deemed, and the neighborhood of the future will be so long in developing that the best years of life will be spent, as well as many hundreds of dollars in taxations (town and local) and interest on investment, before the place in creases materially in value.

Country or suburban houses must, of course, be planned to take advantage of the peculiarities of the situation; the view, the sun, the refreshing summer breeze all need to be courted, and protection sought from the severity of

Detail of Tower.

the north wind or the damaging descent of water and dampness from the uplands. The setting of a house affects the exterior as decorations and furniture do the interior. Where possible, the adaptation of natural beauties add incalculably to the effect, and a face of rock or a clump of trees will give more grace than the best planned architectural decoration.

A house which recommends itself for certain situations, has a central rotunda, from which three wings radiate almost like a trefoil; two form the front and look upon an extended view, while the third stretches toward the back and contains the kitchen and laundry. Light and air are thus secured on three sides of the main rooms of the house. The illustrations show the front elevation, the ground plan, and the plan of the second story. There are upper rooms for the servants and a billiard-room in the tower, which are not shown.

The contract-built house, put up in blocks of three or more in cities, is built more cheaply than an individual house

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discard the high stoop and to enter, slightly above the street-level, into a reception-hall, from which rises a flight of steps to the centre of the parlor floor. This plan gives the full width of the lot to the dining and drawingrooms. The kitchen is on the level with the reception-hall but back of it, and is reached from the street through a long passage extending from the

can be erected. The two great reasons for this are-first, economy, which results from duplicate orders City houses. and designs, and from the ability to keep the different trades constantly at work without drawing some off to wait for others; and, secondly, the rise in the value of the property in consequence of the improvements placed upon it. Thus it is that the man who wants a city house which will cost under $30,000, lot included, will do better with his money to buy of some trustworthy builder who has a reputation for honesty than to build himself. A house to cost $20,000 and over, exclusive of the lot, might be built to advantage by the owner. He may not have as showy, nor perhaps as elegant, a house as he would find already built, but

Drive

it would need fewer repairs as the years go by and would be more satisfactory as to interior arrangements. The only objection to buying a city house is the impossibility of determining whether it is honestly built. After the wood trim is in, the marble set, and everything made ready for the innocent buyer, even an expert could not tell if the essential points were well executed.

Plans for city houses are capable of more variety than would seem possible to the hasty observer of the usual oblong lot of twenty-five by one hundred feet. The tendency of the day is to

Fig. 4.-American Basement City House with Reception Hall and Kitchen on Street Level. John H. Duncan, Architect.

readily by his theories. She should arrange everything thoroughly to her satisfaction before the plans are accepted, with the fact well fixed in her

mind that after the work is begun it is too late to change anything except at great expense. It is not by any means true that because a man's business is to build houses that he knows more of the art of living in them than the owner; so it is quite appropriate to express plainly either approval or dislike of the architect's arrangements.

It very often happens in drawing plans that what may be called furniture spaces are quite forgotten, and that when the time comes to arrange the drawing-room there is no suitable place for the piano, and the bedroom lacks wall-space sufficiently wide for the bed, or there is no suitable place for the bureau near the light. It is only reasonable that the best adviser on these points is the woman who is to order the household, and not the man whose sole business is to build the tenement.

The contractors furnish estimates of the work they propose doing at the lowest figure that complies Contracts. with the conditions, but frequently they may be persuaded to lower the sum if a preference is expressed for their work and their figures exceed another's. The first contract drawn is for mason-work. It is desirable when a builder is not employed that this and all other contracts should include as many minor contracts as possible. Thus more responsibility is centred on one man, and the different trades have not the liberty to mar each other's work that is sometimes used with exasperating effect.

The mason's contract may include foundations, cellar walls and floor, plastering, house walls (if of stone or brick), chimneys, supports for piazzas, stone or cement sidewalks, back yards of city houses, and cisterns, cesspools and drains of country houses, and mantels and fire-backs where bricks take the place of wood and metal.

The carpenter's contract may in

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