In response to your favor of the fifth instant we now send you print of a revised plan for the terrace and grading about the house for Mr. Jones.

You will observe that the grade of the ground in the service yard is here made one foot lower than in our first study. This will bring it nearer the natural surface and save filling. But a question of the balance of advantages is involved, and if after conference with Mr. Jones you should think it best to avoid the additional step or two which this plan requires between the floor of the kitchen and the yard, you will not make the change thus suggested. If you conclude to make it, a slight modification of the grading immediately about the yard will be required to conform it to that of the yard.

Mr. Jones thinks that the glare of the tile floor which we proposed to be used on the terrace would be objectionable. The tile which we had it in view that you would use are not glazed earthenware such as would be used for an interior floor, but essentially red bricks of octagonal or square form, each a foot or more across. We have obtained them from Baltimore, but understand

[785]that they are made of good quality at Galesburg, Illinois. You may perhaps obtain them at some brick yard nearer Chicago. We first used them some ten years ago in a situation corresponding to Mr. Jones’s, and in that case and wherever we have used them since they have been found satisfactory. They have been used in carrying out plans which we have designed in co-operation with McKim, Mead & White; Peabody & Stearns, and other architects. In two or three very luxurious houses, as in that of Mr. Rockefeller on North River, where we were in co-operation with Carrere & Hastings, we have used the long, mottled Perth-Amboy brick instead of these tile. The tile of course are less costly. Common brick would answer.

It is a common practice to place mats upon these tile floors of out-of-door rooms, these being in the form of rugs and coming from China or Japan, of suitable size and finish for the purpose. There are good mats for the purpose also which are made by the Indians of the North-west Coast, apparently from the inner bark of the Cedar tree.

Mr. Jones writes as if he might prefer a terrace of an entirely different character; such as we should call a terrace garden. We can by no means advise such a terrace in substitution for that which we have recommended. One thing would not take the place of the other any more than a drawing-room would take the place of a library. If a terrace garden is wanted we should make it an addition to the terrace proper. It would by no means serve the same purpose. The terrace we advise would serve in a great degree as a substitution for the “piazza” or veranda of the ordinary American cottage, this being too narrow to be used as a room and too wholly covered to give its occupants a fair enjoyment of the beauty of the sky or full advantage of sitting in the open air. It is desirable to have a part of such a terrace covered as it is proposed to be in this plan. Perhaps it would be better to make the roofed part of the terrace a little larger than you have proposed it to be, and if the annoyance from insects is liable to be much of the time very serious, to make arrangements by which this part of the terrace, under the roof, could be screened by mosquito netting. One of our clients living near a salt marsh from which, under certain conditions of the wind, clouds of mosquitos came, making life out of doors a torment, had a large room built extending outwards from the walls of his house, the sides and roof of which were all of wire netting, mosquito proof. He did not want to live in the country if obliged to keep within prison walls through the hours which of all the twenty-four were most to be enjoyed out of doors.

Yours Truly