Which House?
The Motif House
Intensely sophisticated and original. Geraniums painted on window glass. Ceiling utilized for decoration, with painted flowers, ascot ties, and so forth. One door in the room decorated to match the ceiling. This gives it a personal fillip, perhaps even a bright salute. Here and there bottles filled with brightcolored water. Then you go out and pick up some twigs and, combining them with modeling wax, make knowing little Rogers-group things. Paint two and a half walls in each room Scotch tartan. This makes the room more cozy; or, if you don’t want it cozy, you can consider it gives it jolly expanse.
The Big-Window House
It is a good First Conception — the Big Window to Bring the Outdoors In. Having decided, after looking at department-store show windows, upon the type and size of glass panel desired, you can easily make the rest of the house fit in with it. When the house is completed and the Big Window becomes adjacent to Outdoors to Be Brought In, the resulting state of affairs can often be cured by heavy planting, or a high white board fence with a crenelated top. Unless, of course, you just love to look outdoors, and the bras pendant from adjacent lines have for you the restless sweep of flying gulls, the white sheets the distant feel of snow-capped mountains. Imaginative thoughts may rise from seeing the oyster-gray fluted cylinders like truncated Doric columns of eld, tipped with a touch of frost— in this case, the overflowing ashes. In the trail of the oilman dragging his soiled snake through the snow, what an arabesque pattern of black on near-white! The track of the dog to the overturned garbage can! Yet — on second thought, perhaps Venetian blinds.
The Reduced-Space House
The principle of so-called sardinization. Saving a bit of area here and a bit there. Eating at a flap-up wall table in the kitchen, on stools the children fall off of. Guest rooms, if any, mostly closets with an inlaid bunk. Multiple-tier beds in children’s room. Living room with folding desk, folding sewing machine, folding radio, folding couch, space-saving chairs. If one has any leisure after making up high beds, folding this and unfolding that, there must be a barbershop in the neighborhood where there is plenty of waiting, where a fellow can stretch his legs.
The Reminiscent House
This is the type of house that follows the uncatalogued museum theme — authentically nostalgic of something, but not documented. And no price lists. The owner will tell you post prandially about bargains achieved. Along the walls you have old wagon wheels, breaking up t he square lines of the room and carrying you back mistily to the days when people didn’t have the lovely homes we have today. Against one of those wheels is an old piano remodeled for a desk and painted red. Then there is that appealing though possibly fatal rocking chair with the short rear rocker-ends— painted red — a potential gymnasium unless you sit well forward and watch it.
By the side of the fireplace you hinge the interior blinds you bought when they tore down that old Main Street mansion, to act as an inflammable but pretty fire screen. These are painted red. On the ceiling are adze-dressed beams from the Old Mill, not exactly structural since they don’t quite reach the walls at either end (how else could you get, them in ?), but providing a sentimental background for that fifth-cocktail yearning for the bygone days.
Moderate-Income House to Make Life Easy
Simplicity the keynote. Simplified kitchen, with cubicle for electric range, drawer-type refrigerator, fume hoods, dishwashers, garbage disposers; cubicle for laundry; dining cubicle; a couple of walls of ceiling-high cupboards. Simplified occupational therapy room, available for junior recreation, ping-pong, formal dinners, parent-teachers’ meetings, rainyday clothes drying. Simplified adult reflection room, soundproofed, acoustically treated, bookcased, builtin-radioed, with decorative meat-house tracks on the ceiling for movable lights. Simplified bathroom, with sun lamps, acoustical correction, roomy expanses, cubicles, closets, forced ventilation, instantaneous hot water. House operates smoothly with plenty of fuel oil, plenty of electricity, plenty of machine servicing, plenty of mortgage.
Before and After
“Only Fate knows why we were attracted to that stuffy house with its plain Greek pillars and wide porch — ‘verahndah’ my husband humorously dubbed it. Pillars and porch came off. The center hall we wisely merged with the former still Colonial parlor, to make a large Foregathering Room, with nubby rugs, merry tankards, churns, and cobblers’ benches about. A country-store counter, painted red, became a bookcase. We traded the stuffed-shirt Georgian mantel with fine carving, which simply didn’t go with our witty décor, for a darling meatcutting block that sparkles as a cocktail table. The house now gives you a fillip. It’s gallant, I mean.