The American Home - home of the Kenneth Gowards in Lowell, Massachusetts (1939) | Architect Royal Barry Willis

OF COURSE you've heard that old advice, "Don't accept it unless it's useful, or beautiful, or both." Well, a lot of us have learned that it should apply to houses as much as to anything else we may be thinking of acquiring. To illustrate, the 1939 house of the Kenneth Gowards in Lowell, Massachusetts, designed by Royal Barry Wills, the Boston architect, is useful and beautiful to an unusual degree.

Mr. Goward teaches school, and the tiny study is just what he asked for as a place for necessary work. The family, for its part, wanted to have a roomy living room and a dining space definitely out of sight of the front door. They have them in the living-dining room, while a tiny entrance hall (with a coat closet) is thrown in for still further privacy. Mrs. Goward got an almost square kitchen with everything at arm's reach, as well as a porch, opening off it, secluded enough for outdoor meals and opening on the children's back- yard play area. There is a good-sized parents' bedroom and a second for the children; there's storage space in the area behind the bedrooms' back walls, and down in the cellar is an open space to serve as Mr. Goward's workshop and another for laundry tubs, with a bulkhead door leading directly up to the drying yard. "We use every single inch in the house all the time," is Mrs. Goward's testimony to its 100 per cent super-usefulness.

The site has the advantage of being eighty feet wide instead of the usual fifty, but otherwise has the disadvantage of sloping up quite sharply from the street. The drawback was turned to an asset when it was used to subordinate the garage on a lower level, and to give the porch considerable privacy, which was increased by placing a flower bed, bordered by a low rail fence, on the street side of the porch. Mrs. Goward tossed in a few hollyhock seeds the first year, and now they keep coming up to make a delightful screen. A rose climbs up the garage wall beside the hollyhocks, and that's about all the landscaping there is. A lawn (no velvety greensward is called for) is broken by a stepping-stone path from the driveway, and in the back are more lawn, more birches, and a huge oak tree that stands just behind the porch.

The house is finished with red cedar clapboards stained brown, the door is stock pattern lightened with two glass insets, and there are no shutters-two ways by  which Mr. Wills often manages to save some money for a client.

Inside are further evidences of "custom building." The fireplace is made of a few wide boards, the hardware includes economical H- and-L hinges painted black to contrast with the white woodwork, the living room has a dado dispropor- tionately effective for its small cost, and the study has two walls sheathed in knotty pine.