Designs for cottages, farmhouses and villas, with a theory of the American house: that it should be fit for its purpose, show that it is a house and a home, suit the landscape round it, and suit the American climate, above all by its veranda.
Downing (1815–1852) was a nurseryman and landscape gardener from the Hudson valley whose books did more than any others to form the taste of the American middle class in the mid-nineteenth century. Cottage Residences (1842) and The Architecture of Country Houses (1850) offered plans and views of picturesque houses (Gothic, Italianate, “bracketed”) with practical advice on building, heating and furnishing them.
He asked first that a house be truthful: that it look like a dwelling and not like a temple, and that its materials be shown for what they are. He asked that it fit its setting, preferring soft earth colours to white paint in the country, and that it fit its climate: for him the veranda, or piazza, giving shade in the American summer and a place to sit out of doors, was a positive luxury in summer, though not, as a kitchen or a bedroom is, an absolute necessity.
The book, part by part
I The real meaning of architecture
Beauty in a house grows from its usefulness, its truthfulness and its expression of the life led in it.
II Cottages, farm-houses and villas
Plans and views for each, with their costs, and the features each needs: the porch or veranda, the bay window, the bracketed eaves.
Rules: The veranda