XXXIII. Ways and Means

It is a common belief that to build an artistic house a large sum of money is required. Art and ornament are often held to be synonymous terms, and the house which possesses the largest amount of ornament is often held to be the most artistic. It will be necessary, first of all, therefore, to state that the reverse of this is very often the case, and that a house is artistic in proportion to the amount and quality of the skill and thought displayed in its design, and not in proportion to the amount of decoration it possesses.

Again, the intrinsic value, or rather the market price of the materials ot which a house is built, is often taken as the measure of its artistic merit, without regard to beauty of workmanship or design. Such a method of judging is almost as unreasonable as if one estimated the value of a picture by the price per pound of paint or per yard of canvas.

So far from being a luxury, the house which is rationally designed on economical lines is not only a source of pleasure and comfort to its possessor but also a wise investment.

In considering the cost of a house designed on the principles I have endeavoured to explain—principles which are claimed to be both rational and artistic—it is necessary to think of the house with its furniture and decoration ready for occupation, and to compare the total outlay required with the ordinary house, built, furnished and decorated in the usual way. And then, again, the cost of maintenance must be compared, the wear and tear of furnishings, and fabrics which perish in the using and which have to be replaced.

If one recalls to mind the ordinary house to let unfurnished, what a chilling and depressing vision is invoked! Think of its dreary wall surfaces, covered, perhaps, with three or four layers of dirty papers, its gas-fittings, its glaring windows with their broken Venetian blinds, its mantelpieces and grates, and its floors with their borders of battered staining. To make all this endurable there must be curtains and carpets and drapings of all kinds; and in the furnishing it is often considered necessary to introduce a multitude of unnecessary things to distract and confuse the eye, and so to screen and palliate the original ugliness of the unfurnished room.

But in the house where the building itself has been the subject of careful study, beauty does not depend on furnishing or decoration. Unfurnished, it is still inviting and homely, and nothing but essential furniture is required for its habitation. The perishable fabrics, which form so large a part of the ordinary house, are here reduced to a minimum.

Its floors do not demand carpets nor its windows curtains, and the less furnishings and trappings put into it the better it will look. Where only a limited sum of money is available for the making of a home, it will be the best wisdom to spend as much as we can afford in securing a thoughtfully designed and well-built house, and as little as may be required for essential furnishings, and nothing at all in decoration.

If, later on, circumstances admit of further outlay, decoration can be added as a result of careful consideration, or cheap and temporary furnishings may be replaced by better, but the structure of the house cannot be so easily modified. Custom and habit are the tyrants who have settled for the non-reflecting majority the expenditure required for the furnishing of a house. It is usual to spend, say,; 500 in furnishing a certain type of house, and the family is therefore invited to consider a scheme showing how to furnish for; 500. The expense may be grudged, but it is paid because it is usual and customary so to do. And so the furniture arrives, and probably includes the very pictures for the walls. Given a certain station in life such surroundings are correct and usual. It is not merely that such furnishings are badly made and vulgar in design. They are for the most part quite unnecessary and merely a source of labour and an obstruction of floor spaces. The demand for such things is the creation of their manufacturers, for, it may be observed, that by continuously and patiently telling a man that he wants a thing, he will end by believing you, and whether it is an encyclopaedia or a drawing-room cabinet he oflers himself a willing victim to the enterprising advertiser. And so the Englishman’s house has become an indiscriminate collection of objects which he has been insistently told that he wants. It is a compound of the cabinet-maker’s shop and the picture-dealer’s gallery, and as such is surely the strangest medley which, since the world began, has ever been chosen as a setting for human life.

In this country it is not usual for the average man to contemplate the idea of building a house for himself. He is deterred by various considerations. He has been told that building is an expensive luxury, and that the cost of a house invariably exceeds initial estimates, while he fears that if it may become necessary for him to sell or let his house he may not realise his expenditure. His informants are generally those who have built houses, and whose experience in the matter he therefore values. Speaking from my own experience, I may say that I have designed houses which have been finished within the expenditure originally proposed, and others in which the initial estimates have been more than doubled; and I believe I am but stating the experience of architects in general when I say that the additional cost has always been incurred by the client’s express demands. It has never occurred in houses designed for people whose means were limited, because they, knowing they could not afford to indulge in extras, were content to exercise a necessary restraint.

Generally speaking, the richer the client the more unchecked the tendency becomes to add to the original price, and this seems a very reasonable position of affairs for the man who in his daily life is accustomed to deny himself nothing; and, when the accounts have to be paid, it is perhaps merely human to cast the burden on builder or architect, and afterwards to nurse the conviction that this accumulative and unforeseen expenditure is an inherent part of the business of house-building.

To avoid such an experience it is necessary at the outset to determine once for all what is actually required and how much may be spent, and to allow a reasonable margin for unforeseen contingencies, and by keeping strictly to the original programme, or by departing from it only with the calculated knowledge of the cost involved in each case, there is no more reason why a man should spend more than he intends in building a house than in making a purchase in a shop.

If we assume the case of a man for whom it is necessary that economy should be studied, and who has no large sum to invest, and if we suppose that house, it will be necessary for him to allow a certain sum for the formation of the garden and its enclosure, as well as for furniture and perhaps decoration, and in order to be quite on the safe side it will be well for him to think of the total sum as £,()00 instead of looo, so as to leave an ample margin for contingencies. The sketch-plans for the house having been prepared, unless the architect has had experience or special knowledge of the price of building in the particular district, it will be wise to get a preliminary estimate at this stage by submitting the sketch-plans, with a rough specification, to a local builder.

In the selection of a builder to carry out the work, the competitive system of tendering is not always the most satisfactory. It is better to make local inquiries and to try and find a man who has the reputation for being straightforward in his dealings, and give him the work on condition that his price is considered reasonable by the architect. The architect is thus spared the necessity of playing the distasteful part of the amateur detective, and the work is carried out with the minimum amount of friction. It seems, indeed, little short of disgraceful that in the ancient and honourable craft of building there are so many men who demand the services of a constant spy in the form of a clerk of the works to insure proper work being done. Apart from ethical considerations, this degrading and vulpine attitude is the worst sort of business policy, and the architect who has the misfortune to engage this type of builder does not continue to employ or recommend him. But the competitive system of tendering, assuming that all builders belong to the criminal class and need constant police supervision, gives the work to the lowest bidder without considering his reputation or inquiring as to his character. It is this competitive system which is to a great extent the cause of the degradation of the modern builder. Under the pressure of necessity he may be tempted to offer to do the work for a price which compels him to attempt to scamp it, and his dishonesty in this respect is a retaliatory measure. I do not say that competition between builders of reputation is necessarily bad, but in competitions between builders whose characters are not inquired into it will generally be the most unscrupulous—the one who counts on making up deficiencies by undetected scamping—who offers the lowest bid, and the whole process thus often results in the survival of the unfittest. To inquire into character after the competition has taken place is useless. The rules of the game demand that the work should be given to the lowest bidder, and the fact that a man has been invited to compete implies that he has been considered eligible.

Although an architect may be able to obtain from an unscrupulous builder a minimum standard of excellence in the work, not only is this achieved with much unnecessary friction, but in the absence of any pride in his work on the builder’s part, it is impossible to obtain a really satisfactory result, for the best kind, of work cannot be obtained under compulsion, and so the final result is never quite satisfactory.

Having succeeded in obtaining a reasonable price for the work from a reliable builder, it may next be considered how the man who has not a large sum to invest may set about the important matter of paying for the house. Assuming that the cost of the house is £ i ooo, it will not be a difficult matter to obtain a mortgage on the building as it approaches completion for three-quarters of its value, so that the actual sum of money required will be, say, 300. Assuming that the interest payable on such a mortgage is 4 per cent., the house may thus be equivalent to one for which a rental of; 40 a year is paid. It might be considered necessary to allow a certain sum out of this for repairs, but in a house simply and solidly built this will be a much smaller sum than is usually allowed for old houses. The possibility of either selling or letting such a house eventually, should occasion demand, would depend very much upon its position and suitability to average requirements.

My own experience in this matter has shown that houses of average size, built in suitable localities, can be readily disposed of, for, while it is not the general public who at present demand rational houses, the minority who do are not catered for at all at present, and this minority, I feel assured, is increasing every year.

Those who have any faith in human nature at all must believe that the hideous outcrop of modern villadom is a merely temporary condition of affairs, and a veneer of so-called art will not for long be accepted as a substitute for comfort and convenience in planning.

The most economical house to build is one which is a simple rectangle in plan covered with an unbroken roof. In most cases, to aim at picturesque and elaborate roof-lines and plans full of nooks and corners, is to add to the cost and often merely to secure a restlessness and fussiness of effect. It is commonly supposed that the art of the house lies in complexity of roofing, in picturesque “skylines,” and so on. In answer to an attempt to induce a client who held such views to accept a simple type of plan, I was told that a plain house c’ould be obtained from any one, and that he had come to me because he wanted something unusual. To achieve the unusual in building nowadays, it is necessary merely to aim at being rational and simple, and to depend on proportion and the structural integrity for whatever beauty of an unobtrusive kind the house may possess. It does not by any means follow that a plain house is an ugly house, and conscious striving for picturesque effects often results in failure.

The most telling and prominently satisfying buildings are generally those which are simple in outline and structure.

In estimating the cost of the various houses illustrated, it must be remembered that, as the price of building varies considerably in different localities, these can only be taken as approximately correct. In some cases I am able to give the cost for which the houses have been actually built. In London and its neighbourhood, within a certain radius which it is difficult accurately to define, as weU as in certain popular or fashionable resorts in other parts of the country, the price of building is high. In country districts it is much lower, and is lowest in those where old traditions have been least influenced by modern ideas.

Large firms in most districts tend to maintain a uniform and somewhat high scale of prices, but in many country places the small local builder, who perhaps even works with his own hands, and who is not entirely consumed with the idea of making money, is perhaps the best type for building a small homely house. He does not possess elaborate machinery, and cannot produce that high mechanical finish in the work which represents the modern ideal of perfection, and which has made modern building so depressing. He may not be so intelligent or so expeditious in his work as the more up-to-date builder, but, on the other hand, he is often more conscientious and careful.