STREAMLINED HOMES

Dominion, Volume 30, Issue 130, 26 February 1937, Page 4

STREAMLINED HOMES

Knick-knacks Not In Favour

An American mother sees no use in keeping family heirlooms to hand to her daughter on her marriage. Daughter does not want them, says an English writer.

No fiddieback chairs, ancient spinning wheels or family portraits for her. No roaming round to dig out an old bit of china or glass. Her home is so modern there is no room for such remnants of the past. She Is streamline in figure, rides in streamline buses, flies in streamline planes, and has a streamline house or flat. There have been many new houses and flats on these lines shown recently. Long, narrow houses that can be taken apart and put up anywhere, others that are all chromium and glass, flats with furniture that folds up into the walls when not wanted. Clean, sanitary, labour-saving. Yes, indeed; but none of the left-overs from the past that helped to make a home.

The latest development in streamline homes js on the eleventh floor of the Rockefeller Centre Horticultural Building, and you can see eager young couples there every day, going through the exhibition bouse. Outside on the setback roof (for the building towers some 30 more stories up in the air) there are some gardens, French, Italian aud English. They occupy about three-quarters of nn acre. If you get very homesick looking at the. latest thing iu American houses you can go out and sit in the English garden, graced with a copper birch, where there are grassy paths and a gay herbaceous border, and look over the wall where down below New York rushes and bustles and bangs. You cannot see tlie gardens from the little house they enclose, because it is airconditioned, and lias no windows, onlyglass brick walls. It is on a small scale as shown, but can be enlarged to any size wanted in the same trim lines. The kitchen has every electrical device known. A servant would be superfluous. The dishes go into the sink aud arc washed, dried and stacked by electricity. Clothes are washed and ironed in the same way. There are cutters, mixers and scrapers, and an electric mop for the floors. When you want to go out and play bridge you place the dinner in the stove and set it at the right temjierature. It is a gay little kitchen, too, all pink, white and red, with a black rubber floor and a glass brick wall, which divides it from the alcove dining-room off the living-room, which has a table that folds up into nothingness and a colour scheme which blends with the living-room. Puttycolour is used on two wails, yellow on a third, and glass bricks on a fourth. The covers and draperies are In brown and yellow diagonal blocks. A feature of the main bedroom is two large clothes cupboards, one panelled in cedar, the other chintz-lined and with every conceivable gadget for keeping hats, shoes, and scarves, as well as clothes.

Here, too, there is one glass wall, out of which you can see nothing, but which diffuses the light softly and keeps out all dust; two pinky beige walls and one of walnut flexwood. The modernist furniture is walnut and the draperies carry out the pinky beige and mulberry shades. Probably a modern child will be delighted with the nursery, with its inevitable glass wall and another of dark blue, the others being white, with dark blue stars.

There is nothing which is not utilitarian in the house save books, in disconcertingly modernistic eases. One quite sympathised with the middle-aged woman who said, “Thank heaven, I am too old to live in one of these homes!”