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 façade of the house, instead of being a commonplace rectangle of