New Domestic Architecture.
American dwelling houses, whether in city or country, have within forty years been much improved in plan and equipment. To speak only of dwellings in cities, we may note how designers and inventors have promoted comfort and convenience, healthfulness and cheer. At the close of the Civil War an ordinary house in Philadelphia, or Chicago, as it left the builder’s hands was little else than a bare box. Stoves for warming and cooking had to be brought into it, wardrobes heavy and clumsy were placed beside its walls, cupboards meant to be moved and not moved easily held the raiment and table linen. In rented houses the gas fixtures might belong to the tenant; when he took them away ugly breaks appeared in walls and ceilings. To-day all this is of the past: in important details the design of the mansion is embodied in dwellings comparatively small. Furnaces for heating, ranges for cooking, form part and parcel of the building; fixtures for gas and electricity, yielding both light and heat, are provided just as water faucets are; every bedroom has its clothes closet instead of the lumbering wardrobe. In the kitchen we find dressers and china closets built into the walls; the laundry has stationary washtubs and, in some cases, a drying room as well, so that the laundress does not care should it rain on washing day. The aim throughout is that the house and its equipment shall as far as possible make up a unit, that the labor of housekeeping be minimized to the utmost by a judicious outlay of capital when the house is built.