Studio: international art (6.1896)

The Building of a House

FIG. 13.—FIREPLACE IN DINING-ROOM

No. 3 bedroom; this is simple, and gives the key
to the treatment of the other bedrooms. Cup-
boards on each side of the fireplace would be
useful, and help to decorate the room. The wall
surface of lounge, bedrooms, and bathroom are
not papered, but have close vertical boardings fixed
to wood plated ; tinted wall papers without any
pattern might be used as an alternative.

Having now completed this brief and neces-
sarily incomplete picture of what might be done

FIG. 14. — SETTLE ON FIRST FLOOR

with the interior of the house, a word should be
added about the garden, which should include well-
kept grass-plots and slopes from a possible terrace
in front of the house, with some trees cut into
marvellous shapes, not too clever, planted in posi-
tions that the site might suggest.

At the outset of this paper I alluded to the
impossibility of transferring the thoughts of past
generations, or rather the expression of them, into
modern life. A further consideration of this will
explain more clearly what is possible in modern
building. A comparison of the life of other periods

with the life of to-day will help one to see how un-
reasonable it is to continue " copying the old
forms " into modern erections ; an example of this
is the Church House at Westminster, an appalling
failure. Such a building, compared with some
others to which I now refer, illustrates most for-
cibly the difference there must always be between
the work which expresses the possibilities of the
present and that which is a lifeless copy of past
generations. That it is possible to-day, in spite of

FIG. Ij.—SIDEBOARD IN DINING-ROOM

" the hideous luxury and squalor of the age, its
huge, ever-spreading, unvvielding, unlovely cities,"
to build occasionally with beauty and truth, can be
gathered by a study of No. 1, Palace Green, by
Philip Webb, and No. 16, Maida Hill, by Howard

FIG. 16.—FIREPLACE IN BEDROOM

237