HOW TO BUILD A HOUSE.
The only way to build a house properly is to employ an architect to build it for you. All the best houses are built by architects—any architect will tell you that. But of course you will always be allowed to say that you built it, so it will come to the same thing.
The walls of an architect's office are covered with drawings of enormous public buildings which the architect has erected in every capital of Europe. There are also a few of the statelier homes of England which he has put up in his spare time.
While you are waiting you compare these with your own scheme of the six-roomed villa you propose to build.
At last you are ushered into the presence and unless a stove-pipe protruding from your waistcoat pocket suggests that you are travelling in somebody's radiators you will probably be asked to sit down, and may even be given a cigarette. There is no difficulty in opening your business. The architect can see at a glance what you have come for and says quite simply, "You want to build a house?"
"I do," you reply.
"How many reception rooms?"
This rather staggers you. You had not intended to have any reception rooms at all. You never give receptions. All you wanted was a dining-room and a drawing-room, and a study with a round window over the fire-place.
But it is evidently impossible to confide this to the architect. All you can do is to reply as naturally as you can:—
"About half-a-dozen."
"Eight reception rooms," says the architect. "And how many bedrooms?"
"I don't really know; about one each."
"Twenty bedrooms," suggests the architect (there are three in your family). "And did you say a garage to hold two cars?"
By this time you realise that you are engaged in a game something like auction bridge and so far your opponent has done all the over-calling.
"Double two cars!" you cry excitedly.
"Five cars," rejoins the Architect.
"Six cars!"
"Garage to hold six cars," repeats the Architect, confessing defeat. "You are, of course, aware that a house on this scale will cost you at least twenty thousand pounds?"
"Of course," you reply, and you honestly think it would be cheap at the price.
After this the only thing to do is to get away as quickly as possible. It would be pure bathos to suggest any of your wife's labour-saving devices, or introduce the subject of that circular bath-room with a circular bath hanging by chains from the ceiling and a spirit-stove under it—your pet invention. Recall a pressing engagement, shake the architect firmly by the hand and promise to come and see him next Tuesday about details. In the interval you can compose a letter at your leisure, informing him that in view of the high cost of materials, etc., etc., you have decided to postpone the building of your house, but you desire to build at once a gardener's cottage (so that the gardener can be getting the grounds into order) containing one dining-room, one drawing-room, one study (with one round window), three bedrooms, one circular bathroom (with one circular bath) and one tool-shed to hold one tool.
Even so you will probably have to make concessions. Your window will be hexagonal and your bath square. But your worries are over. The architect will choose a builder and between them they will build your house during the next six years, which you will spend in lodgings. It is a long time to wait, certainly, but you will find plenty of amusement in occasionally counting the number of bricks that have been laid since last time. And then in 1926, as you smoke your pipe in your study and gaze out of your hexagonal window, you will not covet the Paradise of Adam, the first gardener.