 
 and are as necessary to the wall surface as eyebrows to the 
 face. Even when, for practical purposes, they are not de- 
 sired, pairs of shutters may be used to fill up blank spaces, 
 or to add a touch of color to the white, which might other- 
 wise become monotonous. In the old houses they are al- 
 most invariably solid, the only means of ventilation being 
 the small saw-cuts in the upper panels, which, though usually 
 crescent-shaped, were sometimes made in a variety of other 
 interesting forms. Of course blinds of the common variety 
 have movable slats attached to a vertical cross-piece, but 
 these blinds are so constantly getting out of order that they 
 are a source of a good deal of expense and annoyance, es- 
 
An old Dutch house with "lie-on-your-stomach" windows 
 
 111(1 
 
 illlhi 
 
 An old house in New Jersey with typical dormer windows 
 
DOORS AND WINDOWS 59 
 
 pecially as there is only one position in which they keep out 
 the sun and admit the air. A better scheme for blinds, if 
 solid ones are not desired, is to make the slats fixed in this 
 position, perhaps with a small solid panel at the top with a 
 saw-cut similar to those of the old blinds. While it cannot 
 
 Saw-cut patterns for the upper panels of solid shutters 
 
 truthfully be said that blinds of this type have quite the in- 
 terest that the old solid shutters had, they are a pretty suc- 
 cessful compromise between the picturesque and the useful, 
 since the square panel of the upper part is always back of 
 the shades, and so does not interfere with either light or air, 
 and at the same time the blind has some interesting feature 
 about it. It is not unusual to see, in modern houses, solid 
 shutters on the first story, where they do add some security 
 to the house, and blinds on the upper story. This is an 
 appropriate and artistic combination. In changing the 
 single windows of Dutch times to groups of double or triple 
 windows, we find it difficult to make proper provision for 
 these blinds. With double windows they can be made to 
 fold on themselves, but in triple windows nothing can be 
 done except to have them stand straight out from the 
 house, a position which renders them liable to be blown off 
 
60 THE DUTCH COLONIAL HOUSE 
 
 by heavy winds and 1 which makes them always look untidy. 
 A house otherwise well proportioned can be spoiled by 
 badly shaped and badly placed windows, doors and shutters; 
 on the other hand, a rather poorly proportioned house can 
 be redeemed by careful handling of these features. 
 
Plan 
 
 THE plan of the old houses offers nothing of inter- 
 est or utility to the modern designer or house- 
 builder, except the placing of the kitchen in a sep- 
 arate one-story wing. The old houses almost invariably 
 had a narrow central hall extending through the building, 
 with two rooms opening from it at each side; these rooms 
 were of about the same size, and their uses could be inter- 
 changed without hurting the plan in the least. They had 
 no butler's pantry such as we now use; in the early houses 
 the kitchen was used both as kitchen and dining-room, and 
 in the later ones the kitchen was placed next to the dining- 
 room, with storeroom, pantries, etc., at the opposite ends of 
 the kitchen. A single straight flight of stairs led up one 
 side of the hall to the second floor. Of course there were 
 some exceptions to this general arrangement, but it was as 
 a rule adhered to even in buildings whose area was very 
 small. 
 
 The same general considerations which influence modem 
 planning of any country house apply to the plans of houses 
 in the Dutch style; the rooms must be so located as to secure 
 the light and air appropriate to each, the space must be 
 
 61 
 
62 
 
 THE DUTCH COLONIAL HOUSE 
 
 divided proportionately to the uses of the various rooms, 
 and access from the hall must be preserved — at least to the 
 principal rooms — so that no one room becomes a passage- 
 way between others. The requirements of living as they 
 exist at present are for one large room, commonly called 
 
 First floor plan of the Frederick S. Jordan house, Kensington, L. I. 
 
 the living-room, which in small houses is the only public 
 room except the dining-room; beside the living-room and 
 dining-room, a kitchen, pantry, coat closet, two closets for 
 the kitchen, and hall and staircase, filling the ground floor. 
 These are the minimum requirements for an all-year-round 
 house. A slightly larger house has added to it, on the 
 ground floor, a third public room, used either as a recep- 
 tion room or as a study. The largest house which can be 
 gotten in the Dutch style and be reasonably satisfactory in 
 appearance, includes both the study and the reception room, 
 
PLAN 63 
 
 in addition to the rooms of the minimum plan. Of course 
 the requirements of each family determine the numher of 
 rooms on the second story; a small family would prefer 
 three large rooms to four small ones in the smallest house 
 discussed, while a larger family would require at least four 
 smaller rooms. Two bathrooms are now practically a 
 necessity in the American house. In addition to these there 
 must be one or two maids' rooms, and usually a maids' bath. 
 It may be better to take up some of the plans of executed 
 houses and discuss them with regard to their several ar- 
 rangements than to generalize further in the matter, and 
 for this purpose I have selected a few plans of various sizes, 
 each of which presents some points of interest. 
 
 The plan of the Jordan house is in many respects one of 
 the most economical of space, and satisfactory in arrange- 
 ment, that can be devised for a house of the minimum re- 
 quirements, and the size can of course be reduced or 
 expanded as may be necessary to fit the purse and needs of 
 the builder. The entrance is into a small square hall; 
 directly opposite the entrance the stairs go up to a landing, 
 turn and go from the landing to the second story. Wide 
 doors give access to the dining-room at the left and the 
 livingTroom at the right, opening the house up in very agree- 
 able fashion, and making a hall, which although small is 
 not cramped, because all of its sides are open and because 
 each side is interesting. The living-room is about fifteen 
 
64 
 
 THE DUTCH COLONIAL HOUSE 
 
 by twenty-four feet, with a large fireplace, and French win- 
 dows either side of the fireplace opening to the west porch. 
 A room which is somewhat longer than its width is apt to 
 be better than a square room of the same area; the furni- 
 ture can be better arranged, there is more wall space, it is 
 
 Second floor plan of the Frederick S. Jordan house, 
 Kensington, L. I. 
 
 better lighted and two or three groups of people can as- 
 semble in various parts of the room without confusion. 
 The entrance porch is entirely separate from the living- 
 porch at the west and the breakfast porch at the east, so 
 that guests and messengers coming to the house do not in- 
 trude upon any family gathering. The dining-room is fif- 
 teen feet square, which is plenty big enough to accommo- 
 date the dining-table, sideboard, serving-table, etc., and to 
 permit the table's being extended to seat twelve people, 
 without crowding the waitress in her duties. The break- 
 
PLAN 65 
 
 fast porch, opening from the dining-room, is, throughout 
 the summer, a pleasant addition to any house, and, glassed- 
 in and heated in winter, gives a bright and sunny place for 
 that most important meal. The pantry is of good size, with 
 a refrigerator closet so arranged that the ice is put in from 
 the kitchen porch, and the refrigerator entered from the 
 pantry. This is a better scheme than entering the ice-box 
 closet directly from the kitchen, since many of the articles 
 which are usually kept in the ice-box- — butter, milk, beer, 
 cheese, etc. — are needed in the pantry rather than in the 
 kitchen. There is ample dresser space, so arranged that 
 it is not in the way of the passage between the kitchen and 
 the dining-room. The kitchen arrangement I do not re- 
 gard as ideal, since there is no good space in which the 
 servants' dining-table may be set and which they can use 
 as a sitting-room when not working. On the second floor 
 there are four bedrooms, and two bathrooms. The owner's 
 room has a fireplace, and communicates directly with the 
 so-called study; the other bathroom is entered only from 
 the hall. In a house of this kind frequently it is desired 
 to have two connections into each bathroom. This is a sat- 
 isfactory arrangement as long as one adjoining bedroom 
 only is in use, hut when both adjoining bedrooms are occu- 
 pied, is apt to prove a source of considerable annoyance, 
 because people using the bathroom very frequently forget 
 to unlock the door that they have not used, although they 
 
66 
 
 THE DUTCH COLONIAL HOUSE 
 
 never forget to lock it. There are fair-sized closets for all 
 the rooms. In this house a single flight of stairs is made 
 to serve hoth the servants and the owners, a thing which 
 would he objected to by some housewives* but, assuming a 
 single staircase, it could not probably be better arranged, 
 
 First floor plan of the Stanley G. Flagg, Jr., cottage, 
 Stowe, Pa. 
 
 since access to it from the kitchen can be had without the 
 servants passing in view of the occupants of either the liv- 
 ing-room or dining-room. Returning to the first floor for 
 a moment, we find that there is a vista through the ends of 
 the dining-room, living-room and hall, and the French win- 
 dows to the piazzas, and the main entrance to these rooms 
 are on a line ; these vistas are an important feature of the in- 
 terior of any house, and not only should the vista be pre- 
 served, but some kind of an architectural feature should 
 
PLAN 
 
 67 
 
 terminate each vista, the features in this case being the 
 French windows opening upon the porches. 
 
 The plan of the Flagg house is one adapted to a small 
 family only. The living-room and dining-room are each of 
 fair size and placed opposite each other, and, opening from 
 a small hall, a good-sized pantry communicates with the 
 
 Second floor plan of the Stanley G. Flagg, Jr., cottage, 
 Stowe, Pa. 
 
 kitchen, which is very well arranged, in that the working 
 part of the kitchen is separated from the rest of the rooms. 
 On the second floor there are two rooms for the owners and 
 two for the servants, with one bath for each pair. This 
 plan could without difficulty be adjusted to give three bed- 
 rooms for the owners and one servant's room, and, if re- 
 quired, a servant's room could be put on the third floor. 
 The back stairs, which are a feature of this plan, could 
 properly be diminated in a house of this small size. 
 
68 
 
 THE DUTCH COLONIAL HOUSE 
 
 The house at Kensington has a very unusual type of plan, 
 which will appeal strongly to some and be disliked by 
 others. From a small vestibule one enters a hall eight feet 
 three inches wide, which is indicated by the ceiling treat- 
 ment rather than actually divided from the living-room by 
 
 Forman & Light, architects 
 First floor plan of a house at Kensington, L. I. 
 
 any partition. This opening up of the living-room and hall 
 together gives of course a sense of space otherwise not to 
 be obtained in so small a house. It has certain disadvan- 
 tages in the inability of the hostess to conceal herself when 
 not dressed to receive guests, and the opening up of the 
 room to this extent naturally loses in coziness what it gains 
 in spaciousness. The kitchen arrangement is an excellent 
 one; the stairs to the cellar go down in the secondary hall 
 
PLAN 
 
 69 
 
 between the kitchen and the living-room, so that the master 
 of the house can go down cellar without disturbing the cook 
 and her guests. The kitchen is accessible from the exterior 
 only through an entry, which some clients insist upon, much 
 as others dislike it. The second floor contains three prin- 
 
 Forman & Light, architects 
 Second floor plan of a house at Kensington, L. I. 
 
 cipal bedrooms and two bathrooms, and a servant's room 
 and servant's bath, and there are two other rooms in the 
 third story. Of course all four of these rooms could be used 
 for owner's rooms, and the servants relegated to the third 
 story entirely, if this were desired. The problem of light- ■ 
 ing and ventilation of the second story has been well man- 
 
70 
 
 THE DUTCH COLONIAL HOUSE 
 
 aged, and a deck in the rear, opening from the stair landing, 
 has room enough for the usual purposes to which a second- 
 story porch is put. 
 
 The McDaniel house is as well planned as it is designed. 
 The entrance is from what is really the rear of the house, a 
 
 Taylor * Bout a, architects . 
 
 First floor plan of the McDaniel house and garage near 
 Syracuse, N. Y. 
 
 scheme which ensures privacy in the family rooms, and acts 
 as a screen from the noise and dust of arriving vehicles. 
 At the left of the carriage entrance is placed the interesting 
 curved staircase, with a connection through to the kitchen. 
 A dining-room, morning-room and living-room are included 
 in this plan, and each of these rooms is of good proportion- 
 ate size and well shaped. The living-room is twenty-seven 
 by seventeen feet, the morning-room fifteen by eleven feet, 
 and the dining-room about seventeen feet square. A break- 
 
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PLAN 
 
 71 
 
 fast porch is a feature of the plan. The hall running 
 through the house is always a delightful thing to have, es- 
 pecially when, as in this case, the stairs are so placed as not 
 to obstruct the vista. A large downstairs lavatory is so 
 placed as to be accessible yet secluded, and the cellar stairs, 
 
 Taylor St Bonta, architects 
 
 Second floor plan of the McDaniel house and garage 
 near Syracuse, N. Y. 
 
 which are also entered from this secondary hall, have the 
 advantage mentioned in the Kensington house. 
 
 One admirable feature which is gradually becoming to 
 be more usual in American planning is the connection of the 
 house and garage by a covered passageway. In the old 
 days, when there were no motor cars, and a stable was part 
 of the equipment of every complete country place, the stable 
 was kept as far from the house as possible, because of the 
 odors and dirt and general disagreeableness incident to too 
 
72 THE DUTCH COLONIAL HOUSE 
 
 close proximity to living-quarters. Now, when a good clean 
 motor car has taken the place of a horse, the garage may 
 well be connected with the house to form a sort of group. 
 It not only adds to the picturesqueness of the scheme, but 
 it also gives a chance to go to the car in wet or snowy weather 
 without exposure to the cold, and permits both of these 
 buildings to be heated by a single heating plant. In the 
 example illustrated the second floor contains five rooms, one 
 of which is called the sewing-room, and the space under the. 
 sloping roof is, as suggested on the chapter on Roofs, util- 
 ized for closets. A sleeping-porch is accessible from the 
 two principal bedrooms as is a bath, these two rooms being 
 thus arranged entirely en svite. The other bedrooms have 
 a bath opening only from the central hall; servants' rooms 
 are placed in the third story. The plan, while a little com- 
 plicated, repays close study, and it will be found that the 
 architects and owners between them have worked up a' thor- 
 oughly convenient, attractive and livable house. 
 
 The plan of the Fay house includes about the same num- 
 ber of units as those of the McDaniel house, but they are 
 somewhat larger, and a convenient location of the several 
 items has in consequence not been so well preserved. The 
 entrance is again from the rear under the stair landing, the 
 stairs go up at the left side of the hall, and at the right side 
 of the hall, under the stair landing, is placed a lavatory. 
 Large doors open from the hall to the living-room and din- 
 
PLAN 
 
 73 
 
 ing-room, each of which has its own fireplace. The study 
 is accessible from the living-room only, an arrangement 
 which is not without its disadvantages, especially in some 
 such case as where the owner wants to slip away to avoid 
 guests in the living-room. The two porches placed sym- 
 
 • neoT- ruDfc-puwr- 
 First floor plan of the Charles J. Fay house, Dongan Hills, Staten Island 
 
 metrically on the public side of the house serve as living- 
 porch and breakfast-porch; the breakfast-porch is accessible 
 from the pantry as well as from the dining-room, so that 
 convenient service is always possible. The servants' stair- 
 case goes up from the kitchen, with a cellar stair under it 
 so arranged that it can be entered from the outside, thus 
 doing away with the necessity for outside cellar steps, which, 
 especially in winter, are often the cause of annoyance. The 
 refrigerator closet at the right of the kitchen porch gives the 
 iceman a chance to get the ice in without the necessity for 
 allowing it to drip over the kitchen floor. I might say here 
 
74 
 
 THE DUTCH COLONIAL HOUSE 
 
 that it has been the cause of constant amazement to me, in 
 the course of a fairly extensive practice, to find how much 
 the average woman dreads the thought of dripping water 
 from ice on the kitchen floor; Lese majeste is a light crime 
 compared to it, and I think that if the women could have 
 
 2: 
 
 Second floor plan of the Charles J. Fay house, Dongan Hills, Staten Island 
 
 their way it Would be put in a class with treason and murder 
 as a capital offense. It is very well from some points of 
 view to have the ice-box filled from the outside, but for my 
 own part I want somebody to know just how much tribute 
 the iceman takes from the ice-box on his diurnal calls. This 
 kitchen is well arranged in that it has through ventilation 
 and that enough of the kitchen is free to give the maids a 
 place in which to eat their meals. The second floor has, in 
 the main part of the house, three bedrooms, two bathrooms, 
 a dressing-room and a sewing-room, with a great many 
 closets ; the kitchen wing in the second story is utilized as 
 servants' quarters, with three maids' rooms, and a maids' 
 
PLAN 75 
 
 bath, and is shut off from the front of the house by a sep- 
 arate servants' hall. Two of the bedrooms are compara- 
 tively small rooms, one communicating with the principal 
 bedroom, and the space under the slope of the roof is used 
 for closets. Two additional guests' bedrooms and bath 
 are located in the third story. As the windows in the front 
 are of the recessed variety, and are flush with the wall at 
 their sides, the space below them was in this case used for 
 shoe boxes. From the principal bedroom, which has its 
 own fireplace, opens a dressing-room, communicating with 
 two closets, and from the dressing-room opens the bath- 
 room and one closet. This gives the owners a suite of their 
 own, comfortable to the verge of luxury, and is especially 
 useful in case of illness, since it could be completely closed 
 off from the balance of the house and give a room for a 
 trained nurse, with a bathroom and all necessary conven- 
 iences. As there are arrangements made for attaching a 
 gas heater, it would be possible in the case of infectious dis- 
 eases, to have all the cooking done there. The owner's 
 room should invariably be the best room of the house and 
 have every possible convenience that space or money will 
 permit. Mrs. Owner occupies the room at night and a good 
 portion of every day, every year; the children, especially 
 when young, sleep in their rooms and are in them little of 
 the rest of the time; "Mother's room" is their playroom, 
 no matter how excellent a playroom may be provided for 
 
76 
 
 THE DUTCH COLONIAL HOUSE 
 
 them somewhere else. Guests, except of the permanent 
 variety, for whom of course especial provision must be made, 
 rarely occupy their rooms over a week, and these too are 
 sleeping-places rather than living-rooms. Children's rooms 
 and guests' rooms can therefore be subordinated without 
 
 First floor plan of the Henry S. Orr house, Garden City, L. I. 
 
 any feeling of selfishness. The owner's room or suite 
 should be as large and comfortable as it can be made, and, 
 no matter what the size of the house, the second floor should 
 not be divided into rooms of nearly equal size except in 
 those comparatively few instances where there is a family 
 composed of three or four adult members. 
 
 The largest house of which I have thought it worth while 
 to show plans, is about the largest to which the Dutch style 
 can be adapted. The ground floor has a carriage entrance 
 at the rear, with a little lavatory beside it in a secluded and 
 yet convenient position. From the front one enters a cor- 
 ridor, at each end of which is a coat closet; at the left large 
 doors open into the living-room, at the right, to the dining- 
 
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PLAN 
 
 77 
 
 room. This corridor is divided into three parts of about 
 equal length, with doors into the reception room and study, 
 and an arched opening to the staircase. The study opens 
 from the dining-room as well as from the corridor, so that 
 it can.be used as a smoking-room after meals, a scheme 
 
 Second floor plan of the Henry S. Orr house, Garden City, L. I. 
 
 which has perhaps no particular advantage, but which is 
 after all rather an attractive feature. The stairs go up 
 
 . from the pantry, so that the odors of the kitchen do not reach 
 the second story; the kitchen has two large closets. Both 
 the dining-room and living-room have fireplaces. A fire- 
 place in the dining-room is, to my way of thinking, a matter 
 of appearances rather than of actual utility; a fire is seldom 
 
 -£ghted in it, because the people who are placed in front of 
 it have their backs scorched 1 , at the same time shutting off 
 the heat from the others. In a house with four living- 
 rooms on the first story, such as this has, the study and liv- 
 ing-room should be the ones for fireplaces. In the second 
 story there are five bedrooms, a sewing-room, three bath- 
 
78 THE DUTCH COLONIAL HOUSE 
 
 rooms and ample closets. The servants' staircase goes up 
 to the third story in an enclosed hall, so that they have 
 access to their own quarters without passing through the 
 rest of the house. Two bedrooms and one bath at the 
 kitchen end are shut off for the use of the children, so that 
 when the door to their private hall is closed the family can 
 make as much noise as they like without disturbing them. 
 Four of the five rooms are either corner rooms or have 
 cross draughts, and three of them have fireplaces. There 
 is a large linen closet and a broom closet on this floor, be- 
 sides ample closets for all bedrooms, and chests-of -drawers, 
 etc., in the spaces under the roofs. This house was of 
 course a comparatively expensive house, costing in the 
 neighborhood of $20,000, and while there are every year 
 perhaps a couple of hundred houses built in the United States 
 which cost about $50,000, the plans of such houses as these 
 are so large and depend so much upon the particular needs 
 of the family, and upon the landscape, that they need not 
 be considered ; while these plans are adapted to people who 
 can afford to spend from $6,000 to $20,000 for a house. 
 
 Of course, in a brief chapter like this we can hardly hope 
 to do more than to illustrate typical plans, but I have found 
 it the rarest thing in the world for one plan to suit any 
 other person than the one for whom it is designed. Plans 
 are chiefly useful as illustrating the possibilities of the divi- 
 sions of given space into rooms, but are not usually very 
 
PLAN 79 
 
 useful in indicating exactly how this division should be fol- 
 lowed. Everyone has some little individual desire which 
 must be met, and when one considers that in a house the 
 size of the Jordan house there are several thousand possible 
 arrangements, one can realize how difficult it is to endeavor 
 to show plans which meet all conditions of living. The 
 general considerations set forth at the beginning of this 
 chapter, too, apply with great cogency to all plans, whether 
 they be big or small, but in applying them to any individual 
 case there are so many factors of view or of ground slope 
 or of size of the family, or Of location of windows and doors 
 to fit furniture, that the subject is too big to treat in a single 
 chapter, and even in a single book, and I doubt if a whole 
 encyclopedia would cover the ground. 
 
 Every house is a series of compromises; certain features 
 of the exterior to some minds are all-important, to others 
 negligible, and to some people certain considerations look 
 big which to others are unimportant. I have, during the 
 past ten days, spent twenty-four hours of earnest — I might 
 even say prayerful' — effort to find a place for the kitchen 
 stairs which would please one of my clients. I found at 
 least a dozen solutions which made a good workable plan, 
 but each of them was open to some objection which seemed 
 insuperable. Finally one was found which managed to 
 combine more good points and less bad ones than any 
 other, and the house is going ahead. This is the only way 
 
80 THE DUTCH COLONIAL HOUSE 
 
 in which a really satisfactory plan can be obtained; an 
 architect with a good knowledge of planning and a house- 
 keeper who knows how she wants to keep house — and not 
 how the "collective woman" wants to keep house — can, as 
 a rule, between them find something which is very satis- 
 factory, although neither of them by themselves could per- 
 haps find a scheme which would at all suit the other, and 
 certainly neither of them would find in any book of plans, 
 no matter how comprehensive, one which would meet the 
 given requirements. 
 
The Treatment of the Principal Rooms 
 
 THE question of appropriate treatment for the in- 
 teriors of houses of Dutch design is very much like 
 that of any other country house of reasonable size 
 and design: for people of good taste, they must be simple, 
 the various rooms must harmonize with each other, and they 
 must be of a character which is distinctly not what the 
 decorators call "Period" work. While this might seem to 
 limit the variety of interior treatment permissible in the 
 Dutch house — and of course it really does exclude cer- 
 tain types — in reality it gives an opportunity for much 
 more freedom of treatment than is customary in most 
 styles. In a house of pronounced English style, and in the 
 American modifications of French chateaux, which were 
 only a few years ago considered quite the thing in our best 
 social circles, they had to be distinctly French. Now 
 neither the Elizabethan nor the Louis XIV period produced 
 either furniture or decoration which were at all comfortable 
 or satisfactory to live with, and as furniture and decoration 
 are intimately associated with interior treatment it is ex- 
 ceedingly difficult for the modern American to be at all 
 happy in them when they are carried out as they should be. 
 
 81 
 
82 THE DUTCH COLONIAL HOUSE 
 
 In the Dutch farmhouse the first requisite is for a 
 comfortable-looking scheme, and the design will almost 
 take care of itself. One can introduce whatever furniture 
 one desires, providing it is not too extraordinary, and can 
 treat the walls with dark high wainscot, or light low wain- 
 scot, or without any wainscot at all, and have the walls 
 papered or without any paper but sand-finished, and still 
 get interiors which are perfectly in harmony with the house 
 itself, attractive and comfortable. The one thing which 
 one cannot do in a Dutch house any more than in any other 
 house, is to have all the rooms designed in different ways 
 and get a result which is a unit. Not very many years ago 
 it was customary to do the living-room in the French style, 
 with French paneling, the dining-room in English oak, 
 and the music room, if there were any, in the Italian style, 
 and group these rooms around a Colonial hall. In the 
 smaller houses, where limited means precluded the pos- 
 sibility of elaborate interior treatment, the idea was to get 
 everything different. Every reader will recall either her- 
 self or one of her friends, in selecting wall papers for a 
 house, picking out blue for the dining-room because it was 
 so "cheerful," red for the den because it was so "cozy," and 
 green for the parlor because "it was such a good back- 
 ground for the pictures," without any regard for how the 
 three would look together. The same thing applies to the 
 wall treatments : whatever we do in the interior, let us have 
 
Living-room in rough plaster with hand-hewn woodwork in the Starr house, 
 
 Tenafly, N. J. 
 
 Plans in text 
 
 The living-room in the Orr house, treated more like old Holland than most 
 
 American interiors 
 
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TREATMENT OF THE PRINCIPAL ROOMS 83 
 
 all the principal rooms, especially when these open up in 
 the manner so common to-day, if not in the same color, at 
 least in colors which do not fight with each other. 
 
 There is a wide latitude of choice permissible in Dutch 
 work. Most of the interiors of any importance and for- 
 
 r 
 
 mality in Holland are treated with a rather rough plaster 
 and dark woodwork. On the other hand, many if not 
 most of our Dutch interiors in the country were of the dis- 
 tinctly Colonial type, with white wainscots, mantels, etc., 
 and in some cases with the hewn beams of the second story 
 exposed. We have, therefore, without overstepping the 
 limits of Dutch work, considerable latitude of choice, even 
 though the style adopted be carried through the whole of 
 the interior. I have found that in general the hall is the 
 unit most likely to fix this scheme, and that the preference 
 of the majority of people of taste and education is for a 
 hall of Colonial type, possibly treated with pilasters and a 
 plaster cornice, but with the stairs, which are the"most impor- 
 tant single feature of the interior, of marked Colonial type, 
 with turned white balusters, a mahogany rail and sometimes 
 mahogany treads. Since the principal rooms open from 
 this hall, they might well follow the same scheme and be 
 treated in a more or less Colonial manner. 
 
 In the average small house there is as a rule not money 
 enough to go into very elaborate interior treatment; a few 
 simple motives artistically combined must be made to pro- 
 
84. THE DUTCH COLONIAL HOUSE 
 
 duce the maximum of effect, and these, boiled down, resolve 
 themselves into window and door trim, wainscot, cornices 
 and beams for the ceilings. Still, judicious use of these 
 few motives may be made to produce surprisingly good re- 
 sults, even in the simple forms possible in a small house, 
 and there are illustrated in this chapter some of their sim- 
 pler combinations. 
 
 The most attractive part of the old houses was unques- 
 tionably the kitchen, for it was there that the family lived 
 and worked, and it is the living and working quarters 
 which always gather to themselves the most personal char- 
 acter, and hence are the most worth studying, since person- 
 ality, while it may be pleasant or the contrary, is at least , 
 always interesting. The parlors of these old houses seldom 
 had much that was attractive in them, and however well 
 the doors and windows were disposed, however good the 
 mantels Were, or however excellent was the treatment of 
 the wainscot, they were cold and forbidding. In the mod- 
 ern house the place of the kitchen has been taken by the 
 living-room, and in consequence it is the living-room which 
 is the dominant feature of the house, and usually the most 
 attractive, although the dining-room, chiefly because the 
 character of its furnishings is definitely fixed, is rarely as 
 bad as the living-room can be, and for the same reason is 
 seldom as good as the living-room can be made. 
 
 Of the old American interiors illustrated, perhaps the 
 
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Ernest F. Guilbcrt, architect 
 A blue and white dining-room with red tile floor in the Guilbert house 
 
 A corner of the Lady Moody house hall, showing inconspicuous stairs 
 
TREATMENT OF THE PRINCIPAL ROOMS 85 
 
 most interesting is the Lady Moody house, of which photo- 
 graphs of the hall and living-room are shown. The ceil- 
 ing in the first story of this house was not plastered, but 
 the heavy beams of the second story are exposed, as is the 
 bottom of the second-story flooring; this has all been painted 
 white. A corner of the hallway shows the start of the stairs, 
 which were seldom, in either the Dutch or other Colonial 
 houses, made much of, and were often enclosed entirely so 
 that heat would not have so much chance to escape from the 
 ground floor. If one examines the photograph of this old 
 house, one will find that the treatment is of the very sim- 
 plest, consisting only of a beamed ceiling aside from the 
 customary base, door trim, etc. The stairs, of course, add 
 -something to the picturesqueness of the room but the main 
 part of the effect is due to the furnishings and pictures. 
 The newel of the stairs is extended up to the bottom of the 
 beam, and the balusters are alternately turned round and 
 with a twisted spiral. The entire rail of the stairs, the 
 treads and platforms of the stairs, and the base are stained 
 dark, while the balance of the work is white. The walls 
 are covered with an exceedingly rough plaster, which would 
 never pass inspection in a modern house, but which, be- 
 cause of its very roughness, helped to decorate the interior. 
 Smooth plaster must be covered with wall paper to give it 
 any richness of surface, but rough plaster needs no addi- 
 tional treatment. A photograph of the living-room shows 
 
86 THE DUTCH COLONIAL HOUSE 
 
 a floor of square tiles which might well be copied in such 
 modem houses as are fireproof , -though not in a frame one 
 because tiles placed over wooden beams in the large areas 
 necessary for a living-room floor are apt to crack and 
 loosen, besides adding tremendously to the weight which 
 the beams of the first story have to carry. I do not hap- 
 pen to know anything about the construction of this par- 
 ticular tile floor, but if the house was built as many of the 
 Dutch houses were, it is not unlikely that they were laid 
 directly on the ground. The ceiling of the living-room is 
 beamed like the hall, and a wainscot, about four feet high, 
 of plain beaded material without panels, is carried around 
 the room. While this wainscot looks pretty well in the 
 picture, it is not an expedient which can be advised as a 
 precedent, and in this room it was certainly introduced long 
 after the rest of the room was built, since the use of boards 
 with beaded edges is a comparatively recent invention. 
 The mantel is an excellent example of good Colonial work, 
 not extremely rich in character, but very well designed, 
 except for the columns, which seem too small for the square 
 entablature over them. A good mantelpiece does for a 
 living-room what the staircase does for the interior as a 
 whole: it is the focal point, and when extremely 
 well designed the rest of the room can go without any 
 particular treatment, and still not seem plain or unfin- 
 ished. 
 
TREATMENT OF THE PRINCIPAL ROOMS 87 
 
 Two other good rooms in an old Dutch house are the hall 
 and study in Mr. Gurd's home. This was an old Dutch 
 farmhouse remodeled and modernized by the owner, who 
 is an architect, but so carefully done as in no way to disturb 
 the very agreeable design of the old work. The study has 
 a large fireplace with a simple mantel; beside this is a cup- 
 board with glass doors. The chimneys in all the old houses 
 were pretty thick and projected into the rooms in a way 
 that left no available furniture space beside them; to utilize 
 this space properly it was not unusual to build in cupboards 
 the depth of the chimneys, and wainscot the whole end of 
 the room, doors to the cupboards being formed in the pan- 
 eling. The dining-room of the Fry house is a good example 
 of this treatment, except that the doors are not paneled but 
 glazed, and the door on one side of the fireplace leads, not 
 to a cupboard, but out upon the piazza. The wainscot in 
 this room, which appears to extend from the floor to the 
 ceiling, is in reality a very simple and cheap affair. The 
 verticals and cross-pieces are of wood and the panels of 
 plaster, but with the whole surface painted white, the effect 
 is the same as that of a Wooden wainscot, and the cost is of 
 course infinitely less; as a result, the expedient was no less 
 satisfactory practically than artistically, since the wider 
 panels of the wooden wainscot are very apt to shrink and 
 show unpainted lines around their edges. The fireplace in 
 this dining-room is simply framed by the wainscot with a 
 
88 THE DUTCH COLONIAL HOUSE 
 
 small shelf above it; no especial mantel has been used or was 
 needed around the brick facing. 
 
 Brick is, par excellence, the proper thing to use for the 
 facings in the fireplaces of Dutch houses, and red brick 
 always seems more successful and rational than buff or 
 yellow, although some of the old Dutch houses in Holland 
 had yellow brick in this feature of the interior. Tile, as 
 material for fireplace facings and hearths, never was, and 
 is no longer considered, especially desirable, though once 
 in a while one finds a fireplace surrounded with Delft tile 
 which has a good deal of character. A very beautiful Dutch 
 example is illustrated in this chapter. As a rule it may 
 be said that tile is too stagey and artificial to serve as a 
 frame for a big wood fire, and this Holland example was 
 intended for a peat fire. 
 
 No old house that I have seen has more interesting in- 
 teriors than those of the Vreeland house, of which photo- 
 graphs of the hall and sitting-room are shown. The hall 
 is square and the woodwork, once white, has now been 
 painted and grained to imitate oak, so that its really fine 
 qualities of design are disguised by its color, as well as by 
 the unfortunate furnishings. The hanging lamp especially 
 distracts attention from the more important parts of the 
 room. Immeditely opposite the entrance door is a series 
 of three arches, the two side ones provided with doors; at 
 the left-hand side the stairs go up between walls, at the 
 
\ 
 
 A simple fireplace in the study of the Gurd house at Riveredge, N. J. 
 
 A lovely Colonial mantel in the Vreeland house at NordhofF, N. J. 
 
TREATMENT OF THE PRINCIPAL ROOMS 89 
 
 right-hand side a door opens into what used to be the 
 kitchen, but is now the pantry, and in the center a narrower 
 hallway is continued under the stair-landing to the rear en- 
 trance. The side arches are semicircular, the center one 
 is elliptical, but all three are of the same height and design. 
 Rather wide pilasters support the openings, with a well- 
 designed frieze and cornice. There is no wainscot, but a 
 simple chair-rail runs around the room and up the stair- 
 way, indicating, rather than expressing, the idea of a low 
 wainscot. In the sitting-room is one of several very beau- 
 tiful mantels, which, like most of the Colonial mantels, is 
 flat against the wall, and is decorated in a picturesque and 
 interesting manner with rosettes, urns and flutes, all formed 
 with a gouge. The flat pilasters which form the frame of 
 the mantel taper towards the bottom. The rest of the 
 decoration of the room consists of a simple cornice, a very 
 interesting window trim, and a chair-rail at the height of 
 the window-sills. * As in the case of the hall, this interior 
 leaves much to be desired, since the big iron stove is the 
 most conspicuous object in it, and in its presence one thinks 
 more of its ugliness than of the beauty of the mantel behind 
 it, but were these two rooms decorated and furnished as are 
 those of the Lady Moody house, they would be of unusual 
 loveliness. 
 
 Another excellent interior, again in Mr. Gurd's house, 
 is the hallway, which is partly opened into the living-room. 
 
90 THE DUTCH COLONIAL HOUSE 
 
 The staircase is of the simplest Colonial type, with a round 
 hand-rail and round plain balusters. This is, to my way 
 of thinking, an exceedingly well treated wall, without there 
 being any distinctly architectural treatment at all. It 
 serves rather as a background for furniture and rugs than 
 as a thing in itself to be admired. 
 
 In the Orr house we find a hall and living-room of quite 
 different type: the hall is wainscoted to the top with long 
 oak panels, the upper panels having decoration in blue and 
 gold; the ceiling is vaulted in groined vaults with flat ribs 
 formed in the plaster across them. Windows light one 
 side of the room, and at the other side are openings to the 
 reception room, study and staircase. The Hvingrroom has 
 a beamed ceiling, with heavy cross-beams either side of the 
 fireplace and smaller flat beams between. The plaster is 
 rough-finished down to the picture molding, and below that 
 is a gold-colored grass cloth. The mantel has pairs of flat 
 pilasters at either side of the opening, a series of panels 
 above the shelf, and below the shelf are carved scrolls with 
 a motto. The fireplace facing is in this case of stone, with, 
 a flat stone arch instead of a lintel. Here we have a pair 
 of rooms which have absolutely nothing of Colonial senti- 
 ment about them, and yet they 'are, after all, distinctly ap- 
 propriate to the Dutch house. 
 
 The living-room of the Starr house presents a similar 
 case. The only strictly architectural treatment consists of 
 
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The stairway in the King house at Great Neck, L. I. 
 
 Plans in text 
 
 The high panelled hall in the Orr house at Garden City, L. I. 
 
TREATMENT OF THE PRINCIPAL ROOMS 91 
 
 a chair-rail, the window-sills extended out in front of the 
 windows to form little shelves to hold plants, and the 
 beamed ceiling, which is of heavy hewn beams cut out of 
 the solid by a ship's carpenter. The fireplace is a brick 
 affair with a wooden facia and shelf. There is not a mold- 
 ing in the room, except the picture molding, and yet the 
 whole effect is of a room with considerable architectural 
 treatment. This is because the utility of the architectural 
 treatment is as a background for furnishing and decora- 
 tions, and not a conspicuous piece of decoration in itself. 
 
 Interiors are, in a way, analogous to jewelry: in some 
 rings we may admire the setting, in others the stone; when 
 a setting is the important thing it must be finely detailed 
 and executed, but when it is the stone which is to be dis- 
 played, the setting must be appropriate but inconspicuous. 
 
 One other room which is of excellent Dutch character is 
 the dining-room of the Guilbert house. This has a tile 
 floor and a simple molded cornice, without any other archi- 
 tectural treatment, but the red tiie of the floor, the dull 
 blue paper of the walls, and the furniture, make a charming 
 and attractive room. 
 
 In considering the problem of the architectural treat- 
 ment of the principal rooms, we have been discussing what 
 we may call conscious architectural treatment, as dis- 
 tinguished from unconscious. The grouped windows of 
 the Guilbert dining-room, with the window-seat below them, 
 
92 THE DUTCH COLONIAL HOUSE 
 
 are what may be termed unconscious architectural treat- 
 ment, and so in any room a good disposition of the win- 
 dows and doors, fireplaces well placed and good shapes in 
 the openings, will do a lot towards making an attractive 
 room, although a room which is bad to start with can often 
 be made into a good room by wainscoting, beamed ceilings 
 and furniture. The eye of the observer can be distracted 
 from awkward and ill-placed openings by objects of suf- 
 ficient interest and beauty in themselves to offset the distaste 
 caused by bad fundamentals, but there is of course no reason 
 for bad fundamentals. 
 
 Quite a common type of living-room is one which runs 
 completely across the end of the house, so placed that the 
 fireplace is on the long side of it, with a window each side, 
 two windows at each end of the room, and the entrance door 
 opposite the fireplace. This is a room which no furniture 
 can make seem utterly bad, because it will be thoroughly 
 well lighted, well ventilated and will be easy to furnish, and 
 these practical considerations appeal so strongly to the 
 imagination that one's first thought in entering a room will 
 be, "What a good room this could be made with decent fur- 
 niture!" instead of "What an ugly room this is!" This 
 unconscious fundamental architecture is something which 
 cannot be illustrated in the way that one can present details 
 of interior architectural work, but it is of even greater 
 importance. 
 
Furniture and Decoration 
 
 THE question of furniture and decoration of a 
 house is often considered outside the province of 
 the architect, just as is the planting around it, and 
 yet nothing can do more to make a house successful from 
 the exterior than judicious planting, or from the interior 
 than tasteful and appropriate wall paper, hangings and 
 furniture. The planting is the decoration of the exterior 
 of the house, and while it is perfectly true that the average 
 architect knows no more, if as much, about plants or shrubs 
 than does the intelligent amateur, he probably realizes more 
 fully than a householder just what shapes, sizes and colors 
 of shrubs and trees can be disposed about the building so 
 as to emphasize its strong points and conceal its weak ones. 
 Most architects are very anxious to be permitted to help 
 in the selection of trees, plants, etc., and are willing to do 
 this work for a nominal fee, although I believe that in a 
 place of any considerable size the services of an expert land- 
 scape architect should be secured. He really knows about 
 the construction of roads to withstand frost, the length 
 of time that trees and shrubs will live, the heights to 
 which they will grow, and a thousand other little items 
 
 93 
 
94 THE DUTCH COLONIAL HOUSE 
 
 which represent a lifetime of study in themselves, and upon 
 which even the most intelligent architect can hardly be ex- 
 pected to advise. So in interior decoration, too often a house 
 is brought up to the point where the walls are left in white 
 plaster, with the trim, wainscot and cornices carefully 
 elaborated by the architects, perhaps with a certain color 
 scheme or especial type of wall treatment in mind, and are 
 detailed so as to be an appropriate setting for a certain type 
 of furniture; the client will then cease from further consulta- 
 tion with his architect and put on a wall paper of brilliant 
 colors and decided pattern which will utterly ruin the effect 
 of the most refined and exquisite detail, when perhaps the 
 only thing that should have been used was a monotone 
 paper of subdued hue. 
 
 The services of a decorator, especially in a large house, 
 are often called in, and where a decorator is really intelli- 
 gent and well trained, especially when a part of his training 
 has been in an architect's office, he can improve the interiors, 
 immensely. On the other hand, a decorator who has taken 
 up the work because of the commercial reward it offers, and 
 perhaps because it is a gentlemanly pursuit, can do as much 
 harm to a building as the most tasteless and ignorant client 
 who could possibly be imagined. It is perfectly true that 
 the client of good native taste, and some knowledge and 
 education in art matters, can secure a result quite as at- 
 tractive as can any architect, but in my practice I have 
 
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A Colonial rocker 
 
 A Georgian armchair 
 
 An Adam armchair 
 
 A William and Mary armchair 
 
FURNITURE AND DECORATION 95 
 
 found — and other members of my profession have assured 
 me that their experience has been similar — such clients 
 have made it a habit to discuss the scheme of decoration 
 with their architect before proceeding with the work. Two 
 heads are always better than one, and an architect will often 
 see possibilities that a client does not realize, while the 
 client will often find some novel color scheme or ingenious 
 arrangement of furniture which is precisely the thing the 
 room needed and which would never have occurred to the 
 architect. 
 
 The prime requisite in decorating and furnishing a house 
 of any sort is that the principal rooms shall hang together 
 in wall treatment, and in color and furnishings shall be, 
 if not similar, at least harmonious. I do not mean that it 
 is necessary to adhere strictly to the precedent of any par- 
 ticular date; in fact I believe that too close following of 
 precedent is apt to result in a house which is rather a 
 museum or a decorator's shop than a home. Our ancestors 
 of the Georgian days, for example, did not furnish their 
 houses throughout in Sheraton or Hepplewhite or Chip- 
 pendale furniture; rather they went to these makers, who 
 were the best of their day, and were all working at prac- 
 tically the same period, and bought such furniture as 
 pleased them, mixing it together with such pieces as be- 
 longed to their ancestors in the days of, let us say, William 
 and Mary or Queen Anne, but which still had some years 
 
96 THE DUTCH COLONIAL HOUSE 
 
 of good service left in them. In just the same way we go 
 out and buy old mahogany or good reproductions and bring 
 them home and put them in the same room with the Mis- 
 sion chair that Cousin Willie gave us when we were mar- 
 ried; or the fine old black walnut "what-not" that was one 
 of Mother's Wedding presents. In one thing our ancestors 
 were fortunate: they had no Victorian era behind them, nor 
 did they live in a day when ornamentation could be stamped 
 on oak chairs by machinery, and the furniture finished by 
 dipping it into a tank of shellac. 
 
 In furnishing a modern house most of us cannot begin 
 afresh. We have a certain amount of furniture which we 
 cannot afford to give away, and for which we must find a 
 place. Besides that, we are living in a time which has 
 succeeded what was possibly the most tasteless era that the 
 world has ever known. The development of furniture and 
 of decoration up to the time of the late lamented Queen 
 was continuous, just as architecture had been; it was at 
 some times better than others, and was constantly changing 
 its form, but it had never been distinctly bad. The devel- 
 opment had been gradual from the rudest benches and bed- 
 steads of the Norman castles, through the solid, heavy, and 
 yet well-designed work of the Elizabethan and Jacobean 
 periods, through the exquisite English Georgian, and 
 through the American Colonial variations of it. We are 
 now endeavoring to connect this thread of tradition with 
 
FURNITURE AND DECORATION 97 
 
 the present-day furniture in so far as such a thing is pos- 
 sible after seventy years of Victorian design. Our best 
 furniture manufacturers, although they are no longer manu- 
 facturing their furniture by hand, are seeking for precedent, 
 not from the work of ten years ago, but from the work of 
 one hundred or two hundred years ago, and the art of re- 
 production or copying of antiques has reached a very high 
 plane of development, from which there is almost ready to 
 grow once again the art of designing furniture as furniture 
 should be designed. 
 
 I have thought it better for the illustrations of this chap- 
 ter to take the designs of two or three of the best modern 
 manufacturers whose pieces can be bought by anyone, 
 rather than to illustrate it with genuine antiques, for whose 
 purchase one would have to compete with Mr. Morgan or 
 the Metropolitan Museum of Art. I have, however, illus- 
 trated two or three old Dutch interiors, not from America 
 but from Holland, since practically all the early American 
 furniture was either imported or copied from imported 
 models. Of course the largest part of it was frankly copied. 
 I suppose that of all the Hepplewhite pieces so common in 
 the old New England houses, there were not more than fifty 
 direct from the atelier of Hepplewhite, but Hepplewhite, 
 Sheraton and Chippendale, as well as the brothers Adam, 
 published books of design, which were sold to furniture 
 makers through the world and from which they copied. The 
 
98 THE DUTCH COLONIAL HOUSE 
 
 furniture of the old Dutch farmhouses was, to start with, 
 of the rudest description — just such furniture as we see 
 now in a lumber camp or a mountain tavern — interspersed 
 with occasional good pieces which had been brought from 
 Holland. The Dutch tradition, however strong it may 
 have been in architecture, did not develop any distinct 
 school of design ; the farmers around New Jersey naturally 
 went to New York to make their purchases, just as they 
 do to-day, and bought whatever was the prevailing style. 
 So in consequence, in such of the old farmhouses as have 
 preserved any of their original furnishings, we find they 
 were in no way different from those of New England and 
 the South. 
 
 The kitchen chairs were the familiar ladder-back ones of 
 our Colonial kitchens; for the better rooms they used what 
 was properly the English furniture, which we call William 
 and Mary or Queen Anne; later the English Georgian, 
 and finally the coarse and heavy mahogany furniture which 
 forms so much of what we know as "antique mahogany," 
 which was an American variation of the Empire. This 
 American Empire is, to my way of thinking, no better de- 
 signed than most of the Victorian work, although it was 
 not so aggressively ugly and was redeemed from complete 
 degradation by the beautiful mahogany with which it was 
 usually veneered. 
 
 It is a fact not very generally known that the design of 
 

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American Empire chairs 
 
 Chairs of the period of William and Mary 
 
FURNITURE AND DECORATION 99 
 
 English furniture was greatly influenced by the influx of 
 the Dutch into England under William and Mary and 
 Queen Anne; the Dutch were at that time the most success- 
 ful craftsmen in Europe, and certain types of chairs and of 
 highboys were either copied from Dutch designs or devel- 
 oped from them. In the accompanying plates I have pre- 
 ferred to illustrate those models which were either Dutch 
 or Flemish in design or copied from Dutch or Flemish 
 models. A little study of the furniture in the old Dutch 
 interiors illustrated will show how slight was the difference 
 between the English and the Dutch types ; much of the fur- 
 niture shown in these interiors is known to us under Eng- 
 lish and not Dutch titles, and the modern reproductions 
 show how very closely the design of to-day follows the tra- 
 ditional styles. Of couse we have had to change some of 
 the furniture to fit present-day needs; the posts, for exam- 
 ple, of the four-post beds have become decorative motives 
 rather than real necessities; we no longer use curtains 
 around our beds, because we no longer live under old condi- 
 tions. The four-posters were originally designed to meet 
 a real need for privacy; the hall or corridor from which all 
 bedrooms open is a scheme not more than two hundred years 
 old. In the old days one went from one room to another 
 directly, and even in palace interiors the guard, whenever 
 it was changed, had to go through the queen's bedroom. 
 The only way to ensure privacy was by bed curtains, and 
 for this reason, as much as because the old houses were 
 
100 THE DUTCH COLONIAL HOUSE 
 
 draughty and leaky, beds with side curtains were a neces- 
 sity. The dining-room extension table is another recent 
 invention, and even the hinged ends of gate-legged tables 
 date from not very far back. In the Colonial period a pair 
 of semicircular tables were for ordinary use placed close 
 together, and when a number of people were expected, a 
 third table was set between these and bolted to them. 
 Sideboards are found as far back as 1700, although serving- 
 tables, in the present sense, are much later. 
 
 The complete modern equipment for the dining-room 
 consists of a dining-room table, chairs, armchairs, sideboard, 
 serving-table, and a china closet or a highboy; as in none 
 of the historic periods were all of these articles used si- 
 multaneously, the modern furniture designers have been com- 
 pelled to design along old lines to complete this equipment. 
 The same thing is true of the furniture of the bedroom, and 
 we find a variety of tables, desks, beds and bedroom chairs, 
 such as was not dreamed of in Colonial days. 
 
 As to the materials of the furniture, both mahogany and 
 antique oak, finished with a dull or wax finish, but not with 
 a high gloss, are appropriate; and the painted furniture, 
 decorated wjth little flowers and medallions, affords an in- 
 teresting variety. There need, however, be no hesitation 
 in mixing with this purely Period furniture such uphol- 
 stered and leather chairs as may be already in one's pos- 
 session, or even willow may be used. Willow furniture is 
 

 A living-kitchen in Holland 
 
 A living-room in the John A. Gurd house, without a mantel 
 
A sideboard of the period of William and Mary 
 
 A china closet of the period of 
 William and Mary 
 
FURNITURE AND DECORATION 101 
 
 of course a purely modern invention, but there is no loss 
 of character in using a few pieces, especially if they are 
 stained dark; since, while we did not find them in Dutch 
 houses we can be sure that the Dutch would have used them 
 had they then been made. 
 
 The subject of decoration appropriate to this style is so 
 wrapped up with colors that it cannot well be treated at 
 much length in a purely descriptive article, but there are 
 a few general principles which apply to all houses, and 
 these it may be Worth while to set forth. 
 
 In the first place the character of the wall covering 
 should be determined by the sort of trim employed: if the 
 trim is light and delicate in character and has considerable 
 ornamentation on its surface, the wall covering should be 
 quiet and unobtrusive, either a monotone grass cloth or a 
 two-toned paper of some variety. An excellent example 
 of a rather elegant trim is that in the dining-room of the 
 King house, with which a simple, brownish gray landscape 
 paper has been used to good advantage. With a land- 
 scape paper such as this, the hangings should be of one 
 color, and free from any decided pattern. Of course a 
 landscape or figured paper, unless of an all-over pattern, 
 is a bad background for pictures, and where there are many 
 pictures to be hung a grass cloth is perhaps the best wall 
 treatment. Grass cloth and burlap both have an advantage 
 over wall paper, in that nails can be driven directly into 
 
102 THE DUTCH COLONIAL HOUSE 
 
 the plaster without cracking it, and when the nails are 
 pulled out they leave no conspicuous mark. Burlaps, 
 especially the coarse-textured ones, should hardly be em- 
 ployed in the principal rooms; in the first place, with the 
 exception of those made by a comparatively limited num- 
 ber of manufacturers, they fade badly, and in the second 
 place they do not seem exactly appropriate for wall cover- 
 ing; nor are the surfaces very interesting, as unless faded, 
 they are perfectly uniform in color. Japanese grass cloths 
 come in a wonderful series of dyes, the colors are as per- 
 manent as any colors can be, and the shimmer of light and 
 shade on the surface produces a background which, while 
 unobtrusive, is exceedingly beautiful. With grass cloth 
 or any other monotone wall surface, including rough 
 plaster, chintz or an English printed linen would make 
 an excellent window hanging. Without some interesting 
 variety of color the room is apt to be dead and lifeless. 
 An excellent example of the agreeable effect which can 
 thus be produced is the dining-room of the Starr house, in 
 which the walls are of sand-finished gray plaster, the beams 
 of the ceiling, the floor and the trim nearly black, and the 
 windows hung with a bright chintz. The room, while very 
 simple and without any pictures, has the effect of being 
 very well decorated, since the plaster is a splendid back- 
 ground for the silver on the sideboard, the chintzes har- 
 monize well with the gray wall and the dark trim, and also 
 
FURNITURE AND DECORATION 103 
 
 with the mahogany furniture, which of course belongs to 
 the chintz period. Without the chintz the mahogany fur- 
 niture would be an anachronism in a room of this char- 
 acter, but the chintz forms a connecting link between the 
 rather rough treatment of the house, and the exquisite fin- 
 ish of the mahogany. 
 
 An interesting piece of interior decoration has been done 
 in Mr. Gurd's house, where there is no mantel at all: by 
 following a trick which can be seen in one of the old Dutch 
 interiors, a hanging across the top of the chimney breast, 
 and hangings down the side, frame the fireplace, so that the 
 lack of a mantel is not felt. This is an extremely clever 
 piece of decoration, but one which, to my way of thinking, 
 was perhaps unnecessary, since the mantel might have been 
 included in the scheme, if without improving, certainly 
 without injuring it. 
 
 Much of the scheme of decoration depends upon the 
 color of the room; a room which is all white and has a good 
 deal of outside light needs very careful consideration of its 
 contents before they shall be included, as every bright 
 article will make the rest of the contents seem pale and 
 insignificant. On the other hand, a room with a good deal 
 of dark woodwork can hardly have too bright colors intro- 
 duced into it. Even the rugs must be included in the color 
 scheme. With a Delft blue room, there is perhaps nothing 
 so appropriate as the soft old blue and grayish golds of the 
 
104 THE DUTCH COLONIAL HOUSE 
 
 Chinese rugs, although the prices of these are prohibitive 
 to most of us ; but modern imitations of these in good color, 
 and of comparatively low prices, will serve equally- well. 
 
 In a white Colonial room with appropriate wall cover- 
 ings and hangings, the rug colors must be extremely quiet, 
 and my own preference for such a room would-be for one 
 of the black and gold Persians, which I believe are called 
 Kirmanshahs, but for a room, as spoken of above, with a 
 good deal of dark woodwork, one can hardly find top bril- 
 liant a rug. 
 
 This would seem not an inappropriate place to say a few 
 words about rugs. The study of rugs is a tremendous 
 one; there are very few people who actually know much 
 about the subject, and a lifetime of investigation may be 
 passed with the discovery, at the end of it, that one is either 
 wrong or cannot obtain what he wants. The only really 
 successful way to buy rugs is to go to a thoroughly repu- 
 table house, and, without worrying about the names, buy 
 such rugs as are good in color, within the price possible (if 
 there are any such, which is generally not the case), and 
 take the dealer's word for the quality. I have spent the 
 odd moments of the last five years endeavoring to find out 
 something about rugs, and have at last made up my mind 
 that it is a subject beyond my grasp. No two experts 
 have agreed on any question, and I have found two rugs 
 which seemed to me precisely similar in color and of equal 
 
A dining-room in good Colonial style in the King house 
 
 A dining-room in old Holland 
 
Sand-finished walls, hewn beams and chintz hangings in the 
 Starr house 
 
 Panelling in a Holland interior 
 
FURNITURE AND DECORATION 105 
 
 excellence of design, priced one at three times as much as 
 the other. 
 
 For the main rooms there is of course nothing so beauti- 
 ful as Oriental rugs, but for bedrooms some of the attrac- 
 tively woven rag rugs that are now being sold by even the 
 best houses, at very low prices, are more appropriate. 
 Where Oriental rugs of suitability cannot be afforded, there 
 are carpets now being woven up to twelve feet square in a 
 single color, as well as the plain rugs with a border of a 
 different shade of the same color, which are priced at from 
 forty to ninety dollars for a nine-foot by twelve-foot size. 
 These last can be obtained in any desired color, since the 
 makers when given a little notice will weave them to order. 
 In considering the decoration and furniture, the floor cov- 
 erings should be taken into account with the rest of the 
 scheme. 
 
 The whole question of interior woodwork, decorations 
 and furniture should be taken up at the same time, and no 
 part of the house should be designed without reference to 
 the others. For example, in the photograph of the corner 
 of one of the Holland rooms, we have a wall cabinet whose 
 doors are ornamented with the linen-fold pattern, which 
 was quite a common method of treating the panels, either 
 in doors or in wainscot in the seventeenth century. Panel- 
 ing of this kind is absolutely inappropriate to a white room ; 
 it can be executed to the fullest advantage only in oak, 
 
106 THE DUTCH COLONIAL HOUSE 
 
 stained dark to imitate the old work. As oak and mahog- 
 any together form a particularly unpleasant combination,- 
 a design of this kind should never be applied to a room 
 which is intended to include mahogany furniture of Colonial 
 pattern; and following the principle that the whole of, the 
 ground story should be designed in harmony; unless the 
 rooms are completely separated from each other, we could 
 hardly have any really Colonial furniture in the house at 
 all. We would have to go back to the earlier period for., 
 our precedent, using the chairs with the spiral backs- and 
 rungs, or some similar pattern of the kind known to the 
 furniture sellers as "Charles II," although all the European 
 furniture of that epoch, including the Dutch, was very 
 similar in character. With a room of this kind we would 
 hardly use a landscape paper; probably a sand-finished 
 wall with a good deal of wainscot, would be most appro- 
 priate. 
 
 I have always found that it is comparatively insignificant 
 and unimportant details which finally determine the choice 
 of an interior treatment, and as we had precedent in the 
 old Dutch houses for all sorts of treatment, and as we find 
 in modem Dutch work that there are a number of different 
 treatments which seem appropriate, it is not especially im- 
 portant what scheme is selected, just so it is properly car- 
 ried out. I have even seen Dutch houses furnished in the 
 so-called "craftsman" furniture which were very comfort- 
 

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FURNITURE AND DECORATION 107 
 
 able, home-like and appropriate, perhaps because the better 
 designed craftsman furniture is not dissimilar from the 
 rudest and roughest of the home-made Colonial. If, as is 
 not infrequently the case, one has a few beautiful and cher- 
 ished family pieces of antique furniture, these may properly 
 determine the scheme of decoration, and the wall treatment 
 can be designed to form a suitable frame and background 
 for these pieces and also be appropriate to the Dutch house. 
 Should any such condition occur, as it not infrequently does, 
 the client should inform his architect in advance, so that 
 appropriate provision may be made for it, and, conversely, 
 the architect should discover from his client how the house 
 is to be furnished before the interiors are designed. In one 
 very unfortunate case in my own practice, where I used a 
 comparatively low ceiling, I found it impossible to get in 
 a peculiarly cherished and beautiful old clock without re- 
 moving the top ornament. A number of times have I 
 heard of cases, though more by good luck than good man- 
 agement they have not been in my own work, where it was 
 impossible to get a four-poster bed up a winding staircase, 
 or in which there was no place in the dining-room big 
 enough to set an unusually large sideboard. 
 
 In designing interiors most people will find architects 
 extremely willing to suit the design to their ideas, but there 
 sometimes comes a point where lesser considerations are 
 permitted to influence the client at the expense of greater 
 
108 THE DUTCH COLONIAL HOUSE 
 
 ones. Every house is a series of compromises. In the 
 first place there is a compromise between the size and finish 
 really desired, and what can be afforded; and even were 
 money unlimited, it is probably impossible to plan a house 
 which contains all the attractive features, or even the con- 
 veniences, one would like. Chimneys have such an unfor- 
 tunate habit of coming out in the wrong place in the second 
 story, the stairs take up such a lot of room that could be so 
 well employed if they were not necessary, and the house 
 becomes rather a question of what one can get, than of what 
 one wants. I think that an architect probably knows as 
 much about how to live as does a member of any other class, 
 but I never found an architect yet who was satisfied with 
 his own house, or felt that he had gotten everything in it 
 that he wanted, although most of us feel that we have gotten 
 in our houses everything that is possible. Another thing 
 that people are too apt to forget is that they are perfectly 
 willing, in a rented house, to put up with a number of in- 
 conveniences in money-saving devices, which they will not 
 consider for a moment in a house they are building for 
 themselves. Thus, the familiar saying, "It is cheaper to 
 rent than to build," is one of only partial truth, since you 
 do not rent anything like the quality that you build.