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An interesting and useful place of entertainment can be made of the roof of the extension, when this adjoins a room that is not used for sleeping, by either walling this in with glass or railing it about with ornamental iron and covering it with an awning. This then becomes an exterior chamber in which Japanese lanterns may be hung and stone chairs placed, surrounded by plants and flowers, a chamber excellent for use in the spring and summer. Even the roof of the house may be made into a garden provided there is an elevator to the floor below it and a comfortable means of getting up from this floor.
We are not at present dealing with the problem of altering private residences into small apartments as a
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68INTERIOR DECORATING
means of obtaining larger revenue from them, but there are other alterations which do not entirely deprive these houses of their essential home quality, and one of these methods has been suggested to me by T. A. Meyer, the architect. His plan is to take three old houses and rebuild them into two modern homes, each to contain two duplex apartments. By this means a greater width for each house will be obtained and a considerable economy in the general layout, inasmuch as four very comfortable modern homes will be made to replace three unsuitable old-fashioned ones. I touch on this merely as a suggestion and show a photograph taken from a single house which he has altered into two duplex apartments, each with its own entrance from the street, the lower one from the "old .servants' entrance and the upper from the existing high stoop. It does not, moreover, seem to be necessary to deal very minutely with the large mansion, as most of these are constructed internally like the modern American basement house, but on a grander scale, with windows on three or even four sides and occasionally with a driveway entrance which opens into an outer stone hall on the ground floor, leading by means of a monumental marble stairway (and also an elevator, of course) to the main floor.
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