Trevista

The house now to be considered is one specially designed to suit one of those rectangular plots of ground so commonly to be found in suburban and even country districts, where estates are laid out with little regard for anything but commercial and utilitarian ends. In such districts it is not permitted to advance the house beyond what is called the building-line. Such beauty as might be gained by a certain irregularity as one may find in old villages, where here a cottage abuts on the road itself, and there one stands back from the highway, is here impossible, and the houses appear as if drawn up on parade, toeing the line with dreary and inevitable regularity. The land so divided is generally sold by the foot of frontage to the road, and the plots are generally of considerable length, as it is assumed that the back land is of no great value. A house is considered, apparently, as primarily a place where one sits in a bay-window which commands a view of other bay-windows and an outlook on the road. Whether the sun looks in at your window is apparently a minor consideration as long as an expanse of plate-glass reveals to the passer-by the elegance of your furnishings. The house illustrated here follows no such canons, but deliberately turns its back on the road because the road is to the north, and its occupants prefer the sun and the beauties of a secluded garden to the traffic and dust of the street.

Although thus cut off from the drawbacks to a roadside situation, it yet keeps as close to the road as the building-line permits, in order to gain the more land for the garden on the sunny side.

In its frontage of a hundred feet three gates form the starting-point of three main vistas, which extend to the back boundary of the site. On entering the centre gate in the paling of cleft oak one finds oneself in no miserable apology for a front garden set with rows of bedded flowers or choked with amorphous shrubberies; but, instead, in a cleanly open court from which one catches glimpses right and left of pleasant vistas appropriately terminated. On opening the front door, one enters a wide and low passage, and beyond its cool shade one sees the garden-room, and, beyond that, one catches a glimpse of a garden vista which, beginning with the rose garden, ends in the semicircular recess at the end of the lawn. This definite connection of the garden paths with the passages of the house helps to make house and garden parts in a comprehensive studied effect.

It is impossible to consider them entirely apart from each other, for taken together they form a single conception. It is not a case of first designing a house and then laying out its immediate surroundings as a garden bearing a certain relation to it, for house and garden are here the product of a single initial idea which comprehends the whole.

In the consideration of the ground plan it will be observed that the central passage serves to separate the main living-rooms of the family from the kitchen premises and the children’s room. The central feature is the large hall, house-place or living-room, of which a sketch is given, in which some indication is conveyed of its great hospitable open fireplace, and its broad spaces of wall, where homely whitewash forms an economical and satisfactory substitute for superficial and mechanical artistry. Adjoining this hall is the dining-recess, a feature which has already been described. The drawing-room is also so arranged in connection with the hall as to give, when required, a combined room over forty feet in length, while the position of the fireplace in the drawing-room not only gives a certain seclusion, but allows of a window there to the south.

The functions of the garden-room have already been dwelt on, and it is here placed to command the main garden vista.

Turning to the consideration of the rooms on the left of the central axis of the plan, it will be noted that the staircase is so situated that a separate staircase for the servants will not be required. The children’s room is long and low, with a sunny outlook to the garden, and a wide ingle fireplace. Here, as elsewhere, the structure is all, or nearly all, the decoration, and so the interior acquires a certain dignity and reality which cannot be realised by the cunningest schemes of paper and paint. To the north of this the kitchen premises are well isolated, and in occupying the position of honour overlooking the road represent a radical departure from the average scheme for a house. A covered way or entry here isolates, but gives dry access, to the coal-cellar and w.c, and forms a part incidentally of one of the three vistas which are the basis of the whole scheme.

On the upper floor there are four bedrooms and bathroom, while above in the roof the space admits of further development; and besides the servants’ bedroom, cistern-room, and boxroom, a study or studio might be formed there, or additional bedrooms if required.

In considering the garden scheme, it may first be noted that in addition to the three main vistas there are two subsidiary ones, one of which is opposite the bay-window to the hall, and the other opposite the window to the children’s room, and these help to confirm the unity of plan in house and garden, which has already been alluded to. The regularity of the outline of the site and the assumed absence of natural features on an approximately level site are all attributes which suggest, and indeed demand, formality of design. There are occasions and places where it would be equally reasonable and inevitable to admit natural features as the basis of the scheme, and to depart from the rectangular in the formation of patha. But here to do so would be to indulge in unreasonable affectations of design, and so the rose garden opposite the south front of the house is symmetrically disposed, culminating in the central dipping-well, a feature so practically useful for watering flowers with water which has been exposed all day to the sun, surrounding which roses wreathed on arches, and festooned on chains seem to join hands as in some ancient country dance round the maypole. This rose garden is flanked on each side by semicircular recesses for seats, and from the lawn it is divided by an open screen of climbing roses. The lawn itself presents an open space of shaven turf, flanked on each side by pergolas, which seem to be the side aisles of a floral church, while at the end of the lawn another semicircular recess forms the terminal feature to the central axis of the plan. Between the pergolas and the boundary hedge is a long narrow flower bed where lilies and other flowers show their beauty to the best advantage against a dark background, and gleam at intervals between the pergola posts. Beyond this pergola, where the paving is dappled with shadow, a little garden of perennial flowers completes the vista, which is terminated by an arbour. The possessor of such a little garden will find scope enough within its boundaries to create a little paradise of flowers. But it should always be borne in mind that the flowers are for the garden, not the garden for the flowers. As in the house, the collector of furniture and bric-a-brac comes to regard his home as a mere shelter for art treasures, so the gardener is apt to consider the merits of the individual bloom before the general effect of that little outdoor world in which it is but a unit. It is not enough to grow the right sort of flowers, but it is necessary that they should be arranged in right relation to each other, and considered in this way, the materials of which the garden is composed are as the colours which a painter uses to make a picture, and he who chooses a small canvas may rival the efforts of a whole staff of gardeners employed without the controlling influence of artistic skill in the grounds of the millionaire’s mansion.