Suburban Residences, and How to Circumvent Them

by J. E. Panton

plans and ensure the houses being built in such a way that it is possible to live in them without an undue expenditure of money or resources? How I should love to design just for once the small ideal house with its square hall, capable of being used as an extra sitting-room or a billiard-room, we need not then have the ‘three reception-rooms’ which sound so grand and mean so little. Upstairs should be three good bedrooms and a dressing-room, bath and day nursery; the servants’ rooms and box-room in their turn above these, and whenever possible, reached by a separate staircase. I see no reason why such a house with reasonable and rational servants’ downstairs accommodation, as already described, should be out of the reach of the usual suburban resident with his £800 to £1000 a year.

If arranged in this compact and comfortable style, and if every labour-saving appliance that is obtainable is introduced, the number of servants required would be minimised. A great consideration in these days, when though we are always being badgered to help the unemployed no one seems able to get any servants, and, even if they are forthcoming, they have to be paid double the old prices, while they do half the amount of work. At least that is what I am always hearing. Personally, I have never found any difficulty in obtaining all the maids I myself require.

At the same time, if I were building ever so small a house, I should undoubtedly have hot and cold water taps and a waste pipe in every bedroom and dressing-room, and would even go as far as to have fixed washing-stands there too. I would put at least one cupboard in each room, also a window-seat, and, of course, the regulation tiled hearth and slow-combustion stove with its tiled surround and its simple black fender. The short curtains to the windows, the carefully-selected pictures and ornaments, and the matted floor should all help to make the work light, and to render it unnecessary to keep any superfluous number of maids.

But we have at present to do with the suburban residence as it is and not as it might be, and therefore it is not much use in dreaming about perfection, for if we do we shall most certainly be disappointed, and do no real good at all. We shall have to combat shrunken doors and ill-fitting windows, poor grates and bad floors, and therefore the sooner we set about remedying these faults the better it will be for us. I do most certainly advise that whatever else is put up with, the usual black wide-mouthed all-devouring grate may be altered and replaced with some kind of a very simple slow-combustion one. These grates can be bought for £3 or £4 at Shuffery’s in Welbeck Street, and will probably save their cost in coal in one month’s use. Besides which they will ensure the warmth and comfort which cannot possibly exist without them; for pile on coal as we may on the grate of the past, the heat goes mostly up the chimney, while the fuel is exactly as useful as regards keeping the fire in, as would be leaves or pieces of paper. Our sole occupation with such a grate is to jump up every five minutes and prevent the fire from going out altogether, by putting on more coal, and yet again more; until our patience, to say nothing of our coal supply, gives out most completely. I have recently spent some months in the company of such a grate, and I can assure my readers I have not had a pleasant time of it. I happened to be obliged to have a fire in all night, and I had no sooner gone comfortably to sleep than the cold roused me again to find that the wretched thing had gone out or almost out, notwithstanding that half an hour before I had not only fed it copiously with coal, but put briquettes in considerable numbers into its vast and hungry jaws. Briquettes which will as a rule keep in the fire for nearly twelve hours were useless here, and I have been therefore confirmed in my deadly hatred against these grates by my sufferings at their hands during a long and most exceptionally severe winter.

Once more, I can assure my readers as regards the grates, that it is absolutely no use to temporise; and that both the one in the day nursery and that in the best bedroom must go, even if it cannot be managed that the grates in the other upstairs rooms can be changed; while let nothing persuade anyone to have gas stoves erected. They are both cheerless and unhealthy, albeit I know they are a great saving in trouble, that they are now properly ventilated, and that they can be turned on and off at a moment’s notice, and can be so regulated that the proper temperature for all rooms—60 degrees—can be maintained either at night or day. But I cannot breathe in any house where gas is allowed to warm the air. I know plants never last in such an atmosphere, as my plants do, and that, moreover, wherever gas stoves are employed largely, anyone in that special place is pale, wan and susceptible to cold. Indeed, the more I see of any attempt to heat our rooms otherwise than by open fires, the more I am convinced that such attempts are harmful and unsuccessful, and that, therefore, coal and wood fires should be ‘our only wear,’ at least until some genius invents something better and less costly. At the same time I don’t see why anyone need make such attempts—given the proper grates—for nothing can take the place of a cheery blaze, which apart from its health-giving properties, always seems to greet us when we enter the room, is a delightful companion, and oftentimes provides us with a pleasant occupation should we be bored or tired. For nothing is more pleasing than to feed a good-tempered blaze until it laughs and chuckles at us as it goes rollicking up the chimney on its way to the outer air.

Then the last thing at night it can be banked up and left, rather dull-looking perhaps and surly and sad; but when the early morning comes one poke of the judiciously-applied poker and out leaps the eager blaze; a few good knobs of coal are put on, and in less than five minutes back comes our cheery friend, making even a foggy morning bright and cheerful, and a wet or snowy one vivacious if nothing else, under its bright and charming influence. What stove, what emotionless gas glitter can be anything save prosaic in comparison? while I am certain health suffers where anything save a proper fire is ordinarily employed.

A careful tenant can keep the landlord’s grates and replace them when he leaves, but I never think this is worth the expense, the principal expense about changing the grates being the fixing them; at the same time, I cannot say too often that we shall not want to move in the insensate manner in which suburban residents do move nowadays, if we make ourselves comfortable at first, and do not sit down to discomfort, with that depressing sentence on our lips—‘After all, it’s only for three years, and therefore it is not worth while!’

Having begun our reform by putting in new and decent grates, we can turn our attention to the doors and windows and the floor. The draughts must be excluded by ‘Slater’s patent,’ and the floor properly stopped, and moreover planed if rough; while should the door show gaps, as I once knew one to do, in a manner which allowed the unfortunate owner to perceive, without opening it, whether the gas was burning in the hall outside or not, these gaps must be stopped, either by inserting slips of wood, or with putty, or some sort of stopping: the door, as usual, being covered inside and out by the ever-useful, ever-faithful and most decorative portière. I cannot understand the firm and pugnacious way in which the ordinary householder clings to his bare and undraped doors, and will not avail himself of the shelter and warmth which can be obtained in no other way. It cannot be the expense. Wallace supplies the rods at 4½d. a foot, the brackets cost about 4½d. each, and as a yard and a quarter of double-width material suffices for the ordinary suburban door, though I advise an extra half width; and this costs, at the outside, 5s.; I see no reason why this should not be put over even the humblest suburban door in the world. As it cannot be the cost, I can but come to the conclusion that as usual paterfamilias has interfered, a thing no man should do in a house on the matter of decoration and management. He may give an opinion if he is asked for one: though he is most judicious who takes care that that opinion coincides with that of his wife, so if he has been hardy enough to veto the portière, he must be gently, but firmly, shown that it is not stuffy—the thermometer will do that—and that neither is it a dust-trap. This can be demonstrated in a few minutes by taking it down before his eyes, and having it removed, shaken, and replaced all in less time than it takes to tell of it. If after this he objects to moving it on one side as he enters the door, he must be carefully trained to see how ridiculous such a notion is, the while it is casually mentioned that an entrance to a room is not to be effected in the same way one takes a five-barred gate. This is a lesson all men can be taught just as many of them have been taught, thanks to me, that the hall need not be strewed with hats, gloves and brushes, and hung with coats and waterproofs in the last stages of dissolution, and that they can be quite as happy with their raiment out of sight as ever they were when they were allowed to strew it about in their entrances, at their own sweet wills. It is, however, usually impossible to live in an ordinary suburban house unless the furniture be made, in a measure for that special abode. For the rooms are so awkward and tiny that ‘combination’ furniture must be employed, or else one cannot have space to move.

No bed should ever be draped in any way. If the bedroom is properly arranged and ventilated, while all draughts are excluded, curtains cannot be required, and no bed need present a starved or undecorated appearance if pictures are properly arranged behind it, or a bookcase hung on the wall above it, and the pillows properly put into frilled cases, and placed during the day high up on under pillows. At night the look of the bed behind the sleepers cannot trouble them, but it will be all right if, as I said before, pictures are hung properly, just, and only just above the top rail of the plain and simple brass bed, the only kind which should ever be allowed in any house. If brass is too dear, then plain iron must replace it; the iron can be Aspinalled ‘real ivory,’ and so be made to look quite superior in every way, should the plain black iron be objected to.

I am quite shocked to see that a strenuous effort is being made to revive the beautiful, but unhealthy, wooden bedsteads of our ancestors, but I do hope someone will form an ‘anti-wooden bed league,’ and scotch the thing in its very earliest days, for there are people who will buy anything if assured by an enterprising tradesman that it is the newest thing out, and that a similar article was sold to a member of the aristocracy during the last week or so. Now, the very idea of the newness should warn off any wary buyer, for a new thing cannot have been really tried and found successful, while anyone can be fairly sure that a thing which has been sold, and sold largely for ten or more years, must be a success in one way or the other.