A fireplace in field rock
The chief expense would naturally be for the living room, dining-room, and kitchen. The dining-room, however, may well be simply a corner or alcove of a large living room. Such an arrangement greatly increases the value of a single fireplace, which will be required to give the summer home the sense of perfect comfort. This may be of rough field rock and should be large enough to take one-cut fireplace wood. The chamber furnishings may be very simple indeed. Furniture dealers make a point of supplying beds, bureaus, chairs, and cabinets of simple design, unfinished, so that the purchaser may stain them to harmonize with any desired colour scheme. But such furniture, or good substitutes for it, can be made very inexpensively. For example, the stock for a good bed will not cost over seventy-five cents. Cases provided with shelves and curtains in place of drawers, made at a cash outlay possibly of one dollar, will serve for bureaus. The cost of materials for building an eight-room cottage in every way satisfactory need not exceed five hundred dollars; and such a cottage could be beautifully furnished by clever boys and girls at an expense for materials of one hundred and fifty or perhaps two hundred dollars.
An inexpensive bed
In the exterior finishing of summer cottages nature generally needs very little assistance. No colours harmonize so well with the gray rocks, sere fields and marshes, and the evergreen trees by the seashore, as the weathered grays of the shingled cottage. The window frames, door frames and facings, painted to preserve them, may be of the same colour or in dull green or brown, plainly marking the outlines of the house but without unpleasant contrasts. A stained roof in slate gray or creosote brown is also in keeping. The underpinning and outside chimneys in the field rock of the locality are eminently fitting. The house among the hills will stand more colour because the colours of nature are richer, especially in the autumn season. But wherever the house may be, it should repeat in its larger surfaces the prevailing colour tones of its natural setting. It should seem to fit into its surroundings as if it belonged there and would always remain there, a part of the simple, natural beauty all around it.
THE COUNTRY LIFE PRESS, GARDEN CITY, N. Y.