The great thing in house planning is to think ahead, and still think ahead. The hall which looks so spacious on paper is sure to contract, and ordinary-sized rooms will shrink perceptibly when they come to be furnished. It is important that the spaces between the doors and windows, the proportionate height of the doors and windows, the many little conveniences, and innumerable minor yet major details, like the placing of mantels, registers, chandeliers and side-lights, be planned by the occupant, and not left to the mercy of the architect. The latter will place the mantel on the side of a long, narrow room, thereby diminishing the width several feet, when it should go at the end. He will hang the doors so they will bump together, or open on the side you do not want them to open on. If he concede you a spacious hall and library, he will clip on the vestibule, or be a miser when he doles out the space for the stairway landing or the butler’s pantry. And what architect will stop to think of that most important of household institutions—a roomy, convenient, concealed catch-all, or rather a series of catch-alls!
Even so simple a contrivance as an invisible small wardrobe in the wall adjoining the entrance—a receptacle for hats, wraps, and waterproofs—he has never yet devised. Every hall must of necessity be littered up with that hideous contrivance, a hat-rack, in a more or less offensive form, when at a touch a panel in the wainscot might fly open to joyfully engulf the outer vesture of visitors. You must see your house planned and furnished with the inward eye ere the foundation is laid, and exercise the clairvoyant’s art if you would not be disappointed when it is finally ready for habitation. The question of closet-room is best left to the mistress of the house, otherwise it is certain to be stinted; and it were economy in the end to secure the services of a competent chef to plan the kitchen and its accessories—that tributary of the home through whose savory or unsavory channels so great a wave of human enjoyment or dolor flows.
It is with houses very much as it is with gardens—no two are ever precisely alike; so far at least as the interior of the former is concerned. Both reflect, or should reflect, through a hundred different ways and niceties of adjustment and arrangement, the individual tastes of those who are instrumental in their creation. The ideal house must first be conceived by those who are to dwell in it, modeled according to their requirements, mirroring their ideas, their refinement, and their conceptions of the useful and the beautiful. By different persons these ends are approached by different ways. So long as we attain the desired end, the route thereto is of little consequence. But in the ideal house, it may be observed, a little money and a good deal of taste go a very great way.
All the eyes of Argus and all the clubs of Hercules must need be yours, would you see your house perfectly planned and perfectly constructed. The terrible gauntlet one has to run! He who builds should have nothing to divert his mind from the task. It is the work of a lifetime crowded into a year.
And when all is done, and the lights are turned on and the house is peopled with its guests, who is there that is fully content with the result of his labor? who that finds in the fruition the full promise of the bloom? The perfect house in itself exists no more than the perfect man or woman. We can at best set up an exalted standard of excellence to approximate as nearly as we may. It is very much in building as it is in life, where content with what we have is, after all, the true source of happiness. “I long ago lost a hound, a bay horse, and a turtle-dove, and am still on their trail,” is the burden of Walden. How many of us are not likewise in quest of the something that ever eludes? When we think we have come up with the fox, it is but his shadow we seize; he himself has already vanished round the ravine. We follow, but may not overtake, at will, the siren that the poet beckoned for in vain:
Ah, sweet Content! where doth thine harbor hold?
Is it in churches with religious men
Which please the gods with prayers manifold,
And in their studies meditate it then?
Whether thou dost in heaven or earth appear,