NEW TRICK HOUSES

Hawke's Bay Tribune, Volume XXIV, Issue 195, 1 August 1934, Page 11

NEW TRICK HOUSES

Equipped With Machines BUnOii CONTROL WINDOWS Whether one wants a house so luxuriously equipped that the windows close automatically when it rains or whose awnings raise by themselves when the sun goes down, or a simple steel-walled cottage for a subsistence homestead, the model homes exhibit at a Century of Progress Exposition is replete with new ideas in home design (Says a Chicago writer to the “Christian Science Monitor”). To-morrow’s trend in home planning, introducing new materials, new methods, new plans, has made the homes exhibit a paradise for the home planner, be he plain man or plutocrat, city man or country man. The newest note in design is the subsistence homestead home, where a cost limit of a few ■thousand dollars cuts out all frills and fancies. But everyone will want to see the latest tricks, regardless of the size of his pocketbook, because it costs nothing to look. Most tricky of all is the new Frigidaire house, whose chief attraction is complete airconditioning and cooling, but whose novel bedroom, with a bedside panel of electric push buttons, is the “tired business man’s dream” of comfort come true. With one button the bed adjusts its mattress level to whatever position is desired; with another, the windows may be opened or closed; with another the “cold” can be “turned on,” and with still another the door may be ■ closed or opened. Better still, if it begins to rain during the night, an automatic control, sensitive enough to respond to the moisture change, sets in operation the electric machinery for closing the window. An electric eye sees when the sun goes down, and lifts the awnings. Every room is air-condi-tioned. Here is a home fit for a king, but for the family of modest means, seeking subsistence on a farm not too far from town, where advantage can be taken of city employment when it is available, there is a Cape Cod cottage type of home, charming in its whitewashed simplicity, which can be built for approximately 3500 dollars. It is built on the same stran-steel principal displayed in the more expensive house which attracted so much attention last year and is still shown this season, but the new house uses brick exterior over the steel framework instead of enamelled panels. With five rooms, casement windows, and modern equipment it represents an ideal type of home for a family of taste and refinement, but limited means. Even more modest in price is a steel “flivver house” which visitors they see grow from day to day. Priced at 3000 dollars, it is made of steel panels which are merely set up on a concrete foundation and bolted into place, filled with a spun-glass insulation material, and then finished on the inside with composition board. Steel and glass stand out as favoured new building materials. The round ■glass house designed by Mr. George Fred Keck, Chicago architect, is shown again with copper as an exterior finish instead of steel, but steel figures in its construction as well as in the “flivver house,” the stran-steel, the armco-ferro porcelain enamel house, being shown again with a few changes from last year, and the General house. Besides the masonite house, the rostone house, the lumber house, the brick house, and the Florida house, all familiar to Did fair-goflrs, there is the new model farm home designed for the Crowell Publishing Company, using a new type of pre-fabricated brick construction. The bricks are assembled at the factory into large steel braced panels and merely set into place on the job. This house separates the living accommodation of the farm home from the work quarters and gives the family privacy from the goings and comings of the farm hands. Living quarters are all on the second floor, where an upstairs terrace also gives private outdoors living space.