CHAPTER VIII

BUYING HAPPINESS

We are all children, and in nothing so much perhaps as in the kind of
delight we take in any form of building. The architectural efforts of
a child with a box of bricks or a heap of sand explain the Tower of
Babel, the Pyramids, and the Golden House of Nero. House-building
unites the ideal with the real more thoroughly than any other human
employment. What can there be more delightful than to see that which
you have dreamed grow into tangible and enduring form? No wonder the
rich man builds himself 'a lordly pleasure-house'; it is a kind of
practical poetry which he can understand. Were there only millionaires
enough to go round all architects would be wealthy, for building is a
kind of material art admirably suited to men of material intelligence.

The weeks which followed the acquisition of my two deserted cottages
were the most delightful I have ever spent. First of all, there was
the question of structural alterations to be considered. In my opinion
the living-room of the house is the chief consideration. It should be
a _room to live in_, the focus of the whole life of the household. For
this reason it should be large and airy, covering the whole site of the
house as nearly as possible. One large room is infinitely to be
preferred to two or three small rooms; it is healthier, and much more
cheerful. Space and air are most needed in the room which is most in
use. It is of no consequence that the bedrooms should be small; one's
active hours are not spent in them, and a window left wide open summer
and winter will provide an ample supply of oxygen in the smallest
chamber. What can be more absurd than the arrangement of a modern
London villa? It is usually cut up by partition walls into a number of