American homes and gardens (1909) (17970454608)

Title: American homes and gardens
Identifier: americanhomesgar61909newy (find matches)
Year: 1905 (1900s)
Authors:
Subjects: Architecture, Domestic; Landscape gardening
Publisher: New York : Munn and Co
Contributing Library: Smithsonian Libraries
Digitizing Sponsor: Biodiversity Heritage Library



Text Appearing Before Image:
>HE charming house of J. H. Hammond, Esq., at Wynnewood, Pa., is delightfully situated on a shady site in that prosperous and progressive Philadelphia suburb. The country thereabouts, as all must know who have seen it, if no closer than from a rail- way-car window, is one of the most de- lightful that surrounds any great American city. I dare not venture so far as to assert that Mr. Hammond was fortunate enough to obtain the most delightful site of all, but surely it was attractive enough to call forth sympathetic treatment from his architect, Mr. Carroll Thayer, of Swarthmore, one of Wynnewood's neighboring towns. A delightful site, it seems to me, should always inspire the creation of a delightful dwelling. The two go together as naturally as can be, and I offer the accompanying photographs as excel- lent evidence, and the best, of the admiration I feel for this quiet little house that seems so exquisitely fitted to the trees and woods amid which it is built. It is a stone house, as are many of the better houses in this vicinity, with a great sloping shingled roof, whose lofty gables on either end are shingled to the apex. On the front, the roof is broken by a dormer, that rises to a height of two stories and which gives so much interest and so much char- acter to the exterior. Its propecting eave is pierced, on one side, by the great stone chimney that rises up from the wall below, cutting through the main roof and rising to a suf- ficient height above the gable of the dormer. The silhouette elements of the design are thus very varied and highly decorative, but there are a number of other features that help to make this a thoroughly interesting bit of architecture. There is an entrance porch on one corner of the front, a porch occasioned by a recessing of the outer walls, with a fragment, as it were, left on the outermost angle to support the great roof above. Here, beneath the porch, is the main doorway, on the side wall, and not facing the street, a delightful arrangement for privacy that one seldom sees, yet which, now that we see how it is done— and why—is very clear and simple. In the main wall are two pairs of twin windows, with leaded glass in diamond pattern, and between them is the base of the chimney, to which I have already referred. And this is all, unless one includes, as indeed one must, the great stone bay on the side, which we presently discover to constitute a considerable por- tion of the dining-room. Being but a simple little house—and I must insist on this
Text Appearing After Image:
A charming house of stone with its two-story roof