Townhouse

“ In time of peace, however, the visitor passed unscathed through the gate into a vast courtyard enclosed by huge battlemented walls or towers; a courtyard that is almost a village, for it contains the church, the knights’ quarters, the squires’ house, the lodgings for pages and servants, the barracks, the cottages of the artisans and labourers on the estate, the bake-house, the kitchen, the walled and gated fish-pond, the fountain, the washing-place, the stables, the barns, etc. A second gate, a second portcullis, lead to a smaller court, where—huge, swart, and sombre—towers the keep. ”

“ The “town-house,” or town-hall, of the New England town or village, in its architecture, is a modern structure, often as simple, unpretentious, and unornamented as the “meeting-house” near which it usually stands on the village green or “town common.” It is the arena wherein rich and poor, educated and illiterate, wise and foolish, meet, at least annually, and as much oftener as occasion demands, to decide those questions of Home Rule which are most vital to all concerned. ”

“ Flagged pathways cross the greensward of the court, and there is a fine hall wherein the inmates used to dine together.
As we traverse the village streets we often meet with these grey piles of sixteenth-century almshouses, often low, one-storeyed buildings, picturesque and impressive, each house having a welcoming porch with a seat on each side and a small garden full of old-fashioned flowers. The roof is tiled, on which moss and lichen grow, and the chimney-stacks are tall and graceful. An inscription records the date and name of the generous founder with his arms and motto. ”

“ Every town and village along that vast stretch of double river-frontage had a best dwelling, finest dwelling, mansion,—the home of its wealthiest and most conspicuous citizen. It is easy to describe it: large grassy yard, with paling fence painted white—in fair repair; brick walk from gate to door; big, square, two-story 'frame' house, painted white and porticoed like a Grecian temple—with this difference, that the imposing fluted columns and Corinthian capitals were a pathetic sham, being made of white pine, and painted ”

“ The first evidence of social quaintness in the town is the way the first families live. Here comes the strain of French blood. The venerable houses are placed among dense foliage, the side, never the front, of the house facing the street. In this side are the parlor and upper bedroom windows, which are never open to the public streets, but covered with wooden shutters. Instead of a front doorbell to ring, there is a small gate with a bell. This you tinkle, and a servant lets you in. There is a long piazza running the full side length128 of the house, which is often used as a sitting room. ”

“ In the spacious halls of opulent companies, which showed but an old-fashioned porch in a narrow quiet lane, but which presented to those who were permitted to enter their portals a superb range of apartments teeming, mayhap, with old furniture and valuable pictures, and doubtless giving on a quiet garden, worth no one knows what a square foot for building purposes, but preserved from the ravages of the builder, merely to gladden the eyes of the plump City sparrows, and of the master, the wardens, and the clerk of these most worshipful corporations. ”

“ Either course will bring you before a wide low house of yellow brick, with green blinds and white woodwork and English ivy. Directly ahead of you, across the circle of the driveway, the square main section of the house, capped by a tower, rises above a bright portico. To left and right the house throws out long extensions of even height, terminating in wings set endwise to you, like double-faces in the game of dominoes. Your first impression will be one of unusual size, your next of flatly rectangular simplicity. ”

“ Writing of the Garden District, Mark Twain said: “All the dwellings are of wood ... and all have a comfortable look. Those in the wealthy quarter are spacious; painted snowy white, usually, and generally have wide verandas, or double-verandas, supported by ornamental columns. These mansions stand in the center of large grounds and rise, garlanded with roses, out of the midst of swelling masses of shining green foliage and many-colored blossoms. ”

“ In the eastern part of the town the dwellings are large, comfortable, even elegant, with well-kept grounds filled with trees and shrubbery, and there are a few of the same character scattered here and there throughout the town; but the large majority of houses, those that give the place its discouraged, unambitious look, are small wooden dwellings, a story or a story and a half high, with the end facing the street and a shed-kitchen behind. Those that are painted are white or brown, but many are unpainted, have no window-shutters and are surrounded by untidy yards and fences that need repair. ”

“ Apartment houses—regular flat buildings, with elevator service and all that—shoved their aggressive stone and brick faces up to the pavement line of a street where before old white houses with green shutters and fluted porch pillars had snuggled back among hack berries and maples like a row of broody old hens under a hedge. ”

“ Whenever there is a river or stream available for such purposes, and the surrounding country is fertile, the village rapidly rises to be a considerable town. Frame-houses are so quickly erected, and the materials are so easily procured near a saw-mill, that, in the first instance, no other description of houses is to be found in our incipient towns. But as the town increases, brick and stone houses rapidly supplant these less substantial edifices, which seldom remain good for more than thirty or forty years. ”

“ I am in favor, therefore, of those plans of housebuilding which have wide central spaces, whether halls or courts, into which all the rooms open, and which necessarily preserve a body of fresh air for the use of them all. In hot climates this is the object of the central court which cuts into the body of the house, with its fountain and flowers, and its galleries, into which the various apartments open. When people are restricted for space, and cannot afford to give up wide central portions of the house for the mere purposes of passage, this central hall can be made a pleasant sitting-room. ”

“ One type of dwelling, indeed, is found to be more or less prevalent through all the urban aggregation. That is the small four or five-roomed cottage, containing on the ground floor a front parlour, a kitchen, and a scullery built as an addition to the main part [101] of the house; and on the upper floor the bedrooms, the third bedroom in the five-roomed house being built over the scullery. And in such dwelling-places, if anywhere, is concealed the secret of the future of the people of England. ”

“ We have been hunting about for a permanent country home in the neighborhood, but no house is so difficult to get as one which has at once seclusion and convenience of position, which is neither of the suburban-villa style nor of the grand hall and castle dimensions. ”

“ The houses, which are all kept painted white, are built in squares, their backs looking on to a large courtyard. This keeps all the fronts free from the unsightly domestic pots and pans and other paraphernalia usually to be seen crowding the fronts of village houses and shacks. Stores, schools, and a doctor’s shop are provided, and each household has its own plot of ground for the growing of vegetables and flowers, and is also provided with the very necessary baths which the architects and builders of the peons’ houses (generally the owners themselves) invariably forget. ”

“ The grey stone house, separated from the garden by a thick privet hedge and moss-grown court, is the last dwelling at this end of the quiet market-town, and, with its slate roof and substantial double storey, is of a class greatly superior to its neighbours, whose warm red tiles are just visible over the walls. ”

“ I don't mean, though, that I have the smallest inclination to take up my abode in this town, but I should like to have you see it, for it is the funniest place you can imagine. The old, queer-looking houses seem to be placed cornerwise on the most crooked of streets, all up hill and down, and winding around so that I begin to think they have lost themselves and will come to a stop, when out they start, from behind some red or green house which they had run around just for fun. ”

“ In the daytime, when the tenants were out at their various avocations, the upper part of the dingy old building was deserted, save by the housekeeper in the attics; while the counting-house abutting on the street was all life and bustle. ”

“ Beyond the walls the town assumes a very different character; elegance, taste, and comfort, and those features which mark the progress of art and refinement, are brought into immediate view; while numerous cottages, and several villas of handsome design and finely situated, throw an air of luxury and domestic comfort over the rural suburbs, the natural character of which is highly favourable to buildings of this description. ”

“ Our porch is one of those accommodating porches with plenty of room, a standing invitation to company. Whenever company comes I have to convert myself into a moving van and tote all the furniture out from the parlor.
The Duke of Mont Alto, and the Duchess, dropped in one evening with the Purdys, and I began to move the parlor. What with spade pushing and furniture moving, I've got Sandow backed off the board. It's wonderful what a little regular training will do for a fellow! ”

“ The public buildings, which are the town-house, of two stories, with low pillared arches, and the church, are all that strike the eye of the stranger; the others are comprised of some few one-story dwelling houses and stores, with huge doors and barred windows, occupied by citizens and small dealers. ”

“ The houses in Meeting-street and the back part of the town, are in general lofty and extensive, and are separated from each other by small gardens or yards, in which are the kitchens and out-offices. Almost every house is furnished with balconies and verandas, some of which occupy the whole side of the building, from top to bottom, having a gallery for each floor. ”

“ In the country neighborhood thereabouts, along the dusty roads, one found at intervals the prettiest little cottage homes, snug and cozy, and so cobwebbed with vines snowed thick with roses that the doors and windows were wholly hidden from sight--sign that these were deserted homes, forsaken years ago by defeated and disappointed families who could neither sell them nor give them away. ”

“ One was a half-modernised feudal dwelling, lying in a wooded hollow—a large concavity filled with a delightful old park. The house had a long grey façade and half a dozen towers, and the usual supply of ivy and of clustered chimneys relieved against a background of rook-haunted elms. But the windows were all closed and the avenue was untrodden; the house was the property of a lady who could not afford to live in it in becoming state and who had let it, furnished, to a rich young man, “for the shooting.” ”

“ These will not as a rule, I should fancy, follow the fashion of the vulgar ready-built villas of the existing suburb, because the freedom people will be able to exercise in the choice of a site will rob the "building estate" promoter of his local advantage; in many cases the houses may very probably be personal homes, built for themselves as much as the Tudor manor-houses were, and even, in some cases, as œsthetically right. Each district, I am inclined to think, will develop its own differences of type and style. ”

“ No one who now sees the pretty populous villadom which has grown up in every direction round the home of my early married years—the neat cottages and cheerful country houses, the trim lawns and bright flower-gardens, the whole well laid out, tastefully cultivated, and carefully tended suburban district, with its attractive dwellings, could easily conceive the sort of abomination of desolation which its aspect formerly presented to eyes accustomed to the finish and perfection of rural English landscape. ”

“ The eye recognizes at once the regulation cottages, all like pretty maids — but here the similarity ceases — of a row, with garden spaces attached, back yards, verandahs, and every attention paid by the constructors to dryness, ventilation, and whatever else a Parliamentary inspector of the most practical type could desire. ”

“ In the present awakening of the public mind to the importance of the housing question, and the want of substantial, comfortable, as well as comely dwellings for the people, especially in the country districts, much attention has been directed to cottage building, and a practical effort is being made by the Garden City Association to solve the question in the competitive exhibition in cottage design and building they recently organized. ”

“ There is, perhaps, a reasonable objection to a single large living room on the part of a particular class who let the front room to a lodger. Nevertheless, for a model village or a garden city it is strongly recommended that the plan should be adopted freely, and the preference for the useless front room in small cottages discouraged. ”

“ Then we sat on the porch and had our pictures taken by flashlight.
Somebody burgled That House and moved the parlor furniture and piano into the dining-room and the dining-room stuff into the parlor. A merry wit tacked attachments to our houses, the managing editor put an "Open for Inspection" sign on the city editor's castle and some one stuck a "For [Pg 148] Rent" placard on ours. And then they began leaving, by twos and threes, and the telephone girl was one of the last to go, lingeringly. ”