100 Turn-of-the-Century Brick Bungalows with Floor Plans by Rogers & Manson

Author:Rogers & Manson
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9780486157672
Publisher: Dover Publications
Published: 2012-09-18T16:00:00+00:00

The Tale Of An Unbeliever.

BEAUTY THAT LASTS.

THAT was a new suburb we walked through last Sunday,” said Huntington, ” “a kind of Spotless Town put together for show-and-sale purposes. Now we’ll see an old place that grew naturally, that used to stand on its own feet as a village long before it became a refuge for weary commuters.”

Again we had been talking about my home, a subject quite as important to me as if I had been planning a million-dollar palace instead of a modest two-story, seven-room house on a fifty-foot lot. My life-long friend, several years older than I, had set out to give me proper instruction in home-building, and now he had brought me to this spacious, sleepy-looking settlement nestling between two cedar-clad ridges. The lawns were the triumphant product of the years, the trees along the street were giant elms, and everything about had that air of settled dignity that comes only with age.

“A house, like a human being, may be boastful, pretentious, without good taste,” my companion was saying, his voice slow and lazy in keeping with the drowsy afternoon, “and, as you spare no pains to avoid a man of that kind, so do you aim to shun such a house. Simplicity, the most beautiful quality in man or woman, is also the most beautiful quality in a home. And along with simplicity, permanence. The very spirit of the home, that which gives the word an appeal possessed by no other in our language, is the idea of permanence, and unless this idea is conveyed to the eye the creator of a home fails to attain beauty.

“I have traveled far in my day — more widely than most men, perhaps — and I have seen houses of human habitation in many lands, but I have never yet seen any material in which simplicity and permanence, the essentials of beauty, are so combined as in the brick. It has all the elements of a perfect building material, hardness, durability, imperviousness to moisture, non-conductivity of heat, adaptability to varied arrangement, convenience in handling. Fire, wind, rain, frost — all are helpless against it. It comes out of the Earth, and it is as indestructible as earth itself.”

We stopped before the gap in a tall hedge, and peered through the shrubbery and trees at a rather small house of rich, dark brick. Its long side faced us, parallel with the road we were on, and it had an immaculate white entrance, decorated by two chaste columns, just opposite us in the middle; small-paned windows with white trimmings; and a white piazza at each end. Vines clung to it lovingly, and one corner was nearly hidden by a profusion of roses.

The building was simplicity itself. As it looked it did not occur to me to wonder what it had cost, whether five thousand or twenty thousand; and a minute later, when Huntington brought my thoughts back to practical things, I realized that this was a tribute to its perfect taste.

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