IV

THE LITTLE HOUSE OF MANY MIRRORS

One walks the streets of New York and receives the fantastic impression that some giant architect has made for the city thousands of houses in replica.  These dismal brownstone buildings are so like without, and alas! so like within, that one wonders how their owners know their homes from one another.  I have had the pleasure of making over many of these gloomy barracks into homes for other people, and when we left the old Irving Place house we took one of these dreary houses for ourselves, and made it over into a semblance of what a city house should be.

You know the kind of house—­there are tens of thousands of them—­a four story and basement house of pinkish brownstone, with a long flight of ugly stairs from the street to the first floor.  The common belief that all city houses of this type must be dark and dreary just because they always have been dark and dreary is an unnecessary superstition.

My object in taking this house was twofold:  I wanted to prove to my friends that it was possible to take one of the darkest and grimiest of city houses and make it an abode of sunshine and light, and I wanted to furnish the whole house exactly as I pleased—­for once!

The remaking of the house was very interesting.  I tore away the ugly stone steps and centered the entrance door in a little stone-paved fore-court on the level of the old area-way.  The fore-court is just a step below the street level, giving you a pleasant feeling of invitation.  Everyone hates to climb into a house, but there is a subtle allure in a garden or a court yard or a room into which you must step down.  The fore-court is enclosed with a high iron railing banked with formal box-trees.  Above the huge green entrance door there is a graceful iron balcony, filled with green things, that pulls the great door and the central window of the floor above into an impressive composition.  The facade of the house, instead of being a commonplace rectangle of stone broken by windows, has this long connected break of the door and balcony and window.  By such simple devices are happy results accomplished!

The door itself is noteworthy, with its great bronze knob set squarely in the center.  On each side of it there are the low windows of the entrance hall, with window-boxes of evergreens.  Compare this orderly arrangement of windows and entrance door with the badly balanced houses of the old type, and you will realize anew the value of balance and proportion.

From the fore-court you enter the hall.  Once within the hall, the, house widens magically.  Surely this cool black and white apartment cannot be a part of restless New York!  Have you ever come suddenly upon an old Southern house, and thrilled at the classic purity of white columns in a black-green forest?  This entrance hall gives you the same thrill; the elements of formality, of tranquillity,