Like most creative people who have a sense of the dramatic, artist Jon Whitcomb is a good host and one who sets the stage well. His house in Darien, Connecticut, has all the necessary props, plus a few non-essentials which certainly add to the fun. (The lighting includes uplights and downlights, dim lights and spot lights and even colored lights.) It is also a house ready at all times for guests, in spite of the fact that Mr. Whitcomb works at home, frequently far into the night to meet magazine cover deadlines. The present house, built around a small week-end cottage, has a plan carefully tailored to the owner's work-and-play kind of life. Guests can be put up overnight. A party can be going on in the playroom, living room, or adjoining terrace, with- out in any way disturbing the quiet isolation of Mr. Whitcomb's studio. For a hospitable man with an unpredictable work schedule, such an arrangement is absolutely necessary.

To stage-set the house for parties is an easy matter. Outside, there are portable floodlights to play up a corner of the terrace, or black out a flowering shrub past its prime. In the living-dining room, there are spotlights in the ceiling above the dining table, pink and white lights in the bar recess, a blue spotlight above the piano keyboard, another spot above the radio-record player. The exceptional studio lighting is a necessity for Mr. Whitcomb's work and a glamour asset for parties. In both living room and studio, there are master switches to control the lighting pat- terns, and rheostats to regulate brightness.

The main entertaining area is the huge, L- shaped living-dining room. Glass window-walls in the L bring the adjoining terrace right inside. At one end of the living room is a music center with grand piano and organ. At the opposite end is the fireplace, flanked by two sofas. Next to the fireplace is a built-in radio-record player. Built into another wall, behind sliding doors, is the bar sink and shelves for glasses and liquor bottles, the latter stored horizontally, each in a cardboard mailing tube. The bar proper, of chestnut with black plastic top, is on rollers so it can be moved easily. The flooring is beige rubber tile except in this area, which is marked off by black tile. The bar and fireplace walls are bleached chestnut; wall behind organ is chestnut paneling, holds bookshelves.

The downstairs playroom is gay and rugged, and obviously belongs to an artist. Mr. Whit- comb's collection of art by well-known illustrators is all around you. One wall is of pegboard painted red; the sofa is upholstered in bright green felt.

When it is used for entertaining, the studio has strictly professional music and sound effects. The high-fidelity music system has a tone of concert- hall caliber, with speakers placed so music can be enjoyed both in the studio and on the adjoining screened porch. The movie projector is set into a mirrored wall recess, and the screen pulls down over the window-wall opposite.

But the studio is mainly Mr. Whitcomb's place to work, and as such is a complete unit with adjoining secretary's office. It opens to the porch and to a secluded terrace where he likes to step out for a break on working days, and to his own bedroom and bath-dressing room. On week ends when three bedrooms are needed for guests, Mr. Whitcomb sleeps in his studio on a pull-out bed which serves as a couch by day.

One guest room and bath is located on the main floor, the other on the lower level next to the playroom. These are furnished to double as sitting rooms, with sofas, television, and comfortable reading and writing spots. Since they are frequently used by models, the bathrooms are carefully lighted for making-up. One has a pink-and- red color scheme: three walls are papered in a small, geometric red-and-white pattern, and the fourth covered in pink pegboard; the flooring is red-and-white marbleized asphalt tile.

Throughout the house are evidences of the owner's three strongest beliefs about how to make a house livable: (1) music of superb tone; (2) furniture on rollers, so it can be easily rearranged; (3) lighting for mood and for fun as well as for working. Mr. Whitcomb also is a great believer in flexibility, and sees no reason why rooms shouldn't adapt themselves to their owners' changing moods. After all, it's no trouble to push an eight-foot sofa if it's on rollers, and a whole room may take on a new look if you simply change a bouquet of flowers and turn a colored spotlight on it.

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source: House and Garden Magazine | December 1953

Mr. and Mrs. Samuel W. Foster of El Centro, California, might well have reversed the old saw, 'a little kitchen makes a large house.' Since the kitchen you see opposite was the first part of their house to be built, the Fosters literally lived in it for several years while construction continued. Today Mr. and Mrs. Foster and their three small children are as likely to gather for a barbecue or to grill steaks at the kitchen fireplace as they are to sit down around the dining table, and little wonder. The Fosters' kitchen has a cheerful open fireplace, a banquette that would be appropriate in a living room, year-round air conditioning, and a decorating scheme as tantalizing as the Mexican tamales that are often prepared here.

So that many cooks could work here without confusion, architect Burton Schutt neatly divided the kitchen into four centers for dining, cooking, food preparation, and washing up. While fireplace chefs turn the meat, another member of the party can prepare vegetables and a salad without ever crossing paths. Since several members of the family frequently do want to cook at the same time, the Fosters consider duplicate equipment more a matter of necessity than luxury. For this reason, eight countertop burners were installed in a peninsula near the center of the kitchen. Two nearby wall ovens let the cook watch several operations at the same time. There are also three sinks, plus a dishwasher, so that many activities dovetail but never overlap. Although the Fosters cook exactly in the center of their kitchen, odors are immediately drawn off by two fans in a hood over the burners. This hood also conceals spotlights that beam light down on the cooking surface to supplement soft illumination produced by nearly 90 white Christmas tree bulbs in a freeform ceiling cove.

Because of the extremes in temperature along the California- Mexico border, the Fosters kitchen fireplace was not just a happy impulse. It is actually used for extra heating on cool summer evenings and in winter. To prevent warping in the extreme hot- to-cold climate, kitchen cabinets are made of thick plywood. In the summer, the kitchen, two maids' rooms, and a service porch (used as laundry room and for the freezer) are kept pleasantly cool by a three-ton air conditioner. Part of the charm of the Fosters' kitchen is that it blends in so compatibly with its surroundings. All of the colors are taken from citrus fruits and Mexican tamales, as familiar to the Imperial Valley as are the desert plants and wide sweep of alfalfa visible through the kitchen windows.

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source: House and Garden Magazine | September 1953

To Mr. and Mrs. J. J. Roberts, transitional means a growing-up kind of house, one with a past, a present, and a future. Their house in Winnetka, Illinois, looks as if it might have been copied from a picture in an old-fashioned storybook, but it lives a thoroughly modern American family life. It has been planned to grow up with the family, to suit three active youngsters now, and later adapt itself to more adult ways.

From the front, the house looks deceptively small, and traditionally picturesque. It is L-shaped, pink brick with white ornamental ironwork trim, snug and pretty and ground-hugging. In back, the house opens up to a sandy beach, and all of Lake Michigan for swimming and boating. Inside, it has two ideas of special delight to the young: a family room on the first floor for parents and children to enjoy together; and the whole upstairs for the exclusive use of the children, with a separate bedroom for each child. These ideas also work to the advantage of Mr. and Mrs. Roberts. both now and in the years to come. The family room will eventually become a gathering-spot for teen agers, and finally will be used as a library. The master suite on the first floor is a quiet oasis now, and later, when the children are away at school, will give their parents an easy-living, one-floor house.

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source: House and Garden Magazine | September 1953

The first thing you discover about Mrs. Monte Brown's house is that her son's cabin cruiser is moored right in the front yard (in this instance, Lake Washington). It must be a big, summer estate, you think, and probably far removed from any semblance of the workaday world. Then you learn that this is a small but self-sufficient year-round house. It has only six rooms and 55 feet of waterfront, and is just a 10-minute drive from Seattle's business district where Mr. Brown works in the family publishing business. It runs without maid or gardener, and gives  its owners the agreeable feeling of being on a year-round holiday.

To the Brown family (which consists of Mr. Brown, his mother, and his mother's aunt), this vacation feeling means boating and swim- ming. Therefore, all of the major rooms open onto the terrace facing the lake where the boat is moored, the living room points into the lake like the prow of a ship, and each of the three bedrooms has direct access to the beach.

Both house and grounds are easy to keep up. The luxuriant planting looks as if it had the constant attention of green-thumb gardeners. Actually, it is an object lesson for those who like the maximum effect achieved by minimum labor under the hot sun. Instead of grass to cut each week, there are hardy plants and flowering trees; and there is an automatic sprinkler sys- tem turned on and off by electric clock, so the garden is watered regularly when the Browns are away on a cruise. Day-by-day housework is cut to a minimum by an exceptionally good one-floor plan (swimmers go direct to their rooms, don't track sand throughout the house), and over-the-years' maintenance is cut by a wise choice of materials. 

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source: House and Garden Magazine | August 1953

From blueprint to blue color, the kitchen in our House of Ideas has been meticulously planned to reduce work and to increase visual pleasure. Excellent equipment is the secret of its efficiency. Color is the key to its visual appeal. As a color lesson, it demonstrates the virtue of subtlety. The colors here are not demanding, they do not shout for attention; their impact, instead, is soft and relaxing. The first impres- sion is of white-even the split bamboo blinds have been rubbed with white paint. Next you will probably notice the bright accents: the citron yellow plastic backs and seats of the kitchen chairs. This is the same yellow, incidentally, that figures so importantly in the rest of the house. Then come the blues: soft Wedgwood blue on the plastic countertops, a similar blue on the dial panel of the range. Open the cupboard doors; you will find blue-and-white china sparkling against blue shelves and walls. Open the refrigerator and you will find blue trimming inside of it too. At the base of this dulcet color medley lies a floor covered with gray linoleum, patterned to look like terrazzo, and gray also appears on the plastic top of the kitchen table in a matchstick pattern. An air of Regency elegance is supplied by brass pulls on wall cabinets.

Attractive-looking though our kitchen is, its gilding does not obscure the fact that it covers not a lily, but a room for work. Its three main centers of operation indicate the nature of the work. In one center is grouped the equipment necessary for food preparation and serving, in another, the laundry equipment, while the third, a section of counter and cabinets with an auxiliary sink, is organized for activities such as flower arrang- ing and other domestic odds and ends.

Newswise, the most interesting item in the kitchen is the range with its magical electronic eye. This device, which rests in the center of one of the surface units, literally measures the temperature of the food cooking in a pan; it maintains the necessary amount of heat by automatically turning the cur- rent off and on as required. Thus the cook need never worry about burned foods and scorched pans again. In addition, the range also has another surface unit which heats red-hot in exactly 30 seconds; a deep-well cooker which lifts out so that it can be replaced by a surface unit (making four in all); two ovens and an automatic electric clock and timer.

Equally handsome and just about as miraculous in its way (even though we have come to expect the miraculous in kitchen equipment) is the roomy refrigerator with a special place for every kind of food and container. It boasts a freezer compartment with separate controls, shelves that roll out to simplify loading and, best of all, an automatic defrosting sys- tem that not only removes the frost but disposes of it. The two-cubic-foot freezer is supplemented by another upright freezer, located in the laundry wing.

Efficiency in this kitchen is also abetted by a front- opening, top-loading dishwasher, wall cabinets that need no pulls because the doors extend below the lowest shelf and can be opened from the bottom, and direct lighting on counter- tops. For laundry, there is an electric washing machine with built-in scales, a companion dryer that sings 'How Dry I Am' when the clothes are ready; and a portable electric ironer that folds to fit into a counter-cabinet. The gray plastic table and citron-yellow chairs serve as an informal family center, for people have a habit of congregating in this room.

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source: House and Garden Magazine | July 1953

Here is a cool, compact design for summer living: a pavilion that seems to float over water. From the terrace, you can walk right down to the swimming pool, sunbathe on the steps after a swim. Indoors, air circulates freely through screened clerestories on three sides of the living room and floor-to-ceiling screens across the front. Canvas curtains can be drawn and buckled down during heavy rain. Circular lounging terrace at right, outlined by yew hedge, overlooks lily pond and compelling bronze sculpture of 'Acrobats' by Mary Callery. The dogwood, hydrangeas, and natural greenery add country flavor.

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source: House and Garden Magazine | June 1953