THE AMERICAN HOME.

Evening Post, Volume LXXVII, Issue 133, 12 June 1909, Page 10

THE AMERICAN HOME.

SOME CHARACTERISTICS. "Shut the door and let us be pi"ivate !" we say in London. « In New York the door is never shut. There is no privacy, and one might almost say there are no doors, except the j outer one which closes the house to the | street. A New York public man recently talked to me of family life in America. He lauded it to the skies. He told of happy family gatherings of father, moth er, sons, and daughters round the steam radiator in the "parlour 4 ," He described games of draughts, whist, pianola playings, and the putting together of thoso maddening picture-puz-zles. The "happy Sabbath evenings" especially brought forth his eloquent phrases. An Englishman friend of I mine visited him a day or two after the conversation/ and was shown through his house in West One Hundredth and Something-street., The house had nineteen rooms in it, with every imaginable convenience. There were front and back drawing-rooms, breakfast-room, dining-room, library, front and rear bedrooms, bath-rooms with shower baths and marble tubs and basins. "Now, where's your den?" asked the Englishman. > '\Den!" said the American. "Man, I haven't an inch of room in. this whole house that I can call my very own. It belongs to all of us to share and share alike. There isn't a room I may go into aild lock the door to keep the rest of the family out. This house has everything in it except privacy. There's mighty little of that to be found in any American home, I can tell you! My ! house is a typical doorless American home." I The New Yorker laughed as he said it, but his laughter had a pathetic ring to it. THE LACK IN AMERICA. It is true that privacy is the one thing lacking in the New York home, and the ftew York Home is typical of most American homes. In England w© hear of "mother's xoom," "father's room," "my own little cosy-corner." It is only on the rarest occasions that one finds an American house fitted up in this fashion with any thought for the privacy of its inmates, and when one does find such a thing there are simultaneous whispers going the rounds that the master and mistress of it "do not get on. well together, and so they keep up private establishments in one house !" If it were not for this lack of privacy the American home would he the most delightful place in the world. I'or solid creature comforts it certainly surpasses the English home. Hot and cold running water in every room of the house, and the wonderful apparatus for heating water in the apartments, one cannot but appreciate. In visiting the American kitchen one notices that the cook has every convenience to hand for her work. Ihe whole house or flat is built upon a labour-saving plan that must appeal to every feminine heart, regardless of nationality — a plan which, 1 believe, will be the only salvation of London's housewives as the servant problem over here becomes more and more acute. But the American lives constantly in the open. In London the household goes quietly from room to room, as night approaches, pulling down the blind with one hand while she lights the gas with the other. She is so in the habit of doing this that she performs the function automatically. In the average American home there is no such ceremony. All the windows are provided with blinds, but they are seldom drawn. English visitors to the American small towns and villages are usually charmed with the beauty of well-designed houses, with their nicely-kept lawns, their graceful window draperies. Fenceless the | lawns of these houses are, extending djrectly to the pavement. Wandering j street boys, dogs, and marauding cats pass jn and out at will among the flower beds of these village homes. "Why do you not have a fence?" I asked a country friend. "Your garden would be so delightful for afternoon tea if one could find a private nook in it. "Our garden is so pretty we like the public to see it," was her reply. Then she added, "It would spoil the look of the rest of the street if we had a fence and the neighbours did not. You must | admit that our street is beautiful." Beautiful, yes, but, oh ! it was not in gardens such as these, surely, that poets and artists have found their inspiration. J DOORLESS. A few years ago on going to New York I was impressed with the doorle^ ness of the city's life. I visited per- I sons living in twenty-roomed houses, where there were in all, perhaps, five or six doors. In New York flats room after | room opens the one into the other by ! means of archways of fancy fretwork, with sometimes a chenille or damask portiere as substitute for a door. The whole idea of building is what may be called "en suite." Often five or six rooms of a flat open the one into the other, with only one door into the hall, and oyen this is frequently taken off its hinges and a pretty bamboo curtain hung in its place. The effect is one of space and elegance, but an effect that is out of place, it seems to me, in a small private home. Opening the door (if there is one) of the outer ball into the drawingroom, you go from this through an archway' into the dining-room. Through other archways you pass into fche famfly bedrooms. I know of homes where the only room that is properly shut off is the bathroom. The kitchen often is separated from the dining-room by a swing door, opened easily by a push of the knee against it, as the waitress brings in the dishes for laying the table. In such a flat it would be absolutely impossible for two persons to have a conversation in an ordinary tone of voice without constant dancer of being overheard. — Mary Mortimer Maxwell, in the Daily Mail.