XV.
THE CHOICE OF A SMALL COUNTRY HOUSE.
Choosing a small country house by the man of average means who can afford one at all is like choosing a wife. You may lay down beforehand all kinds of rules you mean to follow—that the lady of your choice will be blonde and fair, with a placid, broad outlook on life, and you will almost certainly marry a sparkling brunette, quick, lively and sympathetic. So with a house. You may think your ideal is some rambling converted or convertible farmhouse, some picturesque Elizabethan or Jacobean manor house, and you will end with the primmest of Georgian proprieties, facing a village green or country high street, but with a large walled garden behind, where you can be as private and irregular as you like. You may think open raftered rooms with bare brick chimneypieces, where you can stalk about in rough country clothes, the thing you are in search of, and then you, or more probably your wife, will fall to some set of spacious, sunlit, white-panelled Queen Anne or Georgian chambers, looking out over trim lawns and well kept hedges. Or you may find something that does not fall into either category, picturesque or formal, but by a combination of both absolutely bewitches you and drives all preconceived ideas to the winds; indeed, a house of this kind generally does unless you are an absolute formalist and pedant. There is something so very lovable in the marks of time, not only the minor ones, such as floors slightly out of level, cornices softened with the colour-washes of generations, but the major ones which represent distinct past eras. The Jacobean house which has had parts of it Georgianised carries with it the same history with which we ourselves have been built up. It has, perhaps, its central hall with stone floor and oak beams and great chimney-piece with rude carving over it, answering to the rougher barbaric instincts which are deep in all of us; and it has its Georgian rooms with their refined cornices and fireplaces and long elegant windows calling for curtains of brocade or other fine material. In these latter we can cast aside our thick boots and tweeds and become civilised, urbane and even slightly cynical. In such a house, therefore, we have rooms for various moods, corresponding not only to the strata of our external civilisation but to the strata within us. In some modern houses such things have been consciously attempted, but their failure is generally complete. You may wear fancy dress for a night, but you cannot, if you are an ordinary mortal, endure it for a week. Affected age in a modern house is something of that sort, and it becomes worse when it is an affectation not of one age, but of several. No, a modern house needs unity; our grandchildren are the only people who can break that unity successfully, because they will break in answer to some new and real need not yet experienced by us.
Let us assume in this search for a small country house that it is no marriage of convenience we desire. We are not tied, that is to say, to a railway station, but with the help of a small car can reach a convenient line when we want to go to town or to fetch our friends. Obviously, the advent of the motor car has enormously increased the area of our choice. We can now live in real country even if we have to go to town four or five times a week. If London is our centre, we can get as far afield as the Cotswolds, South Downs or the remoter parts of Essex. We can therefore let our choice of a house range over modelled stone houses, warm brick ones or those of wood and plaster. We may even, if we are particularly interested in refined proportions, restraint and elegance of detail, consider Regency and early Victorian stucco. In this latter case, however, we must be prepared for a quinquennial paint bill, but we shall have other compensations, not least in the original price, for such houses are not yet popular. It will be noticed that I am ruling out of our purview all absolutely modern houses, say, those of the last sixty years or so. The reason is that you cannot generalise about such buildings. You may find one to fit your individual taste just as well as if you had instructed your architect to design it. But the chances are against it for many reasons, chief among which is that the last half-century has been a time of excessive individualism. To find, therefore, an entirely satisfactory modern house that will not only fit your material needs, but satisfy your spiritual ones too,—which is a much more difficult but far more important matter for real happiness—is highly improbable. I do not mean to say that there are not hundreds of beautiful modern houses by Lutyens, Newton, Norman Shaw and their followers, but each was designed for a particular client and in a particular way, which older houses, as far as we can tell, were not. In the days of a solid architectural tradition there were certain methods of planning, certain methods of decoration from which no one thought of departing. After the entire break-up of such traditions in the middle of last century even the best architects and their clients sought for individual solutions to problems and individual methods of expression. Those who did not went on building the coarse Victorian houses we see in all our suburbs. Obviously, these are out of the question. One would sooner not live in the country at all than live in a suburban country house, thereby preserving a blot on the countryside. But to return to the good modern country house built by a good architect. You may say, Why not buy that? What could be better? The construction is probably sound, the drains and water supply all good, and the roof not likely to be a source of expense for upkeep. I can only reply by comparing such a house with other people’s clothes. You might find a suit of someone else’s, or a ready-made one, which absolutely fitted you. It is unlikely; but, even if you did, you would be wearing borrowed plumes. Your distinction—and with a modern house, built for someone else, you could not escape a certain prominence—would be that someone else’s. With an old house, however modernised in its unessentials—unessential except from the housewife’s point of view—you make no pretence that you are more than a life tenant. You are merely the custodian and preserver of a beautiful thing you intend to hand on in the same or in a better state than you received it. Build a beautiful modern house by all means, and by so doing add to the real wealth of the nation. That is a very different proposition. Do it, though, with humility, as a man chooses a suit, not as a woman chooses a dress. Make it something reserved and quiet, answering not only to your special needs, but to the general ones of our time. Make it fit the landscape and adhere to the type of building traditional to the countryside. Do not introduce brick and tiles into a stone and slate neighbourhood, or vice versa. If you do, you will probably have to pay for your rashness in hard cash. I know a neighbourhood in Essex where in the heat of the summer all the modern brick buildings on the shrinking clay soil crack, whereas the old wood and plaster ones float on the moving ground like ships and remain intact.
If you are about to buy an old house, however, there are certain points, rather obvious perhaps, which may be worth recalling.
First there is the question of the site, and in this, of course, one has not the same freedom of choice as in a new house. For one thing, our ancestors especially those who lived before the romantic movement, had not the desire for extensive views from their windows that is characteristic of to-day. The sites they chose were usually sheltered ones, often in positive hollows. No doubt, access to roads, themselves less numerous than now, had something to do with this, but it was a question of temperament too. In Georgian times for the smaller houses they seemed to prefer seclusion and privacy on one side of the house even when they made a bold front to the road or village green on the other. I suppose if they wanted a view they climbed a neighbouring hill to get it. There is something, I think, to be said for this, especially if the view is over the sea or a wide estuary. Such a view continually before the eyes is apt to be depressing. A wide view is all very well in a holiday resort as a contrast to the shelter of one’s walled garden at home. To live on the mountain tops all the time, however, is too strenuous for most mortals. We are not all poets and seers who can look eternity in the face every hour of the day. There may, therefore, have been a certain wisdom in the builders of old houses in sheltered situations, an intuitive knowledge of psychology if not of hygiene. This being so, it is all the more necessary to make sure, not only that the house is dry or can be made so, but that the site itself does not exhale vapours. It is not pleasant when November comes to find each night and morning the chimneys of one’s house poking out of a cloud of mist while the rising ground on either side is free. Such mists, however, are not generally to be found above a chalk or gravel soil unless they come from the sea. With clay and loam the matter is different, and it is well, then, to make further enquiries if the house of one’s desire happens to be in a hollow.
The dryness of the structure is a different matter. Most old houses were built without damp-proof courses—I think an early nineteenth-century invention. These are layers of slates and cement or asphalt or other impervious material placed in the walls just above ground level to prevent the damp from the ground rising through the foundations into the walls above. Such things can be inserted yard by yard at a time, but it is an expensive proceeding. If damp courses do not exist and are too costly to put in, it is all the more necessary to see that the subsoil is a dry one, such as gravel, sand or rock. A flagged basement assists in keeping a house dry if it is dry in itself. If, however, it acts as a sump or drain-pit for the surrounding soil, it, of course, makes matters worse confounded, because it ensures damp even in dry weather. Some of the driest houses are the old timber-constructed ones; if such had been damp their timbers would have rotted away long ago. They, however, if not damp are rather apt to be cold in winter and warm in summer, in spite of the cavity in their walls. The inner and outer coats of lath and plaster or weather-boarding are not really sufficiently thick for comfort. Such houses, therefore, need more heating than those with substantial brick or stone walls.
Let us now consider the walls a little. In most old houses they are strong and substantial. They may, however, have been neglected. Rain-pipes may have been left unrepaired, and frost may have entered and disintegrated the mortar. This, however, is not a very serious matter. A little re-pointing will set it right if it has not gone far. What is more necessary is to look at the state of timbers built into the walls. In most old houses these are plentiful both as wall plates and ties. There are two chief dangers connected with them—worm and dry rot. Either will turn them to powder or to a frail semblance of themselves about to fall to powder. In both cases there is nothing to be done but to replace them. Dry rot, however, is not a usual complaint of old houses. It is much more often found in new. It comes not so much from damp as from bad ventilation. A wood floor laid on concrete which has had linoleum on top of it so that the wood is effectually smothered both above and below is the sort of place where it starts. Unfortunately, once it starts it spreads very quickly. Old houses by their age, therefore, generally show themselves proof against it. Worm in the timbers is the reverse. This works more slowly, and is to be found in the hard woods of old houses as well as the softer ones of new. As in chairs, a little dust like sawdust is the proof of its presence. Palliatives may be tried, but for the sake of one’s furniture, if for nothing else, it is better to take the timbers out.
The roof, however, is generally a more important matter, as regards maintenance, than the walls. Roughly speaking, the order of covering materials in cost of upkeep would be thatch, most expensive of all, and only suitable to quite small houses, then stone-slates, tiles and, last of all, slates. But more important than the material covering is the construction. Look to see whether there are internal valleys and flats where snow and leaves can collect and check the flow of water till it penetrates. The less of such gutters and flats the better. When they exist they should be of lead, as indeed, they usually are in any decent house. Repairs, however, in these hard times may have been done in zinc, and zinc has a very short life in our climate. If the roof is of tiles, it should have been boarded over the rafters and under the tiles. Generally speaking, the steeper the roof, except in a very exposed situation, where the wind can blow the covering off, the sounder it is likely to be, for, of course, the water runs off more quickly. The slope, however is determined by the style of the house, and the materials by the slope. Slate, for instance, is quite safely laid at a much less steep slope than tiles, thatch or split stones. Being a truer material it lies closer. An over-all roof in two or four plain slopes with no breaks in it is, whatever the material, the safest form. The water is then shot everywhere into gutters clear of the walls or into a simple lead trough behind a parapet. There are then no internal and half-hidden gutters to leak and pour water down the centre of the house. Indeed, it may be laid down as a general axiom that simplicity of mass and form, given equally good construction, means cheapness of upkeep. A simple cube or rectangular mass with a plain roof hipped all round with no gables or dormers would be the most compact and cheapest of shapes, not only to build, but to maintain. Such things, however, are obvious. Let us now consider the internal arrangements.
The first question in these semi-servantless days is whether the old house of one’s choice can be adapted to the restricted post-war service which is all that most of us can afford. It behoves one, therefore, to see whether the rooms can be so rearranged, without expensive alterations, that the kitchen is not only reduced to a reasonable size, but is sufficiently near the dining-room. Generally the spacious old kitchen, with its flagged floor, its stretch of cooking apparatus down one whole side, with open range, hot plates, ovens and boilers, had better be abandoned. Sometimes it will make a billiard-room later and sometimes even a garage. Perhaps the old pantry or scullery can be turned into a modern kitchen. The point is that in any case you will need new cooking apparatus on a reduced scale, but with greater efficiency. The expense is when you have to build a new room for it. See, therefore, whether you can avoid doing this by a readjustment of function in the various rooms. The ideal arrangement, both in a new and old house, is a small pantry between the dining-room and the kitchen with the service through it. The pantry so placed acts as a buffer to noise and smell from the kitchen, and yet is handy for setting things down. However do not spoil a vista or some real architectural feature by giving up a good sitting-room to a modern kitchen. If you love the beauties of your house you can often pay too dearly for conveniences. The same remark applies to baths. You will probably have to find extra space for them, but it is obviously a sacrifice to give up to one a good bedroom on the main front. With modern plumbing, in which the bath water is at once taken outside the house and discharged in the open into a rainwater-head, there is, in my opinion, no objection to a small bath in each bedroom provided a suitable recess or space can be found for it. The small American deep tub bath in which one can sit with the water over one’s shoulders, but not lie full length, takes little space and gets over many difficulties of placing. The safe general rule on all these questions of adapting an old house to the conditions of to-day is to see whether for kitchen, motor car or baths one can install the new requirements without rebuilding or serious additions. On every ground that is the safe proceeding, whether to preserve character, to avoid the clash of old work with new, or merely to save outlay.