SMALL COUNTRY HOUSES OF TO-DAY.
N
REDLANDS, FOUR OAKS
DESIGNED BY MR. CHARLES E. BATEMAN
The Conditions of House Planning—Aspects—The Lighting of Kitchens—Porches—Red and Yellow
Brickwork.
T comes to some architects to specialise in one type or another of public building, such as schools or
churches, and to others to range freely over the whole field, but nearly all take their turn at
domestic work. In such buildings "as schools there is a code of rules laid down by the
Government department concerned, which leaves the architect comparatively small scope for
invention ; but in domestic building the problem is never twice the same and the variety of plan
and treatment endless. There is, too, a human quality about the making of homes which is absent from
the design of buildings of a public sort (churches always excepted), and with churches the very aloofness of
their aim lifts their conception on to another plane. One remembers Ibsen’s Master-builder :
#1 build no
more church-towers
now. Nor churches
either”
“ What do you
build then ? »
**Homes lor
human beings.”
Though there
is an inherent false-
ness in this con-
trasting of home-
building and
church-building, as
Hilda Wangel
shrewdly indicated
when she coun-
tered Solnes with
“Wouldn’t you
build a little—a
little bit of a church
tower over these
homes as well”
one sees the Master-
builder’s point
There’ is an ‘inti
macy between do-
mestic architecture
and the common
life which it serves,
7—THE ENTRANCE PORCH FROM THE STABLES. that demands of
the designer infinite
patience and sympathy with people’s habits and tastes. Because life is an endless succession of seeming
trivialities, successful house-building is based not so much on the gift of large conceptions, as on the observa-
tion of ordinary needs and skill in ministering to them. In such work Mr. Charles Bateman has built success
on large experience, and the arrangement of Redlands is a good example of convenient and economical
planning. To take first the question of aspect : the whole range of reception-rooms faces the south-east.
The contour of the site suggested it, and, though one hesitates to dogmatise on so thorny a question, it is
probably the best possible, for it gives sunshine in the dining-room both for breakfast and luncheon. The
drawing-room has a big bay also on the south-west front, so that it catches the late afternoon sun. The
cleverest feature in the planning of this front is in the lighting of the kitchen. A main window facing the
